Scamp, Sir (Athelstan) Jack (1913–1977), industrial conciliator, was born on 22 May 1913 in Handsworth, Birmingham, the second son of a house decorator, Edward Henry Scamp, and his wife, Jane Lamb. There was also one daughter. The Scamp family were very active locally in the Church of England, where Jack became a choirboy. He remained in good voice throughout his life, although his latter-day choral efforts were largely private. From childhood he was also a very keen all-round sportsman and was especially good at association football. His height—he was about 6 feet 3 inches—and powerful build gave him a considerable advantage, and he played in goal, as an amateur, for West Bromwich Albion. He was also a useful cricketer.
After he left a local elementary school at the age of fourteen Scamp’s first job was on the clerical staff of the Great Western Railway in Birmingham. There he gained his first experience of life on the shop floor and began to develop the skills that would later establish his reputation as Britain’s principal industrial conciliator. The big change in his life came with his marriage in 1939 to Jane, daughter of John Kendall, a midland builder; they had one daughter and one son. After war service with the Royal Artillery he had a number of temporary jobs, including periods of insurance work, before joining his father-in-law’s building business. But he decided not to remain in the family firm and in the 1950s moved into personnel work in the engineering industry. He started in a post with the Rover car company, then moved on to Butlers in Birmingham, and after that to the personnel department of Rugby Portland Cement.
It was at Rugby Portland that Scamp experienced an incident which was to have a profound influence on his later career. He agreed a pay deal for Rugby Portland lorry drivers while the company’s general manager was on holiday. On his return Scamp’s boss instructed him to repudiate the deal; Scamp refused and resigned. It was an act of great courage, since Rugby Portland was a large company with considerable influence at the highest levels of industry. It could have ended his career. In fact it enhanced his reputation for fairness as well as courage, and established his credentials with the trade unions. He went on to join the Plessey Company and then to Massey–Ferguson (UK), before eventually joining Arnold Weinstock’s General Electric Company (GEC) in 1962 as personnel director. It was a crucial time for the newly formed group, drawn together by Weinstock from three major electrical engineering companies. Thousands of jobs were at risk because of the merger and Weinstock put Scamp in charge of the transformation. Few men in recent industrial history have had a more daunting challenge. It amounted to a complete reorganization of Britain’s electrical engineering industry, which laid the basis for an even broader industrial regeneration.
Weinstock and Scamp formed a formidable partnership in the course of that change and the two men became very close personal friends as well as colleagues. The chairman of GEC regarded Scamp’s role as crucial to the company’s development and he became known, in the industrial establishment of the day, as ‘the smiling face behind Arnold Weinstock’. His handling of the GEC redundancy problems—which involved several thousand workers—was so caring, sensitive, and skilful in the face of enormous human difficulties that there was a huge demand for his services in a range of government-appointed industrial inquiries. During the 1960s he was a member of a dozen such inquiries and chairman of several, covering disputes in railways, docks, shipbuilding, steel, and inevitably the troublesome car industry. His reputation was such that after the 1964 general election and the formation by George Brown of the Department of Economic Affairs he was appointed by Brown as one of his team of industrial advisers. The prime minister, Harold Wilson, then appointed him as chairman of the newly created Motor Industries Joint Labour Council (MIJLC), for which he was knighted in 1968.
In many ways Scamp’s conciliation role with the MIJLC was one of the most difficult of his career. The car industry’s labour relations were in turmoil and registering a record number of disputes, many of them unofficial. Yet he had the ability to settle even the most intractable problem. His calm, friendly, informal approach, his sense of humour, his personal empathy with the shop floor, and his relationships with trade union leaders both nationally and regionally enabled him to achieve what others may have regarded as impossible. All this went to underline a unique reputation for being trusted by both sides of industry as well as government. It was similar with journalists. His handling of the press was quite brilliant and he quickly earned the sobriquet of ‘Britain’s chief industrial peacemaker’. The title was justified. It also enabled the Wilson government to appoint him to some especially difficult tasks—such as non-executive director to the Fairfields (Glasgow) shipyard when it was taken into public ownership in 1967–8.
Inevitably the scene began to change after the 1970 general election, which brought the Conservatives back to office under Edward Heath. Scamp had already been appointed chairman of a court of inquiry into a major pay dispute affecting all local authorities. His report came out shortly before the June election of 1970 and recommended pay increases for local authority manual workers, including dustmen. The report was attacked by the Heath government, and the issue was seen—wrongly—as a challenge to the government’s pay policy. The result was that the Scamp report became a main focus of government criticism against this form of resolving industrial conflict. It was a quite unfair attack on Scamp and he resented it. But the effect was that the great conciliator was rarely used by government after that event.
Even so Scamp was still consulted—often privately—by management and unions and, informally and under cover, by ministers of the Heath government, especially during the wage policy crisis of 1972–3. In his later years he suffered badly from heart trouble and tended to remain in the background, enjoying a very private life with his family which he so much treasured.
In 1970 Scamp became associate professor of industrial relations at Warwick University. He resigned his executive responsibility at GEC in 1972 due to ill health, though he remained a director of the company and a confidant of Lord Weinstock to the end. He also became chairman of Urwick, Orr & Partners, the management consultancy firm. He was companion of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, served on the board of the Engineering Employers’ Federation, and was a fellow of both the Institute of Personnel Management and the British Institute of Management. He remained an active supporter of the Church of England, serving on numerous charitable bodies, and held the chairmanship of Coventry City Football Club—which did not prevent him retaining a sentimental attachment to West Bromwich Albion. He sat regularly as a magistrate in the midlands and was deputy lieutenant of Warwickshire. He died at Moretonhampstead, Devon, on 31 October 1977.
Geoffrey Goodman
Sources
The Times (1 Nov 1977) · The Times (5 Nov 1977) · private information (2004) [friends; colleagues; Engineering Employers’ Federation] · J. Jones, Union man (1986) · DNB · personal knowledge (2004) · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1978)
Archives
U. Warwick Mod. RC, papers
Wealth at death £27,540: probate, 8 March 1978, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
(Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004)
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