BRIGG BLOG REFLECTS ON 'STREAMLINING' STEEL WORKFORCE ANNOUNCEMENT

There are still many people in Brigg and district who are employed on Scunthorpe steelworks.
So it's concerning for our area, as well as the steel town, to hear that British Steel is now planning to shed 400 white-collar jobs across the company in "a streamlining process to ensure the long-term growth of the business."
How many posts that might affect in Scunthorpe has yet to be revealed.
Brigg Blog held down a very junior post within the public relations department at Scunthorpe steelworks in latter half of the 1970s.
Back then the nationalised British Steel Corporation employed more people locally than the current British Steel does in the UK, Ireland, France and the Netherlands.
Scunthorpe had Appleby-Frodingham, Normanby Park and Redbourn works, as well as the Redpath Dorman Long construction subsidiary.
The industry was eventually de-nationalised to create a privately-owned steel company, with Corus and Tata subsequently taking over before the current British Steel was created.
There will be more steel industry pensioners in the Brigg area today than there are current British Steel employees, which is a sign of the times and not unique to the main heavy industry in North Lincolnshire.
We gave in our notice at the works in December 1974, to take a reporter's role with the Lincolnshire  & South Humberside Times, based at 57 Wrawby Street, Brigg.
One of our reasons was a fear that, if BSC was to axe white-collar jobs, the post of Steel News journalist for the Scunthorpe Division, might appear on the radar, as it contributed nothing to the process of making iron and steel.
Knowledge gained during five years with the works PR department came  in very useful while on the staff of the Lincs Times and later the Scunthorpe Telegraph, both in writing articles and editing what others on the staff had sent through to go on our pages.
In the last few years we've been on two of the popular Saturday afternoon steam train tours of the works, operated by the Appleby-Frodingham Railway Preservation Society.
These brought back many memories of the late 1970s, particularly when the train passed close to our old office on Services Road and traversed south ironworks with its four famous blastfurnaces, all named after Queens - Bess, Mary, Anne and Victoria.
But there's not much left of the former Redbourn works we knew well.
Sometimes, rather than driving back to Brigg along the A18 from our office at Appleby-Frodingham, we used to follow the works roads and pass under the Redbourn blastfurnaces before joining Dawes Lane and returning to town via Appleby and Broughton.
The high point for steel was reached in 1974 when  The Queen came to officially open the new Anchor works. Scunthorpe was famously described as the jewel in BSC's crown.
But cutbacks began towards the end of our time with BSC, Redbourn ironworks being closed in autumn 1979.
A national steel strike, called for various reasons, followed between January and March 1980.
By the time BSC really swung the axe in the early 1980s - ending local ore mining and closing the entire Normanby Park works - we were on the other side of the fence, covering the story for the Lincs Times. Sadly, many  readers lost their jobs.