Val Edmunds is a Performance Engineer at Westland and remembers the Westland Affair when the company was taken to the brink of bankruptcy

We had a lot of meetings I remember and there were factions, people had very differing views about what they thought should happen and then it was so dramatic to be part of national news. Oh my goodness, people were interviewing people at the gates and we were in the headlines and in the newspapers. It was very exciting.

But concerning I suppose because the company was on a bit of a knife-edge wasn’t it?

Well, it’s true and I have survived a number of redundancies and they were quite regular so of course there was a fear of that happening then. We didn’t know what our future was going to be and which direction it was going to go but as we know, we’ve had our centenary, so we’ve survived that long.

What was it like when you were coming to work in that period then, because, I suppose, you didn’t really know if the next day, the week after, there would be a job to come to?

No, that’s true. I don’t really remember it being awfully concerning as such in that it was quite exciting and I was relatively young so I was always thinking about what I was going to do next anyway. I hadn’t really seen Westlands at that time as a lifetime career, which it has become, so for me, it was interesting to be there during this period, but I always thought I could do something else so it wasn’t the same I suppose for those people that are part of a dynasty, of which there are many.