Office Politics 2

I have had the great privilege of working for two great British industrial companies when they were both at their peak: BSA (at Group Research in Mackadown Lane) in the early 1960s and Dunlop In the late 1960s. Within a decade of my leaving them,  both had collapsed completely. (Not that I'm suggesting it was anything to do with me, Guv'.)

BSA Motorcycles had been facing fierce competition from abroad, and put all its capital into developing a new three-cylinder series, but got the launch wrong in the early 1970s. I was working for Atlas  Aircraft in South Africa at the time, and I recall the shock of reading of their collapse.
Dunlop also got it wrong, having for decades made a set range of tyres from which vehicle manufacturers could choose. It found itself wrong-footed by more nimble competition stealing their business by giving their clients more choice.  Having left it too late to change, the bulk of the business was bought by the Japanese company Sumitomo while the Coventry aviation engineering gem was snatched by another UK engineering business whose name escapes me.

Now that all of the items on which I worked as a Defect Investigator in the then-new Quality Control Department are on display as ancient artefacts at the Baginton Aviation Museum in Coventry, I think I can tell the stories of my time there.

My understanding is that the Quality Department was established in 1966 after my boss Humphrey Squire had attended a meeting in the USA held to discuss the difficulties being experienced by the Moon-Lander Space program. The result was a new thrust to get a proper grip on manufacturing. It's not easy to understand just how much has changed, but it's clear now that it's nothing short of miraculous that wartime equipment worked as well as it did.

When I was first ushered into the vast Dunlop machine-shop in Swallow Lane, it was surprisingly quiet. At least a third of the machines were silent, with their operators sitting reading newspapers alongside enormous piles of components - all on "stop".
I was told that the scrap-rate  - a key measure of a manufacturer's success (or failure) - was in excess of 25%.
Three years later, thanks to Humphrey Squire's new Quality Department, that figure was reduced to less than 2.5%. Machine Capability measurement had been a key factor, tho' my part was played in identifying design and manufacturing faults and tracking down the causes.  A sort of fascinating Accident Investigation bureau but thankfully without the accidents.

More soon on anti-skid Maxarets, both Rim and Axle, and the shocking variation in test-rigs that revealed even more nasty but educational surprises.