Growing up on the Clyde from 1951, overlooking the shipyards, with my dad the general manager at A & J Inglis Shipbuilders I have first hand experience of our shipbuilding industry on the Clyde. It wasn’t an easy life, conditions could be a bit dire and wages were not great. However, we were doing something right because Clyde Built shipping was renowned the world over. It is well documented that the Clydeside put their political struggles to one side and dramatically increased their shipping output around 1918. This played a pivotal role in blockading the German seaboard and starving them into submission to end World War 1.
Unfortunately, the stigma of the left wing Red Clydesiders lived on and the Clyde Shipbuilding’s card was well and truly marked. Growing up I witnessed the rapid demise and eventual death of shipbuilding on the Clyde, save for a few token naval yards owned by BAE systems and Ferguson’s Shipyard the last privately owned yard at Port Glasgow. Take a walk around Port Glasgow and it would break your heart. A lonely model of the PS Comet graces the pavement but all around is a graveyard where once the heart of the world’s shipping beat loudly. Today it looks more like Dresden in 1945 then Glasgow. On a clear day the view from the Erskine bridge reveal a giant crane embarrassingly standing alone, accusing the perpetrators of its demise. Just to bring the point home they have raised the barriers at the side of the bridge!
I have read much analysis of why this came about. The workers and their unions were radical and extreme. There was insufficient investment in the yards and a failure to embrace new technologies in shipping. The competition from countries like Japan and Sweden and even Germany wiped out our industry in a ‘revengeful’ manner and our order books dried up. The end.
Shipping had had its day.
Do you believe all that tripe? I don’t. This may have been deliberate, like the miners, but I am not going to go there – many others have. I see this as a total failure of vision, the sort of vision that some of our greatest industrialist had a plenty.
I watched a TED Talk by Rose George: Inside the secret shipping industry. Take a watch. She explains that 90% of all our goods today are shipped at some point. Shipping tonnage has quadrupled since the 1970’s?
I think back to an earlier though that ‘shipping had had its day’ and realise that Clydeside should have remained at the forefront of world shipping but for a lack of vision and a political will.
Perhaps a new Scotland with a new vision will recognise that we may not have the yards now, or the heavy engineering firms such as John Brown Engineering, or the steelworks at Ravenscraig or the boilermakers and pump producers at Weirs and Drysdale’s etc etc … but we still have the brand … and they will never take that away.
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