[BITList] Fwd: Coal face

[John Feltham]

G'day Folks,

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> MacGregor, Sir  Ian Kinloch  (1912-1998), metallurgical engineer and industrialist, was born on 21 September 1912 at The Bungalow, Kinlochleven, Argyll, the third son of Daniel MacGregor, a works accountant, and his wife, Grace Alexanderina, nee Fraser Maclean, a schoolteacher. His parents were leading lights in the United Free Church of Scotland, a strictly Calvinist denomination which emphasized the virtues of hard work and thrift, traits which remained with MacGregor throughout his life. Educated at George Watson's College, Edinburgh, and at Hillhead High School, Glasgow, MacGregor proceeded to Glasgow University to study metallurgical engineering. After the award of a first-class degree of outstanding quality, he then obtained a diploma, with distinction, from the Royal College of Science and Technology (now the University of Strathclyde).
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> In the mid-1930s MacGregor was recruited to the armour department of Beardmores, the distinguished Clydeside engineering concern. The Beardmore forge had provided the power base for the red Clydesider David Kirkwood, and one of MacGregor's first tasks as a junior manager was to face down a strike of overhead crane operatives. Identified by Beardmores' chairman, Sir James Lithgow, as a high-flyer, at the outbreak of the Second World War MacGregor was recruited to the Ministry of Supply, where he began work on tank designs. He soon attracted the attention of Lord Beaverbrook, and in 1940 he was sent to North America, first to Canada and then to the USA, to procure armoured metal. He was then attached to the British military mission to advise on war production, and it was here that he became acquainted with the production methods and managerial styles characteristic of the American metal and engineering industries. MacGregor married a Welsh girl, Sybil Spencer (d. 1996), in Washington in 1942. They had a son and daughter.
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> American experience
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> At the end of the war MacGregor chose to remain in the USA. The election of a Labour government in Britain committed to a programme of nationalization was unattractive to him, while he had come to admire the way of life in the USA, with its class-free society. In 1956 the metallurgical company for which MacGregor worked took part in a merger to form American Metal Climax (later Amax). Appointed chief executive of the group in 1966 and chairman in 1969, MacGregor, increasingly concerned about the reliance of the American economy on oil, presided over a significant programme of diversification which transformed Amax into one of the world's leading mining corporations. By the middle of the 1970s the company was the third largest American coal producer. MacGregor also joined Lazard Brothers, investment bankers of Wall Street, and became chairman of the international chamber of commerce in Paris.
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> By this time MacGregor had acquired a formidable reputation as an industrialist who was committed to managerial prerogatives in the face of labour unrest. He fought long and hard against recognition of the United Mineworkers of America and in so doing acquired considerable tactical experience in facing down strikes. His workaholic tendencies were legendary, as was his ability to fly almost continuously between America, Europe, and Australia in pursuit of his business affairs. He was richly rewarded by Amax: in 1975 his salary amounted to £150,000 and his shares in the company were worth nearly £2 million. Age did not diminish his energy: in his sixties he was quoted as saying, 'At my age, some men chase young girls. Some play golf. Some become vegetables. I work'  (The Independent, 15 April 1998). Thus, as retirement from Amax approached, it is not surprising that MacGregor was in search of a fresh challenge, and at the age of sixty-five he accepted the offer of the prime minister, James Callaghan, to become a non-executive director of British Leyland (BL), acting as deputy to Sir Michael Edwardes, the company chairman.
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> Return to British industry
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> Brought into public ownership in 1975 in the wake of bankruptcy, BL was afflicted by low productivity and an unenviable record of labour relations. A defining moment in MacGregor's career at BL was the dismissal of the communist shop steward, Derek (Red Robbo) Robinson from the company's Longbridge plant. MacGregor later claimed that it was he rather than the reluctant Edwardes who had initiated Robinson's sacking, although accounts differ. In any event, it was MacGregor's reputation for implacable hostility to militant trade unionism, together with his managerial capabilities, which resulted in his appointment as chairman of the British Steel Corporation (BSC) in May 1980. This position was in the gift of Sir Keith Joseph, the new secretary of state for industry in Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration, and the announcement of Joseph's choice was received with incredulity in a House of Commons ignorant of both MacGregor's American experience and his Scottish origins. Additional controversy was caused by the terms of MacGregor's appointment-a £1.8 million 'transfer fee' payable to Lazard Brothers to secure his services. Like BL, BSC was encumbered with outdated plant, low productivity, and severe financial problems. In the year of MacGregor's appointment, the corporation employed 166,000 workers to make 14 million tons of steel: losses amounted to £1.8 billion. MacGregor's immediate response was to drive through a programme of fundamental rationalization entailing substantial plant closures and redundancies. By 1983 production was almost at the level of 1980, but BSC was employing only 71,000 workers. Although losses amounted to £256 million, a revolution in productivity was underway. By the middle of the decade BSC was profitable, highly efficient by contemporary European standards, and en route for privatization.
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> Coal industry challenges
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> MacGregor was proud of his achievements at BSC, all the more so since the vast majority of job losses were achieved by voluntary redundancies-albeit at the cost of the desolation of numerous steelmaking communities. His next appointment, therefore, at the age of seventy-one, was greeted with dismay within the wider trade-union movement and the Labour Party. MacGregor himself reputedly wished to move to the coal industry as his next challenge in the restructuring of British industry, and, as far as the prime minister was concerned, he was the ideal candidate to take on the chairmanship of the National Coal Board (NCB). Here again was an industry which, in MacGregor's view, seemed to epitomize the 'British disease'-well shielded from the market force of competition, subject to growing overcapacity in the face of changes in the energy market, and in the grip of militant trade unionism. The government had already announced a programme of pit closures which had produced an uncompromising response from Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). In the light of MacGregor's openly confessed aim to end the NCB's status as a 'social security enterprise', conflict was inevitable.
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> The most bitter dispute in British industrial relations began in March 1984, when the NUM executive called a national strike in response to MacGregor's announcement of pit closures. The dispute lasted for a year and was marked by increasingly violent confrontations between striking miners and the police, as well as by a rising tide of social and economic distress within mining communities. MacGregor himself was repelled by the NUM's tactic of intimidation of working miners, and early in the dispute expressed the wish to the prime minister that he could have at his side 'some of my scruffy, sometimes ill-disciplined, sometimes loud mouthed American police ... and some of the curious ways of the law to back them up'  (The Times, 14 April 1998). It was MacGregor's intransigence in refusing successive peace overtures which led to an increasing rift with the secretary of state for energy, Peter Walker. The latter began his own discussions with key NUM officials and overrode MacGregor in securing cabinet approval for a settlement with the pit deputies' union, the National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS), when strike action was threatened in the autumn of 1984. MacGregor was also criticized for his weak presentation of the NCB's case: in meeting journalists he was dour, impassive, and abrasive, habitually referring to his 'Department of Economic Warfare' and to the fact that, in war, 'a soldier has to shoot to kill. Unfortunately, I'm a soldier in that kind of war'  (The Guardian, 14 April 1998). Thatcher found him 'strangely lacking in guile ... he had no experience of dealing with trade union leaders intent on using the process of negotiation to score political points, so time and again he and his colleagues were outmanoeuvred by Arthur Scargill and the NUM leadership'  (Thatcher, 342).
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> The coal strike ended in March 1985 with the complete rout of the NUM and the implementation of a selective pit-closure programme by the NCB. At the inception of the dispute, coal reserves were at a record high, and as it proceeded the NUM was unable to secure the support of other trade unions. Indeed, the union was fractured and fatally weakened as a result of the establishment of the rival Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Mick McGahey, the communist leader of the Scottish miners, even claimed after MacGregor's death that the end result of the dispute was 'to destroy trade unionism not only in mining, but in Britain'  (The Independent, 15 April 1998). For MacGregor, the prime minister had obtained 'the results she paid for; in fact, much more than she paid for' from his chairmanship of the NCB  (Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1998). His reward was a knighthood in 1986, but MacGregor felt snubbed on the appointment of his successor, the emollient Robert Haslam, who had also followed in his place when he left BSC.
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> After his retirement from the NCB in 1986, MacGregor rejoined Lazards as a non-executive director. His name was canvassed in the press as an 'efficiency-enhancing' head of the National Health Service and also as a board member of British Gas, but nothing came of these campaigns on his behalf. He was, however, much in demand as a 'company doctor' and took on a number of company chairmanships, including that of Goldcrest Films and the troubled property group Mountleigh. At the age of seventy-eight he was particularly disappointed at his enforced retirement from the chairmanship of two American companies.
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> Beyond his industrial interests, MacGregor was peripatetic, spending time in New York and commuting between his Bermuda home and his mansion on the shores of Loch Fyne. Reflecting his religious upbringing, his moralizing tendencies were confirmed by his chairmanship of Religion in American Life, an organization famous for its slogan, 'The family that prays together stays together'. On his repatriation to Britain, MacGregor lent his support to ORT-the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training. This organization was Russian and Jewish in origin and devoted its charitable activities to technical training. For MacGregor, the importance of ORT lay in its inculcation of the work ethic among its clients.
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> MacGregor was mentally tough and physically resilient. A hard-bitten career industrialist with vast experience of the American corporate sector, he came to epitomize the very essence of Thatcherism in the 1980s insofar as the main aims were to reinvigorate market forces and marginalize the trade-union movement. There can be no doubt that the 'cold bath' effects of Thatcherism, as implemented by MacGregor, had favourable effects on industrial productivity. In this respect, MacGregor was the ideal instrument, and it is no surprise that he was among the leading businessmen who publicly urged Conservative MPs to back Thatcher's continuation as leader. In addition to his knighthood, he was appointed chevalier of the Legion d'honneur in 1972. He died of heart failure in Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, Somerset, on 13 April 1998, and was cremated.
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> M. W. Kirby 
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> Sources  I. MacGregor and R. Taylor, The enemies within: the story of the miners' strike, 1984-5 (1986) + M. Parker, Thatcherism and the fall of coal: politics and economics of UK coal, 1979-2000 (2000) + H. Beynon, ed., Digging deeper: issues in the miners' strike (1985) + R. Winterton, Coal, crisis and conflict: the 1984-85 miners' strike in Yorkshire (1989) + P. Walker, Staying power (1991) + H. Abromeit, British steel: an industry between the state and the private sector (1986) + J. Wood, Wheels of misfortune: the rise and fall of the British motor industry (1985) + E. Wallis, Industrial relations in the privatised coal industry: continuity, change and contradictions (2000) + Daily Telegraph (14 April 1998) + The Times (14 April 1998) + The Independent (15 April 1998) + The Scotsman (14 April 1998) + The Guardian (14 April 1998) + WWW + b. cert. + d. cert. + M. Thatcher, The Downing Street years (1993)
> Archives U. Glas., papers, mainly relating to business
> Likenesses  D. Mansell, photograph, 1984, Hult. Arch. [see illus.] · photographs, Hult. Arch.
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