Word: peaches
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...victory was Doug Peach's, but he also paid a price. In the midst of the strike, he collapsed with an attack of angina pectoris. He was away from the factory for five months. During that time, his 34-year-old marriage to Hilda came near to breaking up. "I wouldn't have liked any of my lads to have followed me into the trade union movement," he says. "It made me for a number of years become a machine...
...world, fixed in an intricate pattern of habits, rivalries, loyalties and hatreds. One effect of this has been to make the factory all but immune to change from the outside. Another effect has been to accentuate the profound divisions within the factory. "Inside these walls is our Berlin," says Peach. And within these walls, Hilda Peach refers to the Owens simply and without emotion as "the other side...
...Doug Peach first came to Rubery Owen under very different circumstances. In 1940, his arm badly wounded in a machine-gun attack near Lille, France, Peach escaped by sea from Dunkirk and was hospitalized for nearly 2½ years. "My father was shot up in the first World War, and I used to hear him refer to the political slogan, 'A country fit for heroes to come back to.' Instead, when I was released, I was offered a clerical job for the magnificent sum of $8 a week. Well, I went to Rubery Owen as a spot welder...
...beginning of the union. I didn't know what it was really going to be like. I still had this idea that it was going to be more like a family working together. At that time I certainly never saw them as adversaries. I only met Doug Peach fairly briefly at that time. He was friendly toward me, but a few managers told me he was a bad lot and to be watched very carefully...
...Says Peach: "In those days, anybody was taking his life in his hands when he identified himself as a shop steward at Rubery Owen. They have got to live with us now, but then they could still fire the steward. I knew them to close a whole section to get the man in that section they wanted. I started out with only about 300 members, but by 1958 Rubery Owen was really bottled up by one union or another. Many a time I stood under the clock and told management they had until noon to settle with...