MISSION IMP-OSSIBLE
It was Scotland’s answer to the Mini. But a catastrophic mix of shoddy engineering, weak management and bloody-minded unions (there were 31 strikes in the first year alone) left the Hillman Imp on the scrapheap – along with the thousands of men who built it
IT was the Labour MP representing the town of Linwood who conveyed the sense of loss most starkly. ‘It is not just one motor car factory,’ Norman Buchan told the Commons in February 1981. ‘It is the motor car industry in Scotland.’ Four hundred miles away, 6,000 workers in his Renfrewshire West constituency had just learned their jobs were gone.
Mr Buchan gave his fellow MPs the briefest of history lessons. ‘This town of mine was built for this factory,’ he said. ‘It was a small village 15 years ago.
‘The village was developed into the town of Linwood precisely to provide homes for workers who were brought there to maintain the factory. ‘It is the death of a town that we are considering.’ If he was exaggerating, no one dared tell him so. At a stroke, unemployment in the vast regional council area of Strathclyde rose from 14 per cent to 20 per cent.
And Scotland’s car manufacturing dream – the great industrial vision which decanted workers from shipyards and coal mines to assembly lines for production of an iconic brand – lay stone dead.
Today, 40 years after the closure of the Linwood car plant, February 11, 1981, is bitterly cited as one of the darkest dates in Scotland’s modern industrial history.
‘Linwood no more,’ goes the infamous line in the Proclaimers song Letter from America, written in a fury at the industrial wastelands left by Margaret Thatcher’s governments.
Indeed, political scientists may chart a causal route from the calamity at Linwood to the rise of nationalism and the ascendancy to power a quarter of a century later of the SNP.
Scotland chalked up a mere 18 years as a mass producer of motor cars – and pretty mediocre motor cars at that, as we shall see – but the legacy of its failure and the post-mortem into its causes have endured for very much longer.
It was, of course, on that most unprepossessing of vehicles, the Hillman Imp, that the manufacturing dream was built.
This was supposed to be Scotland’s answer to the Mini – or, as others preferred to see it, a Volkswagen of the Glens.
COSTING £508, the standard model had an 875cc engine in the boot and an innovative rear window which was openable. On a good day, it could manage 0-50mph in 15 seconds.
On a bad day, it did not budge at all. Breakdowns were legion. Even collectors who adore the car to this day admit that, from a reliability point of view, it was a clunker.
Paradoxically, its ugly duckling character and myriad design flaws were the very reasons it melted some petrolheads’ hearts.
‘It was unreliable and horrible and I loved it,’ said one such ‘Imp-ologist’, David Lane. ‘Every time I went out in it, it brought a smile on my face, and also a lot of tears when it conked out.’
Another, Edinburgh support worker Brian Gordon, recalls fondly: ‘My dad had the ’65 model.
‘It broke down constantly and struggled to start whenever it rained – which in Scotland wasn’t ideal. We countered the poor handling by placing a bag of cement in the front compartment.’
Not that the Imp was ever truly a Scottish venture. Scotland was merely the land in which it was put together – increasingly shoddily – by a heavily unionised workforce with little grounding in car manufacture.
It was the brainchild of Rootes Motors Ltd, which had several manufacturing plants in the Midlands and south of England and would happily have handed responsibility for Imp production to one of them.
But a £30million sweetener in government grants persuaded Lord Rootes to found a plant in Scotland, where the investment and the jobs were sorely needed.
This was largely Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s doing. Decreeing that Britain’s wealth must be shared across its shores, he initiated a regional policy to direct large manufacturers into areas most in need of industrial regeneration.
With coal and shipbuilding both in terminal decline, Clydeside was a prime candidate for just such a shot in the arm.
When the announcement was made, local Labour MP Mr Buchan was among the most euphoric voices. ‘The factory will be a growth centre of immense importance to the whole Clyde,’ he said, ‘and will contribute to curing the cancer of Glasgow’s housing.’
How the scales would fall from his eyes over the next 18 years.
But it was with a giddy sense of satisfaction that workers watched in May 1963 as Prince Philip arrived at the new £25million Linwood plant in a limousine then swapped vehicles to drive the first Hillman Imp off the production line.
In the Imp, he declared, the Scots had ‘a winner’ on their hands. There were similar claims at London’s Earl’s Court Motor Show that same year.
Mind you, the hand-finished display car on show there was a far cry from the modest entry model with its 39 brake horsepower and 72mph top speed.
Yet within weeks of the royal visit, the factory was out on strike. Industrial action, some noted drily, was a pursuit carried off with far greater panache at the Linwood factory than making motor cars.
This first strike, lasting just 36 hours, followed the revelation that Linwood workers’ wages compared unfavourably with those of their Midlands counterparts.
Given that few of the Scottish employees had any experience in making cars, this may not have been entirely surprising.
Dozens more strikes followed. In the first year of opening there were 31 stoppages.
The actor and comedian Andy Cameron, who worked on the Linwood production line in the 1960s, recalled there was a strike because there was not enough cheese on one worker’s canteen sandwich.
‘There was another because a pie from a vending machine was cold,’ he told the Mail in 2013. ‘There was a combination of bad management and crazy industrial relations.’
As well as the strike over the cheese, there was another over a nightshift guy who built a bed.
‘He was discovered tucked up with just his shorts on and was sacked – but the unions intervened and he kept his job.’
He added: ‘The plant never stood a chance. I hadn’t seen anything like it. There was a bookie in the “lavvie”. The management knew, but ignored it, because otherwise someone would have taken the bets and sneaked out of the plant to a bookie outside.’
Then there was the overtime fiddle – where staff worked two nights’ overtime on Saturdays and Sundays but did not turn up for their regular shift on the Monday.
Little surprise, perhaps, that quality of workmanship in the Imps – said to be coming off the production line at the rate of one a minute in the mid-60s – dipped badly. The car was prone to overheating, the automatic choke frequently did not work, steering was poor and the car tended to leak water.
Its affordability and a certain national pride in owning ‘Scotland’s motor car’ helped sales along, but Rootes never came close to shifting the 150,000 Imps a year they had hoped for.
By 1965, the Mini had notched up its millionth sale since production began in 1959. Less than half that number of Imps were ever produced. Not that it was entirely lacking its rival’s chic appeal. The Imp became a favoured rally car largely due to the Alan Fraser Racing Team, which drove soupedup Imps with the Saltire painted across the roof.
For a time, Dunbartonshire Police force adopted the Imp as standard and, in 1967, a convoy of the vehicles transported Celtic fans from Glasgow to the European Cup Final in Lisbon.
‘They drove through the Pyrenees like they were driving up Maryhill Road,’ remembered journalist John Quinn, who arranged the trip.
BUT, by then, Rootes had lost patience with its Scottish operation and sold the plant to Chrysler. Quality dipped still further. Paul Coulter, who spent years researching the factory for his play Linwood No More and accompanying book Our Hillman Imp, said: ‘Chrysler wanted a foothold in the European market. But there were cutbacks. The quality of steel suddenly wasn’t as good. Rubber mats replaced carpet and there was more plastic. That, allied to union mischief-making, was the death knell.’
At one point, a senior manager from the US was sent over to thrash things out with the union chiefs. It went badly.
One former shop steward recalled: ‘Suddenly the American leapt to his feet and shouted, “Monkeys I can f ****** train! People I can f ****** talk to! But I can’t f ****** train you and I certainly can’t f ****** talk to you”.’ The union reps walked out. Imp production limped on for several more years but with increasingly unimpressive sales and a growing litany of reliability problems, it was proving the antithesis of the winner Prince Philip claimed it to be in 1963.
The last one left the production line in 1976 and ignominious years as one of the jokes of the car world would follow. ‘How do you double
the value of a Hillman Imp?’ ran one of the most frequently cited gags. ‘Fill its tank with petrol.’
During these lean years the car was seen as so worthless that one collector traded a packet of cigarettes for an Imp.
David Lane, from Yeovil, who has owned Imps since 1981, said: ‘This bloke was out of fags and gave me an Imp in return for 20 Marlboro.
‘In the Eighties they were worth nothing; you couldn’t give them away.’
And yet, for the mechanically minded, they were simple cars to work on and customise. Mr Lane recalls that his first Imp, a Sunbeam Stiletto, went wrong ‘almost every week’ so learning how to fix it became imperative.
‘At the time there were loads of Linwood models in scrap yards, so I practised on those. They’re really simple to work on. You can take the engine out in an hour. It’s easy to do almost anything with them.’
Former Linwood worker John Laughlan took an assembly line job at the Linwood plant the same year Imp production ceased. Relations between unions and management were as bad as ever.
On one occasion a strike was called following the sacking of six workers who had gone round the back of the building to relieve themselves.
He told The Scotsman: ‘If you were on nights and bursting for the toilet – bearing in mind you were on a production line and had limited time, a lot of the guys would go round the back of the building. One night they rounded up half a dozen of these guys and sacked them, knowing full well that the workforce would go on strike.’
The final chapter began when Peugeot Talbot took over the ailing plant and focused production on two models, the Avenger and the Sunbeam, neither of which set the motoring world alight.
Within three years, in the face of growing losses, they pulled the plug on the entire Scottish operation, putting 6,000 employees out work.
‘Suddenly there was 6,000 of us all looking for jobs,’ recalled Mr Laughlan, now 69. ‘I was 18 months on the dole and ended up having to move to Nottingham just to get work in the long-term.’
The blame game over the demise of Linwood has played out over decades. Were manipulative managers the villains of the piece – or cynical unions?
WAS it Mrs Thatcher’s steadfast refusal to bail out failing industries – or was the Imp simply the wrong car in the wrong manufacturing plant.
Whatever the answer, Linwood’s car manufacturing years proved a painful journey. It went from being a depressed village in the 1960s to a depressed town in the 1980s.
Recovery was a long way off. As late as 2011 it received the annual ‘Plook on the Plinth’ award for ‘Scotland’s most dismal town’.
Today the Linwood plant’s spot is occupied by the St James’s Business Centre – home to 150 companies – and, until lockdown at any rate, there was an air of bustle about the place.
The Imp, meanwhile, has taken its place among the Scottish icons of yesteryear. The ugly duckling of the motoring world never did become a swan – but it was, after all, our ugly duckling.