Cranking up production.

This may be of interest to the Forum members.

Below is an excerpt from a book called “A Bumpy Ride” that covers one hundred and fifty years of the Haden company manufacturing in the UK West Midlands. It is written by the latest in the Haden family to head up the company. Over the years Haden were glass cutters, motor-cycle manufacturers, kettle makers, and suppliers of parts to several car manufacturers. Their principal trade throughout most of that time though was supplying lugs, bottom bracket castings etc. to the cycle building trade worldwide. This is a short paragraph about their relationship with CCM.

"Canada Cycle and Motor Co. (CCM)

We had a long-standing customer in Toronto, Canada, known by their brand name as CCM, who traditionally made cycles in the summer and hockey skates in the winter. The American keep-fit craze that began in the 1970s soon spread to Canada, and in order to take advantage of the huge increase in demand for bicycles, they expanded their production from about one thousand to six thousand units per week. Purchase orders for cycle frame lug sets, fork crowns and bottom bracket shells were placed with us accordingly. With our own capacity limited to about twelve thousand sets per week, we were now under considerable pressure in the factory, but we had an excellent team who were ready to rise to the occasion. We were able to negotiate with CCM very rewarding prices, generating healthy profits that we reinvested in a new factory extension and some improved manufacturing methods.

In the course of our dealings with CCM, I got to know their manufacturing vice president Ces Matthews very well. He would often call in to see us while visiting his European suppliers and I would visit their factory on a regular basis. One night, whilst being entertained for dinner in his apartment in Toronto, he told me a story about being stationed in Weston-super-Mare just after the war. He was part of a Canadian army engineering unit which had been given the task of dismantling the coastal defence guns on the Brean Down headland. He remembered that every day, to get onto the track to the headland, they had to pass in their large army lorry through a farm yard, and would throw sweets to two little boys who rushed out of the house to open the gate. This is an extraordinary coincidence, since I am sure the two little boys he referred to were my  brother and I, then only about four years old. We used to spend our summer holidays on the farm owned by the Bowley family and enjoyed, as all young boys do, seeing the soldiers and their army vehicles pass by. We also enjoyed wonderful fresh country food, while those back home were still having to survive on wartime rations.

In 1974 we received a special export award in the form of an engraved glass goblet, an award which we won largely thanks to our substantial exports to Canada. This was presented to us at a special ceremony in London by the Association of British Chambers of Commerce, sponsored by British Airways and the CBI. My father went to receive this because I was in hospital with a slipped disc. I had fallen badly from my horse while out fox hunting — a sport I had only just then taken up, and which has since provided me with a lifetime of fun and many very good friends."