DOWN MEMORY LANE: BURROUGHS MACHINES AT STRATHLEVEN

On the 8th of April 1967 the Lennox Herald included and job advert for Burroughs Adding Machines Limited in Strathleven industrial estate. As a result of expansion between 1965 and 1966 the company set about recruiting a swathe of operators, product design engineers, time study engineers, assemblers, automatic screw machine setters, planning engineers and product design draughtsmen. The benefits of employment listed were free life assurance from starting date, a contributory pension scheme, sick pay, a modern bonus plan, hospital facilities and good opportunities for promotion.

Burroughs was founded in 1886 by William Seward Burroughs under the name the American Arithmometer Company in St Louis, Missouri. Seward Burroughs had invented an adding machine, a specialist mechanical calculator used for book-keeping calculations. For any literature lovers thinking the name sounds familiar, Seward Burroughs was the grandfather of the renowned American Beat Generation author and visual artist William S Burroughs, who famously stated that the money he inherited from his grandfather was what enabled him to write. Seward Burroughs died in 1898 and six years following his death the company was renamed the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and relocated to Detroit Michigan.

Burroughs Adding Machines were the first company to occupy a factory in the Strathleven Industrial estate and the first American firm to come to the Vale of Leven. At their site there they manufactured electro-mechanical adding machines and cash registers. Although the advert we’ve mentioned here was specifically requesting male applicants, the employee mix was roughly even between men and women with the engineering roles typically being male dominated and the assembly roles female.

Despite early success for the firm, the advent of computing would come to be the downfall of manufacturing at the site in the Vale of Leven. As book keeping became computerised and competition in the form of cheap calculators produced in Japan increased the mechanical adding machine side of the business became less of a priority for the firm’s management. A brief increase in trade for new decimalised adding machines when decimalisation was introduced in 1971 saw an increase in output but manufacturing at the site became increasingly reduced as the move away from the product solidified. Production was shut down progressively from the late 1970s. The firm merged with Sperry Corporation in 1986 and became known as Unisys. Unisys has moved away from almost all forms of manufacturing now, specialising instead in software and IT systems.

One particularly interesting item held in the local history collection is a poem written by a Burroughs employee documenting his trips down from C;lydebank in his colleague, Henry (Harry) McGlynn’s car to the site at Strathleven as they attempt to beat their other colleagues and be first to the factory car park. McGlynn was a toolmaker who worked for Burroughs from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. As for the poem’s author, we are unsure, but perhaps the following extract will jog someone reading this post’s memory: