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Remploy Transport Department Borough Mill Oldham

Remploy's distribution warehouse was located in the now demolished Borough Mill on Neild Street Oldham.

 

Pictured here during the mid 1970's this was the rear loading bays while the large glass widows on the floor above were the main offices.

 

On the right is the front of Remploy's coach built Ford mobile exhibition show van along with a number of demountable boxes.

 

The company ran an all British built mixed fleet at this time consisting of Bedford, Ford and Leyland vehicles.

 

Borough Mill remained empty for many years until 2011 when it was demolished to make way for a new a housing estate bringing an end to another piece of Oldham's Industrial heritage.

 

Today this location is totally unrecognisable as the whole area is now a housing estate which was built in 2012.

 

Former Remploy Transport Manager Tom Burns gives a brief history of the Remploy's Transport operations below.....................

 

Remploy was set up in 1947 by the government as a private limited company limited by guarantee.

 

The Guarantors were, and still are, the Government who also paid the wages of the disabled employees and provided capital, interest free for the acquisition of premises, plant, equipment and vehicles.

 

The Company objective was to employ, retrain and if possible return to regular employment disabled ex servicemen, people with industrial injuries such as coalminers, steelworkers etc.

 

Tuberculosis suffers were also employed in so called x factories where all the employees were people with this disease, which was then rife in industrial areas with poor housing facilities.

 

From the first factory opening in Bridgend, South Wales which made garden furniture and, unbelievably, Violins the company grew to 97 factory sites situated in towns and cities from Aberdeen in the North to Penzance in the South.

 

The factories were for the most part initially sited in areas with heavy industries such as Scotland, the North of England, the Midlands and South Wales.

 

At its peak the company employed 11,000 disabled people.

 

The fact that the company was compelled to put its manufacturing sites near these sources of disabled people, rather then than near its markets, made necessary the organisation of a distribution network and transport facilities, in some cases, with factory based vehicles but also with two substantial transport fleets based in the South, at Cheltenham and in the North at Oldham in Lancashire.

 

Warehousing facilities on these sites were in Cheltenham at the former RAF Bentham and at Oldham in a former cotton mill, Borough Mill on Neild Street.

 

Remploy also had in Oldham a unit manufacturing wooden shelving systems based in Collinges old mill on Glodwick Road employing disabled people and there were also warehouses at Cricklewood and Glasgow.

 

The RAF Bentham site closed in the early 1960s and a new warehouse was acquired in Swindon Wiltshire.

 

By 1967 this facility closed along with London and Glasgow and the whole distribution function was centralised at Borough Mill Oldham.

 

All the company's commercial vehicles were purchased by and administered from Borough Mill, the commercial fleet at its peak, numbering some 300 plus units, included factory based vehicles,ranging from Escort vans to 32 tonne draw-bar trailer combinations.

 

Borough Mill in Oldham became the central distribution depot for the company's vast range of domestic and business furniture products.

 

In many instances products from the widely scattered production points were often, (particularly in the case of defence contracts), bound for the same destinations meaning the bulk of the fleet requirement was for pantechnicon type vehicles with a demountable body capacity.

 

At the Birmingham and Coventry factories a fleet of articulated vehicles delivered parts assembled in each factory to Jaguar, Rover and other automotive manufactures where their semi-trailers were part of the assembly line.

 

In the late 1970s the manufacturing site at Collinges Mill in Oldham suffered a roof collapse one weekend when the mill was empty which resulted in the company commissioning a structural survey of all of its manufacturing premises.

 

The Borough Mill, (a cotton mill built in 1874 and having in it's history suffered a major fire which destroyed the top storey) as the hub of the entire company transport and warehousing operation was included in the survey and was found to have cast iron pillars for which no stress date existed, therefore the ultra cautious structural engineers could not say the building was safe nor could they rule it unsafe.

 

In these circumstances Remploy decided there was some risk and therefore decided to relocate to Chadderton where the operation continued for about 18 months on the Lansdowne Road site until the completion of a comprehensive distribution review.

 

The review recommended the relocation of the warehousing facility to the London - South Wales M4 axis, reduction of the in-house vehicle fleet based at Oldham to only 20 vehicles and a new warehouse at Stroud in Gloucestershire operated by a 3rd party this being Mitchell Cotts.

 

The greatly reduced Oldham based fleet relocated to the new shelving manufacturing factory which was located at Bardsley between Oldham and Ashton-under-Lyne.

 

However space restrictions at this new site required the acquisition of a parking and refuelling facility in nearby Ashton-under-Lyne originally owned by Hadfields Transport.

 

This reduced transport fleet continued to operate from Ashton-under-Lyne for a while until finally the whole transport function was transferred to 3rd party ownership and warehousing cantered on the new giant Sheffield factory with all other deliveries effected by either factory based vehicles or locally hired operatives for direct deliveries from factories.

 

Remploy's in-house warehousing and transport operation finally ceased to exist completely in April 2000.

 

In 2009 Remploy Furniture's warehousing, order picking and transport operations were moved from an external supplier back in house to Remploy Sheffield.

 

Resulting in a saving to the business of around £320,000 each year it looks like the transport operations of Remploy have come round full circle.

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Uploaded on November 5, 2014
Taken sometime in 1975