Cliff Lockyer

Research fellow at the Fraser of Allender Institute, Strathclyde University.

Aged 23, Cliff worked in industrial relations at Linwood in 1969, for 15 months.

Cliff Lockyer

"It was very big and it's very difficult to envisage a place employing 9,000 people now. It was almost like a series of villages. Each village did a different job but they all contributed to making cars.

If we started at the north side, that was the old part of the factory. That was something that had been built in the Second World War to produce so many munitions and then was used to produce railway rolling stock and this was the dye manufacture. Where they made the dyes for stamping the car bodies. The work was leisurely and that was a very quiet place. It was very high craftsmen doing the jobs now done by computers.

The next building was the press shop which was a cacophony of noise. The presses thumping up and down, a lot of sheet metal work being done. It was a place you had to watch yourself because the metal was really sharp and it would snag your clothes and cut yourself.

Then you go into the body build sections it was a different smell because here you have the electric welding …this is all done now by robots but in those days it was done by someone holding a machine.

The paint shop was a good place in the winter because it was warm. It wasn't so good in the summer but it was warm, but it was awful smelly. Your throat was dry because of the acrylic paints.

You would walk across the bridge to the car assembly building which was a final assembly building. More than 1000 people worked there, all working onto one assembly line. It started off with just a plain car body and the last person put petrol in and drove it off."