Industries
Singer Manufacturing Co
By Iain Russell
Isaac Merrit Singer (1811-1875), an American mechanic and inventor, founded the world's leading sewing machine design and manufacturing company, I M Singer & Co, in New York in 1851. The company, which became the Singer Manufacturing Co in 1863, opened a small assembly shop in Glasgow in 1867 and began manufacturing in the city in 1873. Despite engaging sub-contractors and opening factories to manufacture components, it soon became apparent that Singer would have to build larger premises in order to meet soaring demand for its machines. In 1882, work began on the construction of the world's largest sewing machine factory at Kilbowie.
Kilbowie
The Singer Manufacturing Co was attracted to Clydebank by the availability of an extensive greenfield site and by excellent road, rail, canal and river connections which would facilitate the delivery of materials to the factory, and the carriage of finished machines to markets in the United Kingdom and Europe. The first sod was cut at the site in May 1882 and McAlpine & Richmond (the construction firm that was to become Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons) set to work. More than 20 million bricks were laid in the construction of the two main buildings, the distinctive clock tower, the cabinet and box works, the foundry and other buildings.
As each building was completed, Singer employees set to work making sewing machines there. The factory was completed in mid-1885 and the firm employed 5,000 men and women by the end of the year. By the 1890s, Singer claimed it manufactured 80 per cent of the world's sewing machines, and the Kilbowie factory was its leading manufacturing plant. With exports booming, the 46-acres site was extended to the north and McAlpines were called back to build a series of extensions to the works. Production at the factory peaked in 1913, when the workforce produced more than 1.3 million industrial and domestic machines.
Singer Strike, 1911
Singer provided thousands of jobs for men and unmarried women at Kilbowie, but there was disquiet over the introduction of more "efficient" assembly line working practices and management hostility to trade unions. In March 1911 the women in the cabinet polishing department walked out in protest at new working practices that effectively increased their workloads and reduced their earnings. By the end of the following day, 10,000 of the factory's 11,500-strong workforce had joined them on strike. Singer broke the strike in less than three weeks, and sacked around 500 employees it considered to have been "ringleaders". The strike may have been short-lived, but it did much to foster union militancy on Clydeside.
Peaks and Troughs
Between 1914 and 1918, Singer continued to make sewing machines as well as munitions for the British armed forces. However, this caused massive disruption to export markets. The most serious loss was in Russia, which had imported one half of the output from Kilbowie before the war, but which was closed to Singer after the Revolution in 1917. There was a recovery during the 1920s, as a new generation of machines captured the imaginations of housewives, and then a slow-down during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Inevitably, exports fell again during the Second World War, and the factory was involved once more in the production of munitions such as fuses, landmines, bullets and rifle components. German bombers targeted Singer during the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941 and many buildings were destroyed by fire or bomb blasts, the firm's timber yard was set ablaze and hundreds of workers lost their homes. 390,000 square feet of floor space was destroyed in the raids, but damaged buildings were quickly patched up and production returned to pre-Blitz levels in less than six weeks.
After 1945, Singer struggled against a host of new European competitors in the market for domestic sewing machines, and faced a growing and even more serious threat from Japan. There were claims that the Kilbowie factory was hampered by old-fashioned management and antiquated machine tools, and the American parent company set up a Forward Planning Unit to oversee the modernisation of production facilities, reduce costs and increase productivity. The old main building and its famous clock tower were demolished in 1963. A new single-storey factory (the High Volume Domestic Building) opened on the site in 1964, its domestic sewing machine workshops equipped with the latest machinery. Management was reorganised, resulting in the creation of two new product groups, the Consumer Products Group and the Industrial Products Group, to manage production of Singer's core products.
The End
Despite substantial investment during the 1960s, the factory struggled to attain profitability. This was due in part to poor market conditions and partly to Singer's investment in other European and (especially) Far Eastern plants to produce more popular domestic models. In addition, the IPG was starved of investment and rapidly lost its superiority in the production of industrial machines. Between 1960 and 1970, the Kilbowie workforce declined from over 16,000 to just 6,400.
During the 1970s, the factory's future was thrown into greater doubt by the perilous financial condition of the parent company, which had run up huge debts in pursuing an unsuccessful diversification strategy. The factory's main markets, in the USA and Europe, slumped. The IPG, working in ageing premises with out-of-date machinery, made huge losses. In 1978, Singer proposed a reduction in the workforce from 4,800 to just 2,000. The trades unions and Scottish Development Agency (SDA) made strenuous efforts to persuade the company to limit job losses and make a commitment to retaining the factory in Clydebank, and the Government offered financial assistance to continue the production of industrial machines, albeit on a much-reduced scale. However, a collapse in worker morale, difficulties in negotiations between the company and the unions and the Conservative Party's victory at the General Election on 4 May 1979 undermined the negotiations. On 12 October Singer announced that the factory would close in June 1980 "as part of a sweeping program to restructure, consolidate and streamline Singer manufacturing and marketing operations...".
The Scottish Development Agency purchased the Kilbowie site and the old factory buildings were demolished to make way for the new Clydebank Business Park, with financial inducements for companies to set up or re-locate there. Singer provided one of the first tenants - the firm opened an engineers' office employing six people, where once it had employed thousands!
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