LENNY Ballentine was a 30-year-old father-of-two when Consett steelworks shut down and he was made redundant.

After six months on the dole along with more than 3,000 of his workmates, the former steelworker finally found employment at the LG Philips factory, on Durham's Belmont Industrial Estate.

Yesterday, less than six weeks from the 25th anniversary of the Consett closure, the 55-year-old grandfather lost his job for the second time in his working life as the Philips factory closed.

Unlike 25 years ago, there were no protest marches, no angry speeches, no bitter recriminations. Instead the mood appeared to be resigned acceptance that the factory had simply reached the end of its natural life.

"It's a pretty sad day," he said, "but everyone has expected it.

"It has been rumoured for years and years, so it hasn't come as a shock to anybody."

Mr Ballentine, from Langley Park, has yet to find a new job, but is looking for part-time work while retraining as an adult literacy teacher.

He said: "At Consett, everyone thought the closure was more of a political thing because the order books were full, but here, people have known over the years that the technology elsewhere was more advanced than what we are doing in here.

"If anything, people are just relieved that it is over and they can get on with their lives."

Opened in 1972 by Ted Heath, the end came for the factory only days after the death of the former Conservative Prime Minister.

At its height, more than 1,000 people worked at Philips, producing cathode ray television sets at a rate of up to three million a year. However, the factory found it increasingly difficult to compete with more technologically advanced operations elsewhere around the world, particularly the Far East.

In the past decade, demand for the traditional televisions produced at Durham slumped as the world switches to flat-screen sets.

The end finally came in March when the company announced the factory was to close with the loss of 760 jobs and remaining production was to be switched to China.

A Government-sponsored task force has so far helped 30 per cent of the workforce find new jobs or training and aims to reach 90 per cent by October.

The city's MP, Roberta Blackman Woods, said: "It is a really sad day and I would not want to put any gloss on that - the tragedy is that the parent company did not invest in new technology.

"The workforce have shown themselves to be really professional and loyal and we are lucky to have a Government which is putting money into the task force, but I would rather this wasn't happening and we were looking forward to another era at this factory."

Among those professional and loyal workers is Lew Dawson, a 62-year-old production engineer, from Brandon, who has been at Philips since the day the factory opened, working on occasions up to 32 hours in one shift.

Despite now going into enforced retirement, he remains reasonably matter-of-fact about it.

"I'm pretty sad really," he said.

"We have known for more than a year we were getting to the end of the factory's life, we were struggling to keep pace with the Far East and we knew it wasn't going to be long. At least the announcement took away the uncertainty."

Wayne Williams, 39, from Brandon, has found a new job at Peterlee after ten years with Philips.

He said: "For all it's sad, I can't dwell on the past, I have to look to the future."When I first started in 1995, people were saying then that it only had 18 months left, so there has been an expectation of it shutting pretty much since the day it was built.

"We just can't compete any longer."