Made in Merthyr?

Finally got around to watching Made in Dagenham last night, the British film (partly sponsored by the National Lottery and BBC) about the strike at the Ford Plant in Dagenham in 1968. The strike, for those who don't know or who haven't seen the film, was about woman machinists being paid the same as men for skilled work.

It was a very good film, Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle was excellent, as was Sally Hawkins as the fictional Rita O'Grady and Rosamund Pike reminded us all of what a great actress she is playing the shrew wife of a member Ford's middle management who supports the strike.

Anyway watching the film a few things really bugged me, and I have to say this is Trainspotters corner but I do have a direct family connection with Dagenham from at least the 1790's through to the early 2000's so excuse the indulgence. The factory looked nothing like the Ford factory I remember from childhood and I spent a lot of the film when we were seeing external shots wondering if there had been something going on down Chequers Lane that the outside world wasn't aware of. The aerial CGI generated shots from above the Rippleside flats didn't make any sense either, the flats shown were in the wrong place in relation to where the factory was. The dialogue clunked at times as well, given that my Auntie who lived in Dagenham all her adult life used to refer to the journey into the city as 'going up to London' - would anybody in Dagenham in 1968 have referred to the journey to Ford HQ at Warley (Brentwood, Essex) as 'going down to Warley' - the only place you go down to from Dagenham is the river!

Well a little bit of searching on the Interweb revealed all, the external shots were filmed at the old Hoover factory in, no not that one in Middlesex, Merthyr in South Wales. Now I know that the old River Plant (the machine room that the woman worked in) buildings at Dagenham have long since gone but there are photographs of them and indeed the opening sequence of the film showed the famous Ford PR film from the 1960's which featured a shot from a helicopter flying over the building, so why did they use a building that looks nothing like the one it was trying to depcit?

It didn't spoil the film for me at all, in fact the film did make me realise how little progress has really been made with regards to pay for women over the intervening years although my personal and professional experience does indicate that this is something that is slowly being consigned to the Ford Anglia of history. I do have a female friend who until five years ago worked in the City as a trader and she says that  speaking to her female friends who didn't opt for a stress free life when she did she finds it still fairly common for women doing exactly the same job as men to be treated poorly, both financially and  on a day to day basis. In fact proof that it's still a man's world came this week when journalist Laurie Penny finally exposed the sordid truth about some of the people out there in her online column for the Independent.