“the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons.”

Priestley, 1984 [1934]: 375

These factory girls were an object of concern and scrutiny, troubling the established categories of class with their outspoken, performed femininity. A new, light, industrial labour force destabilised the established understandings of gender and class. The Bata factory in East Tilbury was staffed, in part, by this kind of woman: making shoes in order to pay for new shoes and handbags and lipsticks. And to keep their families: women’s work is not all about pin money and frivolity, J. B..

There are, or have been, Bata factories all over the world, making shoes for Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, as well as the Czechs. Haresh Khanna, the shoemaker-suitor of Lata Mehra in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy has Bata at the top of his list of preferred employers “I’ve been trying Bata and James Hawley and Praha and Flex and Cooper Allen” (2003: 620). Haresh eventually negotiates his way to taking a supervisor’s position with the efficient Czechs, and stands out from fellow Indian employees by moving into the compound with the ‘Prahamen’ in ‘Prahapore’, pseudonyms for the real Batanagar. In 1932, Bata arrived in East Tilbury, UK (and in the 1940s in Maryport, Cumbria), down at the bottom end of the Essex coast, the dirty part, near where the Thames spews out.

Bata built a new, modern factory, and a new, modern town around it. It brought Czech managers, men, and their families from HQ in Zlin, and recruited local women and men to work the production lines. East European migration isn’t such a new thing. The company wanted a productive workforce, and a productive workforce must be happy. Neat and modern boxes for living in were built, along with leisure facilities – including a swimming pool – a hotel, a bar a grocers and a post office, as in Zlin. Everything you might need, designed for the future.

There are echoes of those nineteenth century paternalists, Cadbury, Salt and Lever, and their company towns, Bournville, Saltaire and Port Sunlight. But with a difference that reflects the mid twentieth century’s “second spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007), where the gambling of the bourgeois entrepreneur gave way to mass production, mass consumption and massive organisation. Management understanding of the benefits of rationality and planning mark the building of the Bata factories and company towns. And what felt like institutional benevolence for those in charge seemed to have a sound footing in science and logic.

The second spirit drew on techniques of scientific management, developed by F W Taylor, and the Gilbreths, amongst others. Workers were measured and assessed to design productivity improvements through rationalising work activity, or replacing human with machine. The production line, with work divided into discrete tasks, is one legacy of this. However, as Eva Illouz argues, rationality was not all-conquering. The new sciences of the emotions, psychology in particular, gave rise to techniques of emotional capitalism. Elton Mayo for example brought the techniques and presumptions of therapy into management. The good manager would listen to his workers, would pay attention to how they felt (Illouz, 2007: 13–15). Bata had vision and ideals. “Friends and fellow workers” said founder Thomas Bata in one of his Mayday speeches…the contemporary equivalent is ‘we’re all in this together’.

So the difference between Saltaire and East Tilbury is not merely in the contrast between brick houses and a Yorkshire stone factory on the one hand, and the square white boxes of East Tilbury’s working and living spaces, but in the understandings of production, work and life that were presumed. Salt’s employees worshipped in the church he built, and it’s not certain whether god or Salt seemed the most powerful. Bata’s employees were freer, to swim in the pool, and to send their children to scout groups. Forward looking international companies in the 1930s managed with science, offering rationalised work and sensible leisure, rather than direct command and control. Scientific management met emotional capitalism. “Work together, live separately” was one of the Bata family slogans, but living in the company town wasn’t such a separation.

East Tilbury Bata was the temporary HQ of the operation during the second world war, and it made boots for soldiers for this time. Production for the domestic market resumed after the war, and generations of Essex girls and boys worked there. Production continued in East Tilbury until 2005, when the factory was closed (Maryport had gone in the 1980s). Now only one of the twenty Bata ‘production units’ are in Europe (8 in Asia-Pacific, 7 in Africa and 4 in Latin America, see www.bata.com. So, like other company towns founded in era of the ‘third England’, the factory building is decaying and some of the houses – still lived in – are starting to bear witness to the long term unemployment or underemployment that can mean a paint job is out of the question. Of Essex’s modernist legacy, these places of work have come off worse than the genteel, expensive houses of Frinton, or the curved splendour of the Labworth Cafe, Canvey Island (Rose, 2012).

Bataville: we are not afraid of the future is an documentary made of an art project by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope around 2004, just as East Tilbury Bata was on its last legs. Former workers from Maryport and East Tilbury, and a group of ‘others’, travelled by coach through Europe to Zlin, the birthplace of Bata (now based in Bermuda…how times change). They stop in the Netherlands Bata, to see how robots replaced people, and then onto ‘Bataville’ to have a look round.

In the Netherlands, some of the passengers were tearful. These machines, “wonderful to watch”, have replaced people, people who had skills, who prided themselves that they could go “right down the whole shoe”, not just stick on the sole. And of course,” you can’t have a conversation with a robot.” So despite the pace of the line, where a shoe would pass you every 6 seconds and you had to do your operation on it, there was something that felt good in the work.

I liked this film. I liked the planning the artists had done to get the groups of strangers to talk to each other by asking each to provide some entertainment for the long coach. Some told stories about their working lives, now over, others played games or got everyone to make something, and some talked about the things they loved. I liked one of the artists talking about her worries that the people they took on the bus were left behind in plans for regeneration of post-industrial areas like East Tilbury.

The world we live in is one where production is subcontracted by branded firms, one where cheap goods are made by low paid workers, and where all kinds of footloose manufacturing industries leave unemployment behind. We see in Bataville the long historical roots of how the local is captured by the global. Bata might still be the company that counts in Zlin, but its experiments in work-life omnipotence in the UK didn’t hold out against individualised globalised capitalism. The ongoing ruination is not beautiful decay, but an emblem of post-industrial Essex, where the only jobs left for lipsticked would-be stars are not those of making something, but those of selling something.

This is a revised version of a talk I gave to introduce a screening of Bata-ville, at Manchester Metropolitan University on 26th January 2012. The event was organised by Morag Rose, on behalf of The LRM and the Manchester Modernist Society, in conjunction with Manchester Metropolitan University. Thanks to all involved, especially Morag.

References

1. (2006) Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future A Somewhere project by Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, developed by Commissions East.
2. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
3. Illouz, E. (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, London.
4. Priestley, J. B. (1984[1934]) English Journey, Penguin Books.
5. Rose, M (2012) ‘The Modernists’ Guide to Essex’, The Modernist, issue 3.
6. Seth, V (2003 [1993]) A Suitable Boy. Phoenix Books, London.

First, there are the nets. The tuna are effectively trapped in an elaborate series of nets, known as a tonnara, anchored at sea. Taken out of their winter storage, the nets must be repaired and arranged ready to be put in position. If the whole process of tuna-fishing is a very male dominated one, women are nevertheless involved in the making and mending of the nets (van Ginkel, 2005). Although the details of the sizes of the sections are tightly guarded secrets, the pieces are numerous: 1,812 in Favignana, calculates Theresa Maggio (1990: 112). Getting this ‘unseen architecture’ (Maggio, 1990: 129) in place at sea is not at all straightforward. Each section of the nets must be secured, which means using anchors that are themselves as heavy as the tuna.

In the model of the tonnara at the Museo Civico di Carolforte in the images above, the nets form a T-shape (seen here on its side). The length of the T (in the large photo on the left) is the section the tuna first encounter which impedes their forward movement. As a result they are channelled towards a series of ‘rooms’ (along the top of the T) until they reach the camera delle morte, the death chamber (shown photographed from above in the bottom right image). The ‘rooms’ that the nets create need to be large (up to 100meters long) so the tuna can move easily, which they must do to be able to breathe and continue to reproduce. Work on the nets doesn’t end when they are in place; they have to be maintained. The adult tuna that are coming up against them are large (more than 100kilos), strong and fast. And there’s the work of counting the number of tuna trapped too — through glass-bottomed buckets, or by the feel of vibrations on a line dropped into the different rooms (Longo, 2009: 143) — until the rais, the head fisherman, decides the time is right…

It’s hard to overstate the significance and status of the rais in this world. He has near-total authority, retains his title and is given ongoing respect into retirement (and beyond the grave, with headstones marked, ‘rais’). He has a profound understanding of the sea and of the tonnara. Indeed, all the tonarotti (the tuna fishers) are highly skilled mariners, learning what to do through a kind of apprenticeship system, and although there is a strong formal hierarchy and division of labour, in practice, the men turn their hands to many aspects of the work (Longo, 2009: 127). It is a highly labour-intensive process, a total bodily and sensory experience of work, and one they talk about in terms of dignity and gratification, as well as hard work (Longo, 2009: 148).

When the rais gives the signal, the tonnarotti gather in specially designed boats around the edge of the camera delle morte. This final chamber differs from the others as it also has ‘floor’. This means that the net can be raised, bringing the tuna closer to the surface. That is when the slaughter of the increasingly tired tuna takes place. It relies on the close cooperation of the tonarotti who kill the fish in a ritualised way (van Ginkel, 2005: 73), accompanied by traditional songs and prayers, and using hooks, gaffs and knives, as in the images here, one old (taken from the website of Isola di Piana), one more recent (taken from Italia a Tavola).

Although it has been criticised by environmental movements, and in spite of the fact that the blue-fin tuna is an endangered species, killing tuna in this way has not been widely contested, in comparison with the whale drive for instance, with which it has a lot in common. In the latter, animal rights have come to trump traditional practices associated with ‘cultural rights’ in public debate (van Ginkel, 2005). Trapping tuna is thought to be one of the oldest forms of industrial fishing still in existence, originally an Arab practice, and at least 1200 years old. Once found all across the Mediterranean, there are now just a few tonnare still in operation. In these cases, people still work and live from the catch. When it is good, as it was last year on the Isola di San Pietro we were told, life improves for everyone. As one of the tonarotti in Theresa Maggio’s study of Favignana explains:

‘You do it because it’s survival. You do it to live. Or you don’t choose this life. You become a banker. It’s not for the violence. It’s not something I do for pleasure, or to please others. It’s survival’ (Maggio, 1990: 127).

Whether or not it’s cruel, the quantity of tuna caught in this way is tiny compared to the industrial scale and methods of fishing: long lines of up to 50 miles, and purse-seines that can catch thousands, even tens of thousands of fish at once. In contrast to the traditional practices, this is highly capital intensive, and the catch needs to be enormous for profits to be maintained (Longo, 2009: 169). However, these methods also catch younger tuna, including those of pre-spawning age, with the effect of hugely depleting stocks into the future. It is the apparent insatiability of the Japanese market that makes fishing them in this way so profitable, at least in the short-term, albeit with the risk of total collapse in the Mediterranean (Longo, 2009). If a fish of less than 30 kilos is amongst those in the traps off the coast of the Isola di San Pietro, it is freed. Most of those killed are mature adult fish in excess of 100 kilos.

Once the tuna is caught, there is other work to do still. Although nowadays a large share of the tuna is sent directly to Japan, some is still gutted, cooked and tinned, and the roe dried in Sardinia. The canning factory no longer exists on the island, but the museum houses a delightful model made by local school children of how the factory — and occupational community — was believed to have been organised in the late 19th century. Fish larger than the people working on them are seen to be gutted and cut into pieces (by men) and cooked (by women). And, today, as then, the roe of the tuna continues to be dried locally by traditional methods to make bottarga.

After the final mattanza of the season, the work of anchoring the nets in place has to be undone. They must be packed away for next year when the process begins all over again…

References
1. Longo, Stefano B (2009) Global Sushi, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oregon.
2. Maggio, T (2000) Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily, Perseus Publishing.
3. van Ginkel, Rob (2005) ‘Killing Giants of the Sea: Contentious Heritage and the Politics of Culture’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 15(1): 71–98.

Since then, it’s fair to say that Sheppey has struggled. Although new industry has been established, Sheppey ranks highly on ‘indices of deprivation’ (health, poverty etc). It was hit badly in the 1980s recession, and the situation is mixed today. The steel mill remains a significant employer, as do the three prisons, but the local economy is now dominated by the import business – of cars and fresh produce. Overall, the picture is volatile with a high percentage of people employed in relatively vulnerable industries. Educational attainment is well below the average for the South East. And life expectancy is several years lower in some parts of Sheppey than it is in other areas in the borough of Swale and the South East more widely.

When Ray Pahl carried out research on Sheppey in the late 1970s and 1980s – published in what became a seminal sociological text, Divisions of Labour (1984) – he drew attention to social polarisation between households. Some combinations of work (paid and unpaid, formal and informal) allowed people to ‘get by’ effectively; others did not. There is ongoing concern that current developments (e.g. housing rather than jobs-led regeneration) may further reinforce social divisions across Sheppey.

The Living and Working on Sheppey project explores the recent history and changes in working lives on Sheppey in the last decades of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st. The project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England through its South East Coastal Communities Programme, is a combination of new research and secondary analysis of Pahl’s earlier data. A first strand is based on interviews conducted by local people with older members of the community about their memories of Blue Town (Sheerness) and the naval dockyard before its closure in 1960 and their experiences of changing times since. A second strand invited young people about to leave school to write essays in which they imagine what their futures will hold in terms of work and family life, a repetition of an exercise undertaken by Pahl 30 years ago.

A montage of Blue Town High Street by TEA

The project team includes Dawn Lyon, Peter Hatton, Tim Strangleman, and Clive Arundell (University of Kent), Graham Crow (University of Southampton), Jenny Hurkett and Alice Young (Blue Town Heritage Centre), the UK Data Archive, the artists group TEA, and Ray Pahl as consultant. The contribution of the artists group TEA is the creation of a short film of a ‘walk’ along Blue Town High Street based on a model constructed from archives, the ‘reality’ in 2010, and imagination — a montage of past, present, and future (as in the image above).

A workshop on Saturday 12 June 2010 at the Blue Town Heritage Centre will present the work of the project and invite comment and discussion about it. This event is free of charge but places are limited and registration is required. Anyone interested in attending – or if you would like any other information about the project – please contact Alice Young, Project Coordinator, Blue Town Heritage Centre, 69 High Street, Blue Town, Sheerness, Kent ME12 1RW; telephone: 01795 662981; email: seccproject@hotmail.com.

References

Pahl, R.E. (1984) Divisions of Labour, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.