Mackie - Built to Last

You had a laugh together.

You worked together. You made your mistakes together.

There was times I could have run a mile to get out of it.

But looking back on it, I got a living out of it.

True Belfast men and woman worked in Mackies

and we had a lot of laughs.

We had some sad moments too.

There was that ethos in the place

that you were part of something, you belonged to something,

and most people felt committed to doing a good job in the place.

The people who worked with the company were the company.

I didn't regard them as working for me. They were working with me.

NEWSREADER: Ulster's heavy industries

have buttressed the Allied war effort since September 1939.

In the gun room of this famous Ulster machine shop,

more than 20 six-pounder anti-tank guns are produced every week.

Many types of gun and ammunition are now made at this great plant...

James Mackie and Sons was a Belfast engineering company

with a name for building machines that were practically unbreakable.

For the thousands of men and women who worked there,

they simply knew the place as Mackies.

In the First and Second World Wars,

Mackie workers stepped up to the plate

and turned their skills to making weapons.

But in more peaceful times,

Mackies was the world's leading builder of textile machinery.

Mackie machines were shipped to places as far-flung

as Cuba and India.

Many of them are still working today,

up to 70 years later.

The man behind the Mackie empire, James Mackie Senior,

is buried in Belfast City Cemetery.

He came from a humble background in Dumfries in Scotland.

In the 1840s, James travelled to Ireland

to work as a fitter in Drogheda.

When that job finished, he moved to Belfast

to work in an iron foundry in Albert Street.

Ten years later, he owned the place.

He started off with a wheelbarrow, going around all the mills

and collecting what they called a flyer.

And the flyer is a bent piece of steel

that spins the yarn onto the bobbin,

so he would collect those in the wheelbarrow

and bring them home with them to Albert Street and get them repaired

and then wheel then back to the mills and deliver them again.

So that's how he started off, with about four employees.

James Mackie arrived in Belfast

as the city was going through an industrial revolution

and at its heart was the linen industry.

He steadily built up the family business

by supplying machinery to the big linen mills of Belfast.

When his son, James Junior, joined the firm, he took on the job

of expanding Mackies into new markets beyond Ireland.

When he and his brother Tom finally took over the company,

James Mackie Junior became affectionately known as The Boss.

He started work at the age of 14, helping his father,

we're talking about the 1880s.

Anyway, he was really the man

responsible for taking on the sales side of the business,

not just in Northern Ireland, where he sold flax machinery,

but also into Europe

and that eventually grew to cover the rest of the world.

There you are. And there's The Boss

stroking one of your dogs, a dachshund.

And there's your father.

After the boss and his brother took over the company,

they brought the next generation of Mackies in to help run the business

at home and abroad.

The boss's youngest son became part of the international sales team,

and it was on a trip to Germany

that young Lavens Mackie met the love of his life -

Marion Dorndorf. They were married in Silesia in 1929.

Mother went into a home because

it was impossible to look after her with her nerves 24 hours a day here.

One of the family at least tried to be in every day

to see her and show her pictures

or go through her wedding video with her and keep entertained,

but I'm afraid she's slowly winding down now.

Well, after 103, she's lucky to be able to wind down.

What happened to Mitzy and Fritzy?

-Well, did they not live in Vienna?

-Yeah, and what happened to them?

Mitzy and Fritzy were two of your bridesmaids, weren't they?

Mother was the daughter of a large shoe manufacturer called Dorndorf.

They already had a chain of shops in Germany

before the First World War

to sell their goods,

and they had a very large factory.

So father was out, selling them more machinery

to make more stitching thread for shoes.

And there was a big dance held in honour of my father

and mother was one of the ladies, at the age of 19, invited to the dance,

and mother always maintained she took one look at him and said,

"Oh, that mad Irishman, no way!"

So anyhow, a year later, they got married.

And mother came over straight away to Northern Ireland.

The Emerald Isle,

isle of blue lakes and kindly hills

whose soft green slopes roll down to the sea.

As summer wanes and harvest approaches,

old and young join in garnering the precious crop.

But in these fields, there is no hum of mechanical reaper.

Simple though it appears,

the pulling and tying of flax is a job for practised hands alone.

Just ten years after the new Mrs Marion Mackie came to Northern Ireland,

Britain was at war with her native Germany.

The linen produced by Mackie machines

was now used to fit out aircraft.

As the men went to the front,

the company took on a majority female workforce to make munitions.

The variety of shells, projectiles,

bombs, was huge.

I believe the figure was something like

72 million shells or shell components

and many of them were armour piercing.

For textile machinery, we used tungsten carbide

as a very hard-wearing metal

to stop the yarns cutting through the metal as they ran over it,

and that metal is hard to work and we had the technology to work it

and so it was incorporated into the shell

so when it struck the tank,

the impact cracked the tank armour open

and allowed the molten metal to flow through into the tank

and kill the people inside.

From shells, we went on to make aircraft.

We made Short Stirling bomber fuselages

and we made a wide variety of other armaments.

EXPLOSIONS

The Bofors Gun was a light anti-aircraft gun,

40-millimetre ammunition, brought in during the Second World War.

The relation to Mackies is,

Mackies made the shells and the warheads for the gun.

The gun was used in the battle of El Alamein

when people from the local light anti-aircraft batteries

went across and fought under a very famous Ulsterman, Bernard Montgomery,

and helped to defeat Rommel in the desert.

The weapon was also used during the Belfast blitz.

Winston Churchill cabled Belfast,

thanking the people of Belfast,

particularly the employees and workers of Mackies

for their contribution to that war effort.

Churchill's letter to the people of Northern Ireland

is one the Mackie family and workforce cherish.

Without them, as Churchill said at the time,

the light which now shines throughout the world

would have been quenched.

Welcome to this exhibition on James Mackie and Sons,

which is, as far as West Belfast or indeed Belfast is concerned,

this was the greatest story never told.

We are lucky enough to have some of the Mackie family here,

but at the end of the day, anybody who had a relation

or came through the Mackies system itself

is part of the extended family.

You mightn't like it, that's the way it is.

Sam McCoubrey's standing beside him, like. By his right shoulder.

You know, now, I worked in Mackies. I went in as a cleaner first, '69.

I was editor of that at that time.

-You're wearing your pearls.

-There you are, look!

MUSIC: "Memories Are Made Of This"

The exhibition is a reflection on the might of the Mackie factory

throughout this area and beyond.

This is the Spectrum Centre

and we're at the junction of where the men from this area

would have went down Lawnbrook Avenue onto Cupar Street

and made their way to Albert Foundry.

It's amazing when you look at that,

you can see the size of the whole complex.

It makes you realise how many different things

Mackies were involved in making.

The first thing that struck me was the size of the place.

There was hammering, chiselling, drilling,

different noise, it was a completely awe-inspiring environment

and I was just fresh out of school

and I felt, "Oh, my goodness, what have I let myself in for?"

On the Monday, 16th October, 1949,

I walked up that path for the first time

with my new linens on, my new overalls.

I thought I was cutting quite a dash,

till I got into the place!

I realised there was lots of people cutting quite a dash!

When I started, you were allowed seven minutes in the morning

and seven minutes in the afternoon. I don't know what would've happened

if you had to visit the toilet after that, but there was a man,

a clerk, known by other names,

that looked after each toilet,

and he took your cheque number when you went in, and timed you.

And he wrote it in a book,

and he slipped two wee bits of toilet paper in below the door

and you were allowed seven minutes.

If you stayed any more than seven minutes, he pulled the chain.

You know?

This is the view from Mackie's Bistro in the Farset Hostel on the Springfield Road.

And here, laid out in front, is the Springfield Dam.

The Springfield Dam is one of the best-known landmarks

in West Belfast and in the Springfield.

The far bank was covered at one time

by the entire length and breadth of the Albert Foundry.

This was the industrial heartland of the Springfield Road.

In peace time, Mackies employed up to 7,000 people, mainly men.

Its West Belfast site was really impressive -

133 acres in total,

with a staggering 1.3 million square feet under cover.

This is a photograph we decided to take for the, for Radius,

and to take the photograph,

I was a pilot at that time,

and I took the Auster aircraft,

which had a high wing, and that meant you could take the door off,

and we got the works photographer, called Jimmy Taylor,

and he leaned out the window,

out where the door should be,

and because of the problems in Belfast,

you were only allowed to fly at 500 feet,

but I think I came down to around about 300 feet

to get this photograph,

so you show first of all the front,

the buildings on the Springfield Road, and this was the office block,

and then it moves down into the iron foundry,

which was doing all the casting work.

The erection shops and also the transport department was around here

and then down to the jute mill

and then the west factory up here, where we set the training school up.

Over here, we come to the Albert Foundry,

welfare and recreation ground, called Paisley Park,

which was after Peter Paisley, not the Reverend Paisley.

Out of our wages in Mackies,

there was a remuneration took every week,

and that remuneration went towards charity and also to welfare,

which also maintained the upkeep of the complex here,

which as well as having the bowling club,

had also the football club and the boxing club.

But having said that, it would have been very difficult, maybe,

for an ordinary employee to become a member of the bowling club

because in the early days,

membership was really for foremen, managers

and staff other than workers on the shop floor,

but that changed in later years.

You got a little brass disc with a number on it,

and that was your number.

When you went in in the morning, you put the brass disc into a box.

And you used that all week. Now, on a Friday afternoon,

you would have got two discs,

a silver disc and your brass disc.

You got your silver disc, and you produced it for your wages.

I can remember exactly what my first pay was.

In fact, I still have the little chit in the house even yet.

It was two pounds, 16 shillings and ninepence for the week,

and I remember coming home and the brown envelope, I gave it to my mum.

You were allowed three late mornings in the month.

15 minutes. If you used half an hour, that counted as two.

And after that, if you were late, you just didn't get him.

Now, the horn went two minutes before the starting time,

and then there was a second horn, and that was you started,

but when the first horn went,

the gates were closed over and there was just a narrow gap left

but I had seen people in Woodvale,

when the second horn went, getting pushed back out.

They lost a day's pay.

So you'd never be late.

Mackies had a bonus system, so that men could earn more money,

but compared to places like the shipyard and Shorts,

basic pay was low.

To balance out the fact that the wages maybe were not the best,

you always had the feeling that if you were working there,

there was a job for life.

It was a safe place to work in

as far as the prospects of unemployment were concerned

and there was always that feeling

that unless you really did something outrageously bad,

you were there for life if you wanted to be.

Well, the company had 20 very successful years

from the end of the war right through until the late 1960s.

It was based primarily on jute machinery,

although there were huge amounts of flax spinning machinery,

synthetic fibre spinning machinery, sisal spinning machinery,

all supplied during the same period,

so the company employment built up to about 7,000 people

and their peak rate of production was 100 spinning frames a month,

and you have to bear in mind that the company started

a jute machinery building company in Calcutta in 1954.

It must have been one of the very first companies in Western Europe

to put a manufacturing subsidiary for engineering products in India.

The Mackie family sold machinery all over the world,

not just in India.

Their machines were bought in South America, Africa, the Middle East

and all over Asia, in places like Burma, Cambodia and China.

Teams of Belfast fitters and engineers travelled the world

installing Mackie-designed machines.

My life in Mackies was very varied.

I started in 1945 as an apprentice,

then I became

an installation engineer

and was sent to Dundee,

and from that,

to various countries in the continent of Europe,

and then in 1954,

I was sent out to Calcutta

to become not only a member of the sales staff,

but also initially a director

and subsequently a joint managing director of the local company,

called the Lagan Jute Machinery Company.

At the same time, in Calcutta,

there were 112 jute mill plants

lined along the banks of the Hooghly River.

Now, our sales staff in Calcutta had increased,

so we put up four luxury apartments.

I had the butler or bearer,

I had a cook,

I had a jemadar to do the cleaning of the floor,

I had a dhobi to do the washing of the clothes,

I had, of course, my chauffeur.

There was also a durwan to guard the premises,

he was a security man,

and a maali to look after the garden

and indeed, it was quite amusing to me

because in the morning, I would leave the apartment

and someone would follow me with a newspaper and the briefcase

and my driver would be standing with the door open

and salute me and say, "Good morning, sir."

And I would say, "Good morning,"

and I had to refrain from laughing, it was...

Because I wasn't accustomed to that

but I soon got very used to it.

So we had a very privileged life.

MUSIC, CHATTING VOICES

Table four.

This wouldn't happen if it wasn't for

Stanley, who's organising the thing and brought people together.

There's something about Mackies.

It was the spirit of work, the work ethics,

and that cemented people together in a very, very special way

and I feel kind of humble to be here

as one of the few of the Mackie family left.

'This is the eighth annual dinner.

'They call it the Mackie Old Boys Club.'

There are quite a number here who were out in India,

and in the Far East, and I was their boss.

And now they can come together and talk about their experiences,

and have a few drinks and enjoy a meal!

'It's not Mackie, it's Mackie's.

'Without them none of us would be anywhere.

'We live for Mackie's and Mackie's, as such, taught us,

'and looked after you, and you knew everyone from day one.

'We went forward together.'

There were very few people who, with any capabilities,

who stayed where they were.

'It was an advancement. It was a push. It's a family.'

'My father was a fitter in the press, in tools.'

He reared his family through Mackie's.

I had an uncle Andy in the machine shops,

an uncle Jim in the machine shops, an uncle Tommy in the moulding shop

and my uncle Billy who was a foreman in the moulding shop.

'And they all reared their families through Mackie's.'

This is a scale model of a spreading machine.

It gives everybody an idea of the many thousands and thousands of parts

that went in to build a Mackie machine.

The tolerances involved were unbelievable.

The joke, or the story that used to go between the shipyard men

and Mackie's men.

Shipyard men, they worked within 1,000th of an inch.

Mackie men, they had to be dead on.

'I remember, in my first week,

'my boss got on of my colleagues to show me round the place,

'give me a tour of it,

'and I remember him taking me through the iron foundry'

and being absolutely terrified of this place.

There were... The heat in it was, was awful.

There were these large containers of white hot metal

moving on an overhead system

and some of the metal was spilling out over the edges, onto the ground.

And I remember thinking to myself,

"I'll never be in here again if I have anything to do with it."

'All day I was standing at the door of the foundry

'and my old foreman came past and he said to me,'

"That's an evil place, Billy, you're working in!"

When he looked in and saw the metal being poured.

So, I sort of agreed with him at the time!

'I was employed as a translator in Mackie's from 1983 to 1991.'

I did mainly Spanish and Portuguese.

I also helped out with French and Italian.

Your vocabulary books where your Bible -

if you lost your vocabulary books you were in deep trouble

because they most definitely were not the type of vocabulary

that we used in our studies at university.

For example, a drawing frame.

In my naivete I thought a drawing frame,

if I'd just looked up the dictionary and not thought about it,

I might pick have picked something an artist might have used

to draw on, or to lean on,

but I was taken down to the works to be shown what a drawing frame was

and it actually would have filled, you know,

something the size of an aircraft hangar!

Mackie's was famous for a whole lot of things.

All the textile machinery in the world that they had built.

They were also famous for these...

homewares.

They done frying pans, pokers, shovels.

As a boy I thought there was two kinds of paint in the world

and only two kind - black and Mackie's Green.

# You went away and left a long time ago

# Now you're knocking on my door

# I hear you're knocking... #

When the Northern Ireland Troubles started in the late '60s,

Mackie's found itself in the front line.

A number of its workers were shot.

It had to increase its own security measures

and there were days when getting to and from work

could be life-threatening.

'I can remember vividly going into work on Mackie's

'on what turned out to be the morning on which internment was introduced.

'Managing to make my way into work

'to discover that there were very few people had done so

'and then one of the directors had managed to get in.

'He came and said, "Look, the army want you out of the place," '

and we went to the front of the gate

and there were two armoured personnel carriers

sitting on the Springfield Road, side-by-side,

and a few of us got in between them, in the middle,

and they took off slowly, together, up the Springfield Road

and every side street that they passed,

the bullets were coming and ricocheting off the outside of these, these vehicles

and we were walking up in between them!

'We were always looked on as a Protestant establishment

'and the problem then was, at the beginning of the Troubles,

'we had the gun shop and we had the automatic shop.

'So we had a big delegation from the locals'

coming to see what we were doing

and we're making arms for the UVF and everyone else.

And I had to explain to them that the gun shop was for making 25-pounder gun barrels

and it had retained a name from the war,

even though now it was making rollers.

'Mackie's being on the Springfield Road

'was really very much at the centre of an area

'that suffered quite a lot during the Troubles.

'There was an occasion where I was doing relief switchboard'

and a phone call came through to say there was a bomb in the building.

And we were always very well trained in Mackie's,

and the switchboard girls trained me very well,

and I actually thanked the caller for his call,

and then said to the girl, Eleanor, who did the switchboard full-time,

"Eleanor, I think that was, er,

"somebody's ringing to say there's a bomb in the building."

In 1975 my daughter was shot in the back, on the Grosvenor Road,

on the way home from the pictures

and they sent her to Stoke Mandeville Hospital

in Buckinghamshire, Aylesbury.

And, obviously, we were going to have difficulty visiting her.

Shortly after that happened...

..an envelope appeared on my desk...

..and when I opened it it contained an airline ticket to London

and 20 quid spending money.

When I came back ANOTHER envelope appeared on my desk,

which contained another airline ticket and 40 quid spending money.

So, I got her home and...

..I got to thinking, "Here...we, as a Catholic family...

"..were supported in this trouble...

"..by our Protestant friends from Mackie's."

Majority would have been Protestant.

'When we set up in the Springfield Road,

'the Springfield Road was a Protestant area.

'So, quite obviously, we came...'

we were taking the labour force from nearby,

so it was predominantly Protestant at that time

but then they put in the Clonard monastery

and the whole area changed, started to change,

from Protestant to Catholic.

At the time of the Troubles,

they were saying about it being a Protestant company,

we did a survey in the company

and I found that there was 28% Catholic

and the rest were Protestant,

which was exactly the same ratio as the Catholics and Protestants in Belfast.

Clearly there were sectarian prejudices among the workforce.

There's no way we could have altered that and so that existed.

But, in terms of company policy,

it was certainly not policy to have,

favour on side of the divide or other.

By the 1970s Mackie's was in decline.

Pay disputes, inflation

and the arrival of synthetic fibres all took their toll.

'In a sense we were victims of our own success.

'We had now modernised all of the industry

'that we were going to modernise.'

So the decline wasn't so much caused by a collapse in demand

for the products which are machinery made

but the fact that the world, by then, was well stocked

with the necessary machinery to make these products.

Our products lasted so long that we were our own worst enemy.

I still, today, see machines that were built 50, 60 years ago

and they're still running.

In 1976, the Mackie family put their shares into a trust

and handed ownership over to the workers.

Leslie and Gordon Mackie stayed as hands-on directors for a number of years.

When the company went into partnership

with the American manufacturer Loomis

that enterprise ended in failure.

Next, a local entrepreneur, Pat Dougan,

took over as Chief Executive.

By now, the Mackie family had cut its ties

with their great-grandfather's company.

Mackie International moved to a new site and factory

and in 1995 it received a Queens Award for export achievement.

The future looked bright.

MUSIC: "Young Americans" by David Bowie

'Good morning, Jim, the president is making history here this morning

'as he becomes the first president ever to travel to Northern Ireland.'

This morning the president as sitting down, Jim,

with workers at a plant that employs both Catholics and Protestants

to point out that it can work.

'Ladies and gentlemen,

'the president of the United States accompanied by Patrick Dougan.'

APPLAUSE

'In 1995 we had the presidential visit.'

Bill Clinton arrived on 30 November.

He did his presidential address in the Mackie complex

and it gave a buzz to West Belfast, Northern Ireland and further afield.

We had to build a covered walkway.

That was to ensure that in the event of some incident taking place,

that the president could be taken from the stage,

out this covered walkway,

without the chance of the world's press

photographing anything that may have happened.

This is on of those occasions where I really feel that...

all that needs to be said has already been said.

But the optimism was misplaced

and, despite the injection of government cash,

Mackie International finally closed in 1999.

Parts of the company were sold as a going concern

and many of its assets were sold at auction by the receivers.

'It didn't come as any surprise

'because things were starting to run down just at that particular time.'

I thought the writing was on the wall...for the firm.

That was a sad time because the best of men lost their jobs.

When Mackie International finally went out of business

part of it was bought by Bridge Textile,

a Galway company with experience in China.

Bridge started a joint venture with a Mr Fu Guoding,

from the Chinese company Golden Eagle.

Golden Eagle opened an office at Mallusk,

where it is now employs only four the Mackie workforce

to run its Belfast operation.

A big part of their job is dealing worldwide in spare parts

for old Mackie textile machines.

That business went on for, until 2005,

when Bridge Textile decided they had had enough of this business

and that they wanted to sell the rest of their holding to Golden Eagle.

At that time we were all out of a job so we had to discuss with Mr Fu,

the chairman of Golden Eagle, to maintain the Belfast office

and to continue to operate, as we did with Bridge Textile.

Mackie machines were,

and are still highly regarded in the textile world.

That the machines made in China still keep the Mackie name.

Today the Mackie Empire is alive and well in China.

Near the city of Donghai, in the East China Sea.

'Donghai is four hours' drive from Shanghai, is on an island,

'it's a very safe city -

'as a foreigner you can walk from six o'clock in the morning

'until 12 o'clock at night and nobody will bother you

'and that is the first thing that strikes you.'

'My father worked in Mackie's tool room for more than 50 years'

and is always expected of me, by the family, that I would join him.

So I joined Mackie's as an apprentice fitter in 1961

and went on my first assignment to Thailand and Cambodia in 1966.

I joined the joint-venture in 2001

and, as a result, visit China regularly.

Golden Eagle has a large number of companies

spread across 24 sites across six Chinese provinces.

It employs 10,000 workers.

Three of its factories are involved full-time

in the manufacture of Mackie textile machinery.

The workers work from eight in the morning until 4.30,

five and sometimes six days a week.

'At the moment textile the engineering division'

is working four nights extra overtime and every other Sunday

due to demand for the Mackie machinery.

On the biggest site there are two Mackie machine shops

manufacturing components for Mackie textile machinery

and there are two erection shops.

They have a spun silk factory, a cashmere mill,

a very large flax mill,

which includes a spinning room with over 22,000 spindles,

which by anybody's standards is very large indeed.

On the same flax mill they have a heckling room,

which they are currently modernising by introducing new Mackie technology.

I admire the chairman of Golden Eagle, Mr Fu Guoding...

in having the foresight and business acumen

to set up the joint venture in the first place, in 1999,

and then to buy out his partners in 2005.

He put in place a young team of Chinese graduates

to support us in the marketing of the Mackie brand around the world.

'We're now on the way to visit the site of the original factory'

that was set up in 1999

to manufacture Mackie machinery in China.

The name of the factory was

Zhejiang Ying Yang Mackie International Machinery Company Ltd.

The project was so successful

that, within a couple of years of it being set up,

they had to move to a different site with more space available

and that has continued to this day.

The foundry is quite a small foundry, employing about 100 people,

approximately six kilometres from the old factory.

Last year it produced 1,000 tonnes of grey cast iron.

These are castings that are used in the manufacture

of Mackie jute machinery in particular.

It reminds me of the days when I, as a young apprentice,

when I walked through the foundry to shelter from the rain outside,

when I was walking to the top of the foundry yard.

And, invariably, the moulders would deliberately splash some molten metal

and make me jump and run!

Four years ago Golden Eagle Mackie opened a brand-new factory

on the outskirts of Donghai.

It takes at 75 acres, and 40 of those are undercover.

On this site the company makes spinning machines,

cards and Mackie spreaders.

The complex machinery built here is due for export around the world.

It was designed by people from Mackie's Belfast operation

on the Springfield Road.

Since the project started in 2001,

we have exported approximately 4,000 machines,

for a total value of over US100 million.

I was surprised to learn recently that Golden Eagle,

because of the strength of the brand name of Mackie,

have now decided to utilise the name on their garments.

So, in future, all jackets, blouses

and shirts manufactured by Golden Eagle will carry the Mackie brand.

When you look at the level of sales that we've achieved

over the last ten years...

..there is only one way of describing it,

that this has been a very successful project.

And at the basis of that success is the design of the Mackie machinery.

I'm very sure that my father,

and all generations of people that worked in Mackie's over the years,

would be very proud that the machinery

that they manufactured and designed in Belfast

was still being manufactured in China.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd