Tractor heritage, news and features

A life with Massey Ferguson

The personnel department somehow got wind of this and called him in. Frank said: “The personnel manager asked me not to do anything just yet as they, in his words, had some plans for me. It turned out they wanted me to take over the management at Kilmarnock.”

Now taking on the top job at MF’s Kilmarnock factory might or might not have been promotion, but it was certainly a challenge. The place had a poor industrial relations record, and the standard of its engineering was held in low regard by many at Banner Lane. And when Frank Noblett arrived in August 1969, he had some forewarning that the Kilmarnock job was something of a poisoned chalice. “I knew the manager there, a young guy called Duncan Cook, very bright, and he’d tell me about all the problems he was having.”

Back from holiday, Frank was told that he would be taking over with immediate effect. “I flew up on the Sunday night with MF’s UK MD and the personnel manager and they called all the managers in. They told them that I was their new boss – this was the first they’d heard about it!”

A shambles

Being a long-time MF manager and engineer, Frank knew Kilmarnock by reputation, but he was still appalled by what he found. “It was a shambles. The production was mediocre and the engineering and test side was actually poor. There were 300 unfinished combines sitting outside, missing engines and other parts. And the unions virtually ran the place. When I met the works convenor, he told me that they’d seen managers come and go: ‘You think you run things here, but you don’t. We do,’ he added.”

Top management told Frank that if things didn’t improve, the factory would close, which would have been a devastating blow for the town. He was given three objectives: to get production back on schedule; to introduce the new 525/625 combines on time and on budget; and to implement a whole raft of reforms suggested by McKinsey, the high-powered management consultants whom MF had brought in to pinpoint what was going wrong.

“It was just impossible,” recalls Frank, who as a sanguine 86-year-old feels able to smile about his Kilmarnock experience now. “After three weeks I went to the MF’s technical operations manager and said it just wasn’t possible to meet all three objectives. Until then, I hadn’t known how bad it was. The big boss wasn’t best pleased, and asked Frank what he would need to get all three things done. He would need, the plain-speaking manager replied, “a f***ing magician!”

But he could do two out of three. The management were reluctant to drop the McKinsey plans, on which they’d spent a lot of money, but in the end these were sacrificed in favour of the more immediate problem of getting some combines made.

It must have looked hopeless in the autumn of 1969, and even MF’s own personnel manager told Frank that he’d have to sack all the line managers, a good indication of how Kilmarnock was viewed by the top brass! But gradually, things did improve. Kilmarnock was then making the 410/510 combines, plus a bagger combine, but the new 525 was a big deal. It was a completely new design, with 2000 new components, and three months behind schedule when Frank came on board.

Somehow, the new combine came together, and the first one rolled off the end of the production line on Christmas Eve. As part of something called First Production Evaluation, it had to be signed off by directors of each department, and everyone assumed that this would now take place after the New Year holiday, losing another 10 days or so.

I wasn’t having that,” chuckles Frank. “I threatened to send telexes to head office in North America, so all the directors flew up on Christmas Eve and did one of the fastest evaluations ever – they just went round it kicking the tyres!” Despite its hurried approval by top management (none of whom wanted to miss their Christmas dinners), the 525 turned out to be a decent combine, and against all the odds, Kilmarnock had produced it on time and to budget.

About six months later it was followed by the 625, and both combines were well received.

Strange goings on

That was all very well, but the closer Frank looked at MF’s Scottish factory, the worse the situation seemed. “It was an unbelievable place – I could write a book about it. In terms of industrial relations, it was probably the worst in the whole group, except perhaps for Marquette, the combine factory in France.

We had strikes that went national. One by the clerical workers lasted from June to August, and they removed every computer record and all the production schedules. Fortunately it was all backed up, and we brought in the managers’ wives to do the work. Mind you, at Marquette, the unions actually took the factory over at one point, and they were throwing office equipment out of the window!”

Asking managers’ wives to do clerical work was one thing, but according to Frank, far more drastic measures were considered as well. The factory was dependent on Perkins for its engine supplies, and there was always the danger that the Perkins men would refuse to send them in sympathy, or that pickets at the Kilmarnock factory gates wouldn’t let them in. This was North Sea oil time, so there were lots of helicopters about, and the management actually considered having the engines flown in to avoid the picket lines!

A less dramatic solution was simply to keep good stocks of components at the factory, so that if there was a walk-out, the combines could keep rolling. “It was an expensive way of doing things,” says Frank, “having all this stock tied up, but it was the only way to keep production going.”

Sometimes walk-outs could happen over apparently trivial events. In the hot press shop, it was a tradition that men could heat up their lunchtime pies on top of the machines. Frank looked out of a window one Saturday morning to see the press men at the factory gates. “I rang the foreman, who was a vigorous type, and asked him what was going on. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘one guy was bringing in peas and all sorts of things to heat up, a whole meal! I wasn’t having that…’

“Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation (though still nothing to touch the firebrands at Marquette) was the time when 300 combines had been finished, waiting on the hard standing ready to be shipped off, but the pickets wouldn’t let them out. Now this was serious. Not only was there a lot of money at stake, but all of the combines had been ordered and paid for, harvest time was approaching and they were all needed on farms.

“In the end, we got all the dealers and distributors to send up their own low-loaders. We rendezvoused them all at Dumfries and set off for the factory with a police escort. We also had a set of lawyers from London with the paperwork to prove that all of the combines had been paid for and were owned by the dealers, not Massey Ferguson.”

That did the trick, and the 300 new combines were shipped off in time for harvest.
More serious was the sectarianism suffered by this part of Scotland. This was at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it was quite usual for Protestant superintendents to recruit only Protestant foremen and workers, and Catholics, Catholics. Quite apart from the implications of having two divided communities, this made the factory difficult to run efficiently. If Catholics refused to work in Protestant gangs, and vice versa, it was hard to move men around the factory as they were needed. Worse still, it turned out gun parts were being made on the night shift – Special Branch got involved in that one…

Blacksmiths and milkmen

Given that Frank was making some tough decisions, there must have been times when he was very unpopular in Kilmarnock. “Well, as a Sassenach running a Scottish factory, I was not the toast of the town!” he recalls with a laugh. “But in the end I had a good relationship with the workforce. They called me the milkman, because I’ve never been a good sleeper and often I’d go into the factory at 3 or 4am to look at a problem. I was working 60-70 hours a week, and the cartoons in the factory about me were legion!”

In fact, topical cartoons seem to have been part of factory life. One showed a horse tip-toeing into the factory in the wee small hours, with sacks tied around its hooves to deaden the clip-clop. Why? Well, on the night shift, workers were allowed to bring their cars into the rectification bay at break time, to do repairs. There were three blacksmiths at the factory, and one asked if he could also bring a horse in to shoe it!
There were other strange goings on at night. Frank went into the welding shop once to find three guys half sitting around a collection of parts that didn’t look like anything off a combine harvester. It turned out that someone was knocking up a wrought-iron gate… Nor was that the only decorative ironwork to come out of Kilmarnock – at least one wrought-iron coffee table was produced on a night shift.

Despite all the aggro, Frank says he enjoyed working at Kilmarnock, and he evidently remembers that ‘milkman’ tag with affection. “It’s a beautiful part of the world. We had a lovely house outside Ayr, and I like walking, so it was just the right place for that.”

But in 1977, the ‘milkman’ was offered the job of managing MF’s central parts operation in Manchester, so he moved. “That was a nice job – the Italian warehouse was near Rome, the ones in France were just outside Paris and Germany was always pleasant because it was the Harz Mountains. There was some good travel involved…”

As for Kilmarnock, there was a sad postscript. Production of combines was shared with Marquette in France, so it was clear that if demand ever dropped off, one of the factories would suffer. Three years after Frank left, MF top management decided to close Kilmarnock, a serious blow for a town that depended on big-name employers like this one. And to this day, Frank can’t understand why the top brass chose its Scottish plant for the chop. “The production costs of Kilmarnock and Marquette were about the same, and the factory had moved on from the bad old days. It was a shame.”