Established immediately after the second world war, the British Nylon Spinners factory in Pontypool, south Wales, at one time employed 8,000 people and had the monopoly on production for the UK. Maurice Broomfield, whose own war as a conscientious objector had involved driving an ambulance in the blitz, spent the 1950s and 1960s primarily taking pictures of Britain at work. This photograph of a woman preparing a warp was taken in 1964, when the Pontypool factory was the heartbeat of the town, with a clubhouse and a ballroom, a restaurant and several bars.
Broomfield, in his photographs, attempted to capture the spirit of innovation that Harold Wilson described in 1963 as the “white heat” of British technology. The photographer had started his working life as a lathe operator at Rolls-Royce in his native Derby, and retained an eye for the pride of production-line workers, captured here in the court shoes and briskly rolled sleeves and headscarf of the woman working in concert with her machine. His pictures, of bottling factories, car plants, and newly industrialised agriculture were about the closest Britain got to the Stakhanovite propaganda photographs of the Soviet Union; Broomfield’s work represented the UK at the World’s Fair in New York in the same year this picture was taken.
A selection from the V&A’s archive of Broomfield’s photographs (along with his cameras, lent by his son, the documentary maker Nick) are now on display at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. They capture, in careful, flattering light, the last decade in which Britain could claim to be the workshop of the world. ICI sold its interest in nylon to the American patent-holder, DuPont, in 1992. The last nylon workers in Pontypool were made redundant 11 years later, when DuPont moved production to Turkey.
White Heat of British Industry, 1950s-60s: Photographs by Maurice Broomfield is at Derby Museum and Art Gallery until 6 May, as part of Format international photography festival
