Tuesday, July 3, 2007

The last days at Triumph

I got to remembering about Dad's last days at Triumph prompted by a post by Gareth Thomas over on the CT Forum (a great place to be! http://www.club.triumph.org.uk/). I've copied it below;


Quoted from GTEVO
'The Triumph was known for having some of the most transparent factory gates in the UK.Today you can laugh, but if you saw what they scrapped, buried, smashed up with sledgehammers in 1980'

Quoted from me

The old man was involved in the factory clear-up. After working at the Standard for nearly 20 years in broke his heart spending his last two years there destroying the place. A couple of tales I remember are;
They (Leyland) moved TR7 production (again!) to Solihull and in the process it underwent an interior trim change away from the tartan stuff. Dad was tasked with slashing hundreds of complete seats with a Stanley knife so that the scrappies couldn't flog em to Leyland dealers. At the end of that week the manager in charge asked Dad for his Stanley knife back!
When stores was being emptied hundreds, if not thousands of surplus windscreens surfaced, Dad was tasked with driving a fork lift into them, and then using a digger to put the residue into skips.
Again when stores was being emptied boxed metering units were going straight into the skip. At the time I was rebuilding the TR5 so the old man got 'a few' out on a scrap ticket for me. Why anyone ever nicked anything from the Triumph I'll never know as it was perfectly legitimate to pay a nominal sum and get stuff out on these scrap ticket's with authority from above, I recall Dad paying no more than a couple of quid apiece for them.
Warning thread drift!