Britain's biggest watch factory made 30,000 a week — Smiths closed it in 1980

Smiths, founded in 1851 as a London watch and chronometer shop, grew into one of Britain's largest industrial groups. In 1946 it founded Anglo-Celtic Watch Co. with Ingersoll at Ystradgynlais in the Welsh valleys, on government encouragement — opening the plant in 1947, the Chancellor promised to "create up here among the Welsh mountains a new Switzerland." At its height in the mid-1960s the factory turned out 30,000 finished watches a week from three million parts, exported to more than 60 countries, and employed over 1,400 people.

Two pressures arrived together in the 1970s. Quartz, which began with Seiko's Astron in 1969, made mechanical movements less accurate and more expensive than the alternative — and Smiths, like HMT in India and much of the Swiss industry, had built its tooling, skills and supply chain entirely around mechanical watchmaking. At the same time the factory was being undercut by producers in countries with far lower labour costs. The Brecknock Society's history of the plant puts the weight on the second; accounts of Smiths as a group put it on the first.

By the late 1970s watches and clocks contributed almost nothing to Smiths' revenue. Clock and watch activity at Ystradgynlais ceased in 1980, and Smiths Motor Accessories took over the site. Smiths survived by pivoting to aerospace, defence and medical systems, reorganising into three divisions in 1984. The site itself passed to Lucas in 1983, lost its production to Poland in 1999, and was demolished in 2012; a supermarket and a pub stand there now.