Sir Geoffrey Whalen obituary

One of the heroes of the British motor industry in the late 20th century, Sir Geoffrey Whalen, who has died aged 90, was bloodied in the interminable, but ultimately futile, battle to make British Leyland succeed, yet his achievement was to keep mass-market car manufacturing alive in Coventry for an extra 20 years from the time he became managing director of Peugeot UK in 1984. Having started out in industrial relations for the National Coal Board in Scotland, Whalen was 30 before he moved to be divisional personnel manager for AC Delco, the components arm of General Motors in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. He was struck by the contrast between what he saw as the disciplined professionalism of miners’ union leaders such as Mick McGahey , with whom he had negotiated, and the anarchy and poor quality of union bargaining in the similarly totally unionised motor industry – due, in his view, to the availability of alternative employment. In 1970, he was recruited to help rescue the UK-owned industry. Two years earlier, the ailing British Motor Corporation (BMC) had been merged with Leyland, in a move encouraged by the government, but in spite of new investment the merger was in trouble in the face of competition from Ford and the reviving European motor industry. Whalen’s job was to bring in a coherent payments structure at the new £50m works at Cowley, Oxford. The company’s fortunes hung on production of a new mass-market car, the Marina. …