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Westwood Works 1903-2003 |
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This section is currently under construction.
From the early days of Joseph Baker & Sons, one of the main objectives of the company has been to automate the process of manufacture of bread, biscuits, confectionery and other foods. Joseph Allen Baker saw it as his main task to – “his machines were help to end the shameful conditions in which hundreds of thousands of his fellow men had worked; they were to raise the standard of public sanitation in food production; they were to lower the cost of living for the poor”. In much later years, in the 1960’s - the age of technology and automation – when manual and clerical jobs were being taken over by machines, Baker Perkins continued to develop the levels of automation in its products to the point where, for example, bread could be made, untouched by human hand, from the bulk handling of raw ingredients to the finished, wrapped loaf.
It is perhaps ironic that the company that produced automatic plant could not itself be completely automated. The reason is that the company was a specialist engineering company, and not a production line plant. It produced one-offs and small batch quantities, not thousands of identical units as did its namesake– Perkins Engines - operating on the other side of the city. Expensive lines of automatic transfer machinery had no place in Westwood Works but the company benefited more and more from the development of automation as the 1960’s progressed. Advantage was taken of the fact that many of the technical developments in machine tools were entirely suited to the ‘jobbing’ type of production necessary within the Baker Perkins group.
Ted Thain, works manager at Westwood, produced some figures in 1967 that indicated just how versatile and complex Westwood Works was –
“In general production, there are over 100,000 job specifications in current use. Well over half a million time tickets are used every year – each time ticket representing a job that may require several operations to produce – so the number of operations completed each year runs into millions”.
TO BE CONTINUED