The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  These men built first in everything – in steam, in iron, in steel, in screw propulsion, in turbines, in hovercraft. And they built beauty and extravagance – the Cutty Sark and the Spindrift which seamen called the giblet pie ‘all wings and legs’, the great steamers which took the Atlantic Blue Riband, and the custom-built jobs like the Russian Royal Yacht Livadia which out-imagined Captain Nemo himself. They built the clippers for the China Tea runs and the Australian wheat races; they forged and carried the rails which would unify nations in the Old World and great Atlantic steamers which would populate the new. Clyde dredgers howked out the ports and berths and docks of five continents; Clyde stern paddles forced the Congo, the Mississippi, the Irrawady, the Yellow River. Clyde pleasure boats abandoned their beautiful estuary to break the American blockade; Clyde-built ships carried Clyde-built locomotives onto the American prairies, the Russian steppes and the Indian plains; out of the tenements of Parkhead poured the shifts to forge and turn and bore and rifle the great guns which would give rough collateral to British Imperial expansion; from the closes of Fairfield, Govan and Clydebank came an energy and a pressure which woke nations from their dreams; from here, on the Clyde, came the vehicles which carried the meliorative force of Western technology and science to the world and in a last refined ecstasy of creation Scottish engineers brought those harbingers of the McLuhan age to the global village – the electric speed of the telephone and television. Amidst all this in an ironically reductive and bathetic act of which only the west-coast Scot is capable they even had time to invent the bicycle.

  Yet history is only a swift dramatic flourish over the long arduousness of men’s lives. The men of the Clyde lived out that arduousness in the room and kitchen tenements of Clydebank, Govan, Tradeston and Parkhead. The shipyards, forges and engineering shops were their bread and dripping, socks and semmits for the weans and schoolbooks in case the oldest boy turned out to be a man o’ pairts. And that expansive historical heat came from a fire which could easily rake into cinders. Between 1920 and 1933 the tonnage launched on the Clyde dropped to a twelfth – 672,000 tons to 56,000. The caulkers, the riveters, the fitters, the carpenters, the riggers, the engineers, the experienced and skilled tradesmen of the Clyde were out on the streets, their bread and butter taken from their mouths. The shipyards and forges and lathes and ingots were still there but capitalism had reached that stage where its movement and action were no longer initiated by the direct confidence of energetic men in their machines and materials. The shipyard owners no longer stood among the fumes and steam and clatter of their yards but behind that shifting chimerical mist which is finance. Their confidence and understanding had gone in the face of ‘the theological subtleties and meta-physical niceties’ of commodity production. Action transmitted through the mysterious system of cash relationships, gold standards and fiscal policies were as effective as a rubber prop shaft. If the shipowners did not understand, the men did, for they had learned through years of hardship in the Glasgow tenements an addition to the harsh reality which they had inherited. That addition which was at once a dream and a tool – the idea of Socialism. From Camlachie, Bridgeton, Partick, Clydebank and Govan they discovered men like Maxton, McLean, Kirkwood, Campbell Stephen, McShane, Shinwell, Wheatley, who took black-balling, imprisonment and poverty in their stride to go and argue the dream and idea of the Red Clydeside tradesmen. They indicted the owners, the government, the capitalist system itself and fought for the living standards and jobs of the men they represented without the mean and narrow-spirited advocacy of special case. They had the fire which came from a moral belief in a political idea as expansive, generous and as hot as the head of steam in a boiler.

  We have a kind of safety valve in this country which lowers pressure of this kind. Perhaps it is just that the style of life in which a living has to be wrung from the world makes for men to whom work is always a preferred alternative to extremity. These men in the yards may have been possessed by a dream of Socialism, but they had their daily lives with wives and children and rents and groceries. They had a stake in life which was more domestic than dramatic. In the mid-1930s work recommenced on the Cunarder. There was preparation for war, there was the war itself when their homes were pulverised by German bombs. Afterwards there was the rebuilding and a gradual but steady increase in living standards. Socialism was deferred in favour of more immediate and urgent victories. Not only in the yards but elsewhere, the trade union movement won battle after battle with capitalism without ever engaging in a war. Its political and moral passion became, at least in form, the possession of the political wing of the Labour Movement – the Labour Party. Without the heat of domestic crisis they too were content to win only battles. In the separation of the two wings of the Labour Movement the political implications of industrial and economic action were lost and ironically the two wings came time and time again to bitter confrontation over the special cases and claims of particular groups of workers.

  In the 30 years following the period of the Red Clyde, shipbuilding on the Clyde began to die slowly of a kind of malnutrition. It suffered from absentee ownership, bad management, lack of capital investment. And shipping itself was changing – in the decade after the war the passenger lines began to feel the pinch of competition from the airlines. In time the passenger services were taken over completely. Freight-carrying ships were becoming bigger, and as docking became more and more mechanised, the bigger ships became more economical. They were also more profitable to build, cheaper to run and more in demand. The custom-built job which was the Clyde’s speciality requiring imagination and flair and engineering skill and experience were no longer in demand. The Spanish and Japanese were turning out the huge production jobs needed for modern freightage and turning them out in coastal yards where there was room to launch the massive tonnage. They were building in covered yards where the weather did not interfere with their schedules. They did not have an expensively skilled and well organised labour force with a trades structure that would lead to dispute and demarcation. Nor did they need them. The pools of cheap and captive labour were sufficient for the kind of job they were doing. They were building to schedule, they were costing realistically, they were getting the big profitable tonnages, they were making money and they were putting it back into the industry. Under the severity of world competition the Clyde shipyards simply declined – Simon-Lobnitz, Harlands and Wolff, Stephens, Babcock and Wilcox, Denny’s, Barclay Curle, they either went or reduced themselves drastically. In the early 1960s the Geddes Commission found a management which could not face the realities of modern shipbuilding. Its recommendations led to the foundation of a consortium which is the present day Upper Clyde Shipyards.

  UCS inherited a legacy of bad worker–management relations, inadequate yards and machinery and berths, the same narrow river which could and should have been widened, and a commitment to jobs whose schedules and costings were the fruits of panic and desperation. In its history over the last half-century of mismanagement, meagre investment, technical ineptitude, a venal leech of profit, and brutal indifference to its work force the ship-building industry was comparable only to the old privately owned railways and mines, but under new management the men of the Clyde showed what they could do. Contrary to their image in the tabloids, the unions and men behaved with a complete lack of that bloody-minded intransigence with which they are so often accused. Demarcation disputes were settled, a fair wage structure was agreed and agreement honoured, management–labour relations became rational and resilient, the work force was cut and tonnage figures soared. The UCS began to pay off a half-century load of other men’s debt. Compared to the bleeding and leakage of the previous half-century its losses were trivial. It had begun to turn towards viability.

  Until the day Mr Heath’s government announced through their Minister for Trade and Industry Mr John Davies that UCS was to go into liquidation. Why the government chose to act like it did in refusing the £6m cash asked for by the UCS is an interesting spe
culation. Interesting because it shows that a rampant and bloody-minded Tory ideology is consistent with the shifts and dodges of high finance and the directions of cash towards the whizz-kid industries and the fast buck. If capital floats around waiting to settle only on the lucrative high return investment then many of the resources of the country are bound to fall into neglect, a neglect which this government is apparently prepared to sanction with acts of flagrant and callous omission.

  When the men’s leaders reacted to the news of the impending liquidation by announcing that they intended to continue working the yards in spite of the liquidator’s presence and in spite of any act of the government several even more interesting things happened. On the face of it the co-ordinating committee of shop stewards are only decent men trying to defend their right to earn a living. Men like Reid, Airlie, Dickie, the workers’ spokesmen, are indeed decent, humane men defending their own and their mates’ livelihood. They have gentle eyes and workmen’s faces and Glesca voices and there is no room in their style for any relish of upheaval or apocalypse. Yet this announcement awoke a few memories of that history of the Clydeside adumbrated here; it restored a few energies and aroused enough visionary fantasy to go around the whole comminuted* variety of left-wing groupings.

  Certainly it was an original kind of industrial action but it was forced on to the men by the nature and circumstance of their plight. It could be seen simply as an imaginative attempt to call the attention of the Press of the country to this plight, to confront the government and in this way force concessions, save jobs, get a deal. Yet in fact the implications of this act of direct and immediate control of physical capital, the carrying on of work and activity and production without the initiation of cash is to strike at the very root of capitalism. It clears our eyes from the abstract mists and obfuscations of finance and capital production and proclaims a new reality of machines, tools, materials and men to work them. It is an act of revolution. Whether these implications are realised or conscious is another matter and depending on this consciousness will be the issue of whether this act is or comes to be either a mere confrontation with this government on this issue or a confrontation with the capitalist system itself. If the spectres of Daniel de Leon and Syndicalism stalk the Clydeside then their nebulous substance has not yet shown in the acetylene fumes.

  It is a hellish and lonely burden which rests on the shoulders of these men in the yards. Hellish and lonely because the movement they represent – and it matters nothing here whether we mean the Labour Party, the trade unions, or the militantly middle of the road Communist Party – this movement has no ideological commitment to, and still less experience of, this kind of action. It is an act committed not only in the physical isolation of their plight but in their historical isolation in the Labour movement; a possibility lost in that wide gap between the industrial and political wings. The stewards are out on their own. If the government continues in its obstinacy then their task may be a little easier for they can go on fighting to either win or lose. If the government concedes they have won a victory. If they are offered a deal, concessions, a bargain, then they have the difficult choice to make between the immediate humanity of saving some of the jobs and the more distant humanity of an act of critical revolt. It is not for us to tell them how to choose.

  Meanwhile the feeling at John Brown’s gate is one of waiting. A few of the fantasy makers and dreamers are about. The fancy London media boy with his rag-bag of left-wing commitments, with his lifestyle and indulgence and expense account and dolly-bird and total lack of a sense of authenticity envying the boiler maker for the authority of his crisis. There are the hard men from the tabloids, the realists, whose only sense of actuality is what is – and can be written in one paragraph. There are the middle of the road media men who must film shop stewards against a crane jib. Aside from the media men there are the VIPs who storm through the yards exuding sympathy and solidarity and keeping their cards close to their chests. And then there are the skelfs and splinters of the left wing – the Trots, the Mao-ists, the IS, the IMG, the SLL: their eyes avid for the upheaval and cataclysm which will herald their arid millennium.

  The public arguments are bald and unsubtle. On the Monday morning when the men from Govan return from their Glasgow Fair holidays there are mass meetings held at every yard. In John Brown’s at eleven o’clock after the mass meetings there is a Press conference and statements are given to the Press. The TV arc lamps are glaring and someone is making cracks about make-up. The committee of stewards sit in a row watching the Pressmen come and make gallus remarks in a language only understood by the locals. Anyway they might not understand the humour which in its gutsy, muscular origin and workaday imagery owes nothing to Monty Python or any kind of sophisticated English whimsy. The questions asked by the Press are just as bald as the statements but afterwards in Connelly’s bar the arguments reach a Mediaeval degree of subtlety. Behind the scenes one imagines the stewards must be arguing with their own brand of finesse. But there is a gap between the two Mediaeval groups which goes all the way from sophisticated anguish to plain bloody worry. Wandering round the yards talking to the tradesmen you seem to meet nothing but quiet, peaceful, patient men with families who have worked all their life on ships. They are staunchly behind the stewards. It seems heartbreaking not to leave them in peace to work and live out their ordinary lives. Elsewhere you meet people hot for action and you think of these men and their families. The stakes are higher than in a lunchtime game of brag and it is these men who will have to pay.

  Yet the hopes and the fantasies clustered round the Clydeside could become real. The argument about the viability of the shipyards can only be dismissed brusquely. No one really believes that the Clyde can’t earn a living, probably least of all the government. What has come to be the issue is whether or not the Socialist movement is capable of growing in stature over the events on the Clydeside. There is the extreme left of the movement impotently defying the system at a level of personal morality and lifestyle, fighting the police over social and racial issues, thumbing noses at university courts, desperately whipping up a sense of revolutionary crisis over issues like women’s lib, or abortion, or gay power, or the right to print porn or smoke pot. While the GEC grows larger, the Tories return to confident power, the guitars belt out their revolutionary message, the left politicos dream of workers’ control – and lose their grip on reality. On the other hand the unions clamber over one another for a bigger slice of the capitalist cake while the Labour Party ties itself to the realism of a mixed economy and lets the Socialist dream go. With Jimmy Reid’s announcement of the workers’ intention something happened – round that announcement there crystallised a lot of hopes. Many people saw in it the possibility of a kind of action which could unite the radical left and make Socialism not just the sour and unrealistic hope of a few lonely men but a radiant possibility for many. The ghost of the old Clyde arose in the imagination of many men.

  As I write this there have been no pay-offs, no redundancies, no attempt to remove materials or machines or stop the people working. When that happens we’ll know where the stewards are going. Whatever way they chose we can only assent, for as well as the choice of revolution they have the plight of thousands of their comrades and their families to think of. The shame and agony of this choice has been the Medieval schisms of the left which has left them alone in their decision. If they do chose to dig in it will be a greater shame to this country’s left (greater than the previous self-defeats of the general strike and the coalition government) if they are not supported wholeheartedly by every member of the left-wing spectrum from the long-haired hippy and life-style dandy all the way to the front bench of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the TUC executive.

  I am not, it seems, exempt from fantasy myself. If I were to have one to articulate it would be this (in contravention of the Unfair Industrial Practices Clause, incitement to, in the Industrial Relations Bill) – that one day a ship would be permanently berthed
on the Clyde, as in the Cutty Sark at Greenwich and the Queen Mary in the States. In front of the gangway would be a notice, or plaque, which would say: ‘This is the first of a long line of ships built by UCS workers at John Brown’s shipyard in defiance of a reactionary government, permanently berthed here to commemorate and honour those same workers who brought life back to British Socialism.’