Word: darlaston
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...question that surfaces almost daily at Darlaston is "Who runs Rubery Owen?" Is it John Owen, 35, managing director, son and grandson of the Owens who have run the plant for 80 years? Or is it Doug Peach, 57, the son and grandson of bricklayers, for 33 years one of the company's 3,000 employees, now a full-time "convenor" for the largest union at Rubery Owen, the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU)?* Whether such men can find some bond of common self-interest will determine the fate of Britain's economy and Wilson...
...grandfathers' than they are to each other's. On a typical morning at 7, Doug Peach sits slowly stirring his tea in the small front room of his two-bedroom row house on the main street of Bloxwich, a small village 5½ miles from Darlaston. Doug Jr., the youngest of the Peaches' four sons, all of whom work at Rubery Owen, was married that weekend and is now off on his honeymoon. For the first time in years, Doug and his wife Hilda face the morning routine alone, and the change is tacitly registered...
...John Owen has left Four Ashes, a 16-acre estate near the pleasant village of Knowle, 25 miles from Darlaston. The rambling, rose-covered "cottage," which Owen bought three years ago for $73,000, has a main section that dates from the 16th century. It is surrounded by spacious lawns, well-tended flower beds, a small pond and a paddock for Granby, the family pony. Later in the day the Owens' two oldest children−Rebecca, 8, and Sarah, 6−will receive riding lessons from their handsome blonde mother Elizabeth, 33, John's stepcousin as well...
...difference between the fiction of Coketown and the reality of Darlaston is that "you saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful." At Rubery Owen, an average workday seems more like a raucous political convention−or a cinema verite version of the 1959 Peter Sellers movie, I'm All Right, Jack. Shop stewards and managers alike frequently spend half of their day on labor disputes, but because the men do not actually leave the plant, these countless lost hours are not even logged among the 70,000 man-days the company now loses a year...
...could look along and see presses as far as I could see at Volkswagen; and when I look at Rubery Owen, I think if there is anything that didn't go on the ark, we have got it. Only once did anyone bother to try and fix up Darlaston. That was in 1960, when Princess Margaret visited Rubery Owen. The factory had such a face-lift as we couldn't recognize it. Wherever they decided she was going to go, the paint went on. I think they must've touched up the clouds. Looks...