Staff were informed by a letter which arrived on Saturday that the company was closed with immediate effect, they had been made redundant and that an application to place the company into liquidation would be made this week.

A skeleton staff has been kept on to assure what B&T's owner Media & Print Investments described as an "orderly liquidation of the business".

The news comes just days after Mike Dolan, chairman of B&T's owner Media & Print Investments (MPI), threatened to close the company if staff went on strike next Wednesday.

The strike was due to take place over a bitter dispute regarding proposed changes to working practices at the firm, which MPI bought in a pre-pack deal in August last year.

Both Dolan and union Unite have pinned the blame on each other for the closure of a site which was once the darling of the book printing industry but which has suffered in recent times from the migration of colour book printing to lower-cost economies.

Unite said in a statement that workers were owed "thousands of pounds" in unpaid wages and deducted pension contributions.

In the statement, national officer Ann Field condemned the closure of the factory as a "despicable act".

She said: "Unite will be demanding recompense in full from the perpetrators of this despicable act, sacrificing people's jobs and livelihoods.

"Mike Dolan and former boss Andrew Hillman should be called to account for what they have done to the workers' jobs, their pensions and their community."

The decision to close the business came on Friday afternoon following negotiations between the union and MPI and conducted with conciliation service ACAS. The union claimed that during those talks it received no notification that the company would be closed the following day.

The closure came as a shock to workers, who, according to Unite, arrived at the factory today to find its gates locked shut.

Dolan said that shareholders in MPI had decided to pull funding in the firm because the union had not backed down over the planned strike at Friday's ACAS meeting. He added that suppliers who are owed money by the business would be paid through the liquidation of the company, and that MPI also hoped to recoup some of its investment in the firm.

He said: “It is a case of Butler & Tanner being illiquid but not insolvent. We had forecast a cashflow squeeze for B&T in April and May, which is traditionally a quiet period for Butler & Tanner.

"If it was not for the strike, MPI would have funded the business through to June when provisional orders indicated the business would be around 50% up on last year.

"Clearly the shareholders were unwilling to pour good money down what could have been a drain and they declined to make further funding available.

"The Union were fully cognisant of the circumstances but no doubt thought MPI was bluffing. Their miscalculation has cost 300 people their jobs and sadly, 100 of those people who were not even in the Union were vehemently opposed to the threatened industrial action.”

In a statement, Dolan said that MPI would aim to re-employ some non-union members in its other group companies, BAS Printers, Borcombe SP, Goodman Baylis and Friary Press. It also stressed that these other companies were trading profitably and were unaffected by the closure of B&T.

Dolan said: "We have a tremendously capable and loyal sales, customer service and administrative staff for whom this is a crushing blow which they did everything to avoid.

"We have no interest in taking the business of B&T into any of our other sites because of the TUPE obligations, but we will make every effort to assist these good people in any way we can."

A meeting of union members is planned for Tuesday.