Part three. East Moors: Fate sealed

Workers Press no. 989, 5 February 1973 · scan page 7

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On January 14 the public heard for the first time that the linchpin of all the plans to save East Moors Works, Cardiff, was dangerously close to being knocked out.

Guest, Keen and Nettlefold chairman Sir Raymond Brookes announced that his company might drop its plan to build a new rod mill in the city.

The mill to be an ex- was tension to existing GKN re-rolling plant at East Moors, which takes virtually all the steel made in the neighbouring British Steel Corporation furnaces.

Although the new rod mill would not employ extra men, the action committee at the doomed BSC plant had hoped that the expansion in the demand for steel it would bring about would at least justify the new mini-steel works announced by the corporation.

There is even some doubt about that because in his statement at Cardiff City Hall, BSC chairman Lord Melchett said the mini-mill, employing 500 men, would be built in the first instance by GKN or, failing that, BSC. operating with the GKN has shown little enthusiasm to build the new super modern plant equipped with electric arc furnaces.

Worse, Brookes has now said that unless Cardiff is given mediate area status. development area status— which means government subsidies for the company's rod mill-it may not be built.

And if it is not built, he added, there would be no need Moors works Action Committee and the City Corporation are pinned to the flimsy prosDeCL of the new Mul-Works and an expansion of the GKN plant which it services.

The Action Committee is basing its strate City Action Committee to win development area status for Cardiff.

With 5 per cent, O1 7,500, unemployed in the city, Cardiff already benefits from interdone without any redundancies at all,' Mr T. Davies, the chairman, told me.

East Moors is a first generation works and Mr Davies told me there were men there who could remember it opening in 1937.

This means that during the next three to five years there are certain to be a large number of men eligible for early retirement. adr oth der glo aln gor hat cor