BRITAIN/SPECIAL REPORT: UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS AT THE FACTORY

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have devoted his life to it, as we didn't see much of him at home. I just thought of the factory as my father's way of life, and I assumed it would be mine some day too. My father always quoted the deathbed scene of his father, whose last words were 'Keep the flag flying.' "

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 and became involved with the union. The people in the department must have seen something in me they wanted, 'cause they elected me shop steward, as green as the grass."

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Sixteen years ago, John Owen received his first intimation that the factory workers regarded him as someone apart. "After leaving school, I spent nine months here in apprentice training as a welder. I was 19 then, and when I was on the shop floor, I was conscious from time to time that everyone would disappear, and I would almost think that it was the end of the world and I was the only one left. They were just having a meeting, and someone was shouting and that was the 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 me, and all the time they were standing there the clock wasn't stopping."

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One of the felt but unseen influences that dominate the collective memory at Rubery Owen is John Owen's 67-year-old father, Sir Alfred, now bedridden within New Hall, the family's vast 14th century manor in Sutton Coldfield, twelve miles from Darlaston. Sir Alfred has not been seen at the Darlaston plant since

1972, when he suffered a massive stroke while attending church in nearby Walsall and was left incapacitated. But his small paneled office, with a Turner painting slightly askew on the wall, has been left completely and eerily untouched. A space in the factory parking lot is kept permanently in reserve for the gray Bentley he used to race around the countryside collecting speeding tickets.

Sir Alfred, a Methodist lay preacher and unabashed autocrat, is remembered with charged and mixed feelings on the shop floor. He often sided with his manual workers against the office staff, referring to the managers