AND ANOTHER THING
Exploring a capitalist Jurassic Park in darkest Staffordshire
PAUL JOHNSON
Some time ago in a remainder bookshop I came across a collection of reprinted jour- nalism. I was intrigued to find it contained a notice of my book Intellectuals. I avoid reading reviews of my books, although kind friends usually draw the more wounding ones to my attention, if necessary by force, but this one had escaped them, having first appeared in an obscure journal called Criti- cal Review.
It was a vituperative attack on me, and what made it remarkable was that every single one of its factual assertions was demonstrably false. I asked one or two peo- ple, should I do anything about it? Don't bother, they said, nobody believes a word of what he writes. The author, Christopher Hitchens, popped up again last week as presenter of a similar assault on Mother Teresa, this time on ITV's Porn Channel.
My first instinct was to write about this programme, exposing what I now see are characteristic Hitchens whoppers. But since it has clearly failed in its aim, and simply elicited a mass of heartfelt tributes to the old girl, I shall deal instead with a more illuminating subject: business as a form of creativity. I examined this theme earlier this year (`Searching for the Michelangelos and the Beethovens of the capitalist sys- tem', And another thing, 28 May), but last week I got the chance to look at a perfect example of what I mean.
JCB is a Staffordshire firm which makes earth-moving equipment. It was started in 1945 by Joe C. Bamford, an engineer who specialised in fixing agricultural machinery. He had no capital, nothing but an old garage. But he possessed something more important: creative energy and imagina- tion. He built up the firm from scratch and made it world-famous. He is an old man now and retired, but his son, Sir Anthony Bamford, has made the business even more famous and successful. In fact, the term `JCB' has got into the dictionaries, and there can be few unaware of its brilliantly yellow-painted products. The younger Bamford read my book Wake Up Britain!, and got me to sign a lot of copies to give to his colleagues and friends. He also invited my wife, Marigold, and me to take a trip in the firm's helicopter to see his works, and we eagerly accepted — she had never been in a chopper before.
Well: mist, rain, fog and cloud revealed the drawbacks of helicopter commuting but the factory was something else. It is abso- lutely enormous and occupies a huge chunk of Midlands scenery. Inside its cavernous halls, which ought to be drawn by Piranesi or Muirhead Bone — or by my new discov- ery, that redoubtable young draughtsman Russell Maclean — there is a kind of marching, ominous miracle of modern high tech. On the production line, the giant metal monsters gradually acquire guts and brains and limbs and tentacles — and then their yellow skin — and finally emerge under their own tremendous power, the brontosauruses and the tyrannosauruses of the earth-moving universe, thundering and bellowing to be let outside into the Jurassic Park beyond the works.
And park it is, quite literally. JCB being a private company, which need not worry about its market price on the demands of greedy shareholders, part of its ample prof- its have been reinvested in creating a 10,000-acre wonderland of lakes and hills and streams and woods — seen at their best last week in autumn foliage. Here the deer and the antelope roam, and not only the 2,500 employees of the firm but all the locals can come to walk, boat, swim, fish and shoot. There are all kinds of organic farming going on in this vast estate, enough to win even Teddy Goldsmith's approval, and to send his brother Jimmy into what he calls `overgloat', for the Bamfords take business seriously and even the organic bits are made to pay. Highland cattle peer at you out of the artistic mist and Charolais Blacks — have I got that right? — are obvi- ously trying to put on weight in the hope of getting in on the Bamfords' profit-sharing scheme.
JCB has some claims to be considered Britain's most successful manufacturer, and certainly it has an unrivalled record as an exporter and a world market-leader. The profits are naturally very substantial — a record this year — and the people who work there happily chatter about their com- ing bonus, which is profit-related but not salary-related, being given to all employees equally. One of the reasons nationalisation failed in Britain was that the workers were never asked to share in the profits, partly, because there weren't any. Not 'spoiling the workers by giving them the same rights as capitalist shareholders is an old socialist tradition.
As a new book by Fiona MacCarthY reminds us, William Morris, the designer, was an unusual socialist in that his firm actually made a handsome return on capi- tal. But he flatly refused to let his workers participate in the rewards of their labours on the grounds that, if he gave them a share of the profits, they would 'squander, it or, worse, become 'exploitative capital- ists' themselves.
The Bamfords have no such inhibitions and cheerfully hand over to the workforce a fair share of whatever is going, believing that British workers are entitled to decide for themselves what they do with their earnings. No utopian News-from-Nowhere nannying at JCB! Even more important than the bonus system, however, is the way in which everyone at the firm seems to share emotionally in an enterprise which Is about something more transcendental than profits and balance-sheets and statistics important though they are. It is about cre- ating first-class products, which are getting visibly more efficient and even, in their own brutal way, handsomer — jolies-laides — all the time; creating well-paid, secure jobs; and, not least, creating an enterprise and its environment which show that a massive production unit can be blended into spler!- did countryside, and industry on a prorh- gious scale can serve to enrich the land- scape in which it flourishes. This is not News from Nowhere but good news from somewhere — Rocester, Staffs, to be precise — and if you don't believe me go and see it for yourself.
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