People of Conwy: Steve Morris
People of Conwy: Steve Morris
Steve first started working for Hotpoint in the 1970s and was one of the last 170 staff based at Llandudno Junction when the factory closed in 1992. Steve shares his memories of the ‘last stand’ and the impact of the closure on this close-knit community.
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Transcript:
The Llandudno Junction factory had a very, very, long history … they were making … wings and wing parts for … De Havilland … who were making Lancaster Bombers in … Broughton ...
… What it was was originally the site was self-contained … there used to be in the Junction the main site which was where the Point is now, where all the garages, they’re all on that site there … the welding shop … the wiring section … and … the machine shop … that was where the Welsh Assembly building is now …
… in the Junction they made … twin tub washing machines. There used to be a separate tub for washing and spinning. The housewife or househusband would put the washing into one side, manually fill it with warm water, put the powder in, and then let it wash …
… the influence of Hotpoint was quite big on this area, in a very subtle way, you know … The factory in Bodelwyddan was a different demographic: so there was people you could work next to on the production line, you didn’t know them. Now when you came to the original factory at the Junction: it was families, it was everybody who lived in the area … Hotpoint at the time encouraged families in there, it was a ‘family orientated’ business …
… the idea being that families worked together then they were more trustworthy; they were more reliable; it was quite an intense place to be …
… and I’ll be honest with you, as a supervisor you always had to be sometimes very careful of upsetting one person because the family of 12 would be working in the factory and it would go round like wildfire, and you’d … you’d have all kinds of upsets of people not wanting to work overtime suddenly or behaving badly because you’d upset the ‘dad’, you know …
… majority of people from the Junction site had gone to Bodelwyddan: now that was a wrench because obviously the essence of the community that was here was completely lost because they’d been dispersed into a factory that was more like a railway station …
… and I was thinking ‘Well, we’re still here, you know, there’s still an entity still here’, so we had this competition to name the factory and then once we’ve got the name, you know, we’re still here … the main site’s gone but … the y’know spirit of Hotpoint lives on, and so we did that and it was called Parc Ysgyryn after … the little village right at the top, towards Pydew …
… we did everything, we did everything we could to streamline production, to improve production to actually make as much as we could …
… do you know what, it was, it was a mixture from absolute tears you know there was … it was quite horrific it was very sad you know, because it’s a bereavement, it’s a massive bereavement isn’t it: you’re taking away this … it wasn’t just a washing machine factory it was … taking away, ripping apart this community that was never going to come back together again. Traditions that had been set up you know that were being torn apart and there was this horrible sense of loss …