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The war between labor and management has many battlefields. One of them is a 70-acre tract of plants in the industrial Midlands town of Darlaston, eight miles north of begrimed Birmingham. The headquarters of Britain's largest privately held company, Rubery Owen Holdings, Ltd., the Darlaston plants are among the country's largest suppliers of components to the British automobile industry: frames for Jaguar, axles for Rover, gasoline tanks for Rolls-Royce. The plants are also the foundation of a family empire established by A.E. Owen in 1893 that now includes some 20 companies in seven countries. The Darlaston plant alone accounted for more than $56 million in sales last year; the group as a whole grossed some $200 million, but made a pretax profit of only $7 million.
The 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's Labor government−and quite possibly more. To help assess the conflict, TIME London Correspondent William McWhirter spent two weeks with managers and workers, observing a company at war with itself.
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Although they inhabit the same world, John Owen and Doug Peach still begin their day in ways that are closer to their own fathers' and 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 by the somewhat uncomfortable silence. After slicing Doug a piece of leftover wedding cake to take to work, Hilda gets ready for her trip to the neighboring village of Wednesfield, where she has a textile stall at the outdoor market.
Before leaving for work, Doug takes a brief stroll down the narrow path to the bottom of his garden. Barrel-chested and brisk-gaited, as befits a onetime gymnast, he is a compact man who gives his height as "5 ft., buggerall" but is more like 5 ft. 5 in. He pauses to check his tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbages, beans, potatoes and onions. "These are my pride and joy," he says. "I look after them like my union members."
By 7:30, Peach has driven his year-old Ford, its seats still protectively covered in their original showroom plastic, through a working-class neighborhood of government-subsidized houses, down Owen Road and through