Being a ‘Clydesider’ in the age of deindustrialisation: skilled male identity and economic restructuring in the West of Scotland since the 1960s

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between long-running deindustrialisation and skilled male employment culture in the West of Scotland. The age of deindustrialisation is a valuable designation: the contraction of industrial production and employment in the United Kingdom was gradual rather than sudden, managed carefully in the 1960s and 1970s and then recklessly in the 1980s. In Scotland there was an important transition in the 1960s from established to younger industrial sectors. In the sphere of employment culture this tested the Clydesider skilled male identity, which was constructed and reproduced in workplaces and industrial communities. The resilience of this identity is tracked through oral history examination of workers employed at the Fairfields shipyard in Govan, Glasgow, and the Linwood car plant, ten miles west in Renfrewshire. The Clydesider identity was derived from shipyard employment culture. It privileged earnings, workplace voice and relative autonomy from managerial supervision. Workers at Linwood used the Clydesider identity to advance their influence on the shop floor, contesting the frustrations of assembly goods manufacturing and asserting skill and autonomy. The article shows how manual workers on the Clyde adjusted to and made sense of deindustrialisation in the 1960s and 1970s in moral economy terms. The protracted and incomplete ‘half-life’ of deindustrialisation contained positive as well as negative effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Deindustrialisation
• work culture
• skilled-male identity
• moral economy

Acknowledgments

The authors are enormously grateful to Alan Glover, Joe Reilly and others whose testimony features here, and thank Ewan Gibbs of the University of the West of Scotland for valuable advice which greatly strengthened the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Author calculations from Ministry of Labour and Department of Employment data published in the Digest of Scottish Statistics from 1963 (No. 21), 1966 (No. 27), 1969 (No. 34), and Scottish Abstract of Statistics from 1978 (No. 10) and 1989 (No. 18), all published HMSO, Edinburgh.

2. Mitchell Library (ML), Linwood, TD 758/1/1, Strathclyde Regional Council, Draft Report, Chrysler: Linwood, November 1975.

3. BBC News, EU Referendum: Scotland backs Remain as UK votes Leave, 24 June 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-36599102; accessed 14 December 2018.

4. BBC News, The UK’s European Elections 2019, 27 May 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/crjeqkdevwvt/the-uks-european-elections-2019; accessed 27 May 2019; ‘European election latest results 2019: across the UK’, The Guardian, 27 May 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2019/may/26/european-election-latest-results-2019-uk-england-scotland-wales-ni-eu-parliament, accessed 19 July 2019.

5. Alan Glover, Interview with Valerie Wright (VW), East Kilbride, 23 September 2017.

6. Tam Brady, Interview with VW, 20 September 2017.

7. Alan, Interview.

8. Alex Wright, Interview with VW, Paisley, 29 August 2017.

9. Alan, Interview.

10. Alex, Interview.

11. Tam, Interview.

12. Alan, Interview.

13. Alan, Interview.

14. The Bowler and the Bunnet, written and researched by Clifford Hanley, directed and presented by Sean Connery (Sean Connery, Scottish Television, 1967), 36 minutes, black and white; the film is included in Tales From the Shipyard. Britain’s Shipbuilding Heritage on Film (British Film Institute, DVD, 2011).

15. University of Glasgow Archives (UG), UCS 5/1/1, Minutes of Meeting of UCS Directors, 5 December 1967.

16. The National Archives, Kew (TNA), EW 7/1456, A. J. Cody, DEA, Brief for Secretary of State, 28 February 1969.

17. Glasgow Caledonian University Archives (GCUA), Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), Special Meeting of General Council, 7 May 1969.

18. TNA, EW 7/1456, Cabinet Ministerial Committee on Economic Policy, 11^th Meeting, 6 May 1969.

19. UG, UCS 5/1/2, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, Minutes of Meetings of UCS Directors, 6 and 11 June 1969.

20. GCUA, STUC, General Council, Report of a Meeting with the Rt Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Minister of Technology, and the Rt Hon. William Ross, Secretary of State for Scotland, Board of Trade Offices, Glasgow, 12 January 1970.

21. UG, DC 65/135, Frank Herron, Redundancy and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd., manuscript, no date, Table 2.3, Wholly Unemployed Males (%) Glasgow, Area, Scotland, Great Britain 3^rd Qtr. 1969-3^rd Qtr. 1971.

22. UG, DC 65/135, Herron, Redundancy and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd., Table 3.1, Occupational Distribution of the Realised Sample.

23. UG, DC 65/135, Herron, Redundancy and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Ltd., Table 6.3, Why the Job Changers Left their First Jobs after UCS; Table 6.13, Subjective Skill Comparison Between Present or Last Job and Job at UCS by Skill; chapter 10.

24. UG, ESR, Box 8, UCS Redundancy, W. McEvoy.

25. Davie Torrance, Interview with VW, Fairfields Heritage Centre, 4 October 2017.

26. UG, Papers of Sir Robert Smith, ACCN 3613/1/1, Sir Robert Smith’s diary documenting the liquidation, entries for 30 July an 2 August 1971; ACCN 3613/1/5, Bundle: The UCS work-in in perspective, no date; ACCN 4039/1/1, Sir Robert Smith, Witness Seminar, University of Glasgow, Centre for Business History in Scotland, 24 August 2012.

27. UG, DC 65/50, UCS: The Social Audit. A Special Report by the Institute for Workers’ Control, Pamphlet Number 26 (IWC, Nottingham, no date).

28. UG, DC 65/45, Nationalisation of Shipbuilding, Ship-Repair and Marine Engineering: Joint Statement, Joint Working Party, Labour Party, Trades Union Congress, Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, etc.

29. TNA, PREM 15/1242, Note of a Meeting with UCS Shop Stewards held at the House of Commons on 28 July 1971.

30. Alan, Interview.

31. ‘Unions may support workers’ dismissal’, The Guardian, 30 May 1964, p. 1.

32. Alex Neill and Margaret Neill, Interview with VW, Glasgow, 18 September 2017.

33. National Records of Scotland (NRS), SEP 4/3996, N. J. Shanks, Scottish Office, Chrysler. Secretary of State for Scotland’s meeting with representatives of Strathclyde Regional Council and Renfrew District Council, 3 December 1975; ML, Linwood, TD 758/1/1, Strathclyde Regional Council, Chrysler.

34. Joe Reilly, Interview with VW, Johnstone, 7 December 2017.

35. University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, SOHC 001022, Cliff Lockyer and Lesley Baddon, Conversations with workers at the former Linwood car plant, 1981–85, Baddon Interview with anonymised former Linwood worker.

36. Joe, Interview.

37. Joe, Interview.

38. Joe, Interview.

39. Joe, Interview.

40. TNA, LAB 28/16/7, C. H. B. Cattell, Director/General Manager Rootes, Evidence to Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations, 7 June 1966.

41. Barry Brown, Interview with VW, Gallowhill, Paisley, 22 November 2017.

42. TNA, LAB 10/2834, B. Roscoe, Rootes Motors Scotland Ltd., Linwood, 6 May 1968.

43. NRS, SEP 4/2402, Redundancy at Rootes’ Factories at Linwood, Note of a Meeting at the Ministry of Technology, 11 October 1966; SEP 4/2403, Ministerial correspondence, Linwood, March 1972; Scottish Trades Union Congress, 79^th Annual Report, 1976 (Glasgow: STUC, 1976), 83–4.

44. Barry, Interview.

45. TNA, FV 22/96, Chrysler Linwood Dispute – Note of Discussions at Department of Industry, 2 November 1977; FV 22/96, J. E. Cammell, Chrysler Linwood Dispute, 29 June 1978.

46. Joe, Interview.

47. STUC, 81^st Annual Report, 1978 (Glasgow: STUC, 1978), 53–55; TNA, FV 22/97, Note of a Meeting at the Department of Industry, 26 July 1978; Note, Linwood Back to Normal, 7 August 1978.

48. Joe, Interview.

49. Joe, Interview.

50. NRS, SEP 4/3996, Kirkpatrick, Scottish Economic Planning Department, The Chrysler Affair – A Chronology, 1 October 1975 to 14 January 1976; SEP 4/3999, Brief for Secretary of State for Scotland’s Visit to Linwood, September 1977.

51. Joe, Interview.

52. NRS, SEP 4/3999, Brief for Secretary of State for Scotland’s Visit to Linwood, September 1977; Building the New Chrysler, written and directed by John M. Mills (Formula One Films, 1976).

53. Joe, Interview.

54. Brian Glen, Interview with VW, Fairfields Heritage Centre, 12 October 2017.

55. Joe, Interview.

56. Joe, Interview.

57. Alan, Interview; Dame Barbara Cartland (1901–2000) was an English author of popular romantic fiction.

58. Alan, Interview.

59. Brian, Interview.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was conducted at the University of Glasgow with support from the Leverhulme Trust, funder of a 36-month project which began in April 2017, ‘Employment, Politics and Culture in Scotland’, RPG-2016-283, with Jim Phillips as Principal Investigator, Valerie Wright as Research Associate, and Jim Tomlinson as Co-Investigator.

Notes on contributors

Jim Phillips

Jim Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. His latest book is Scottish Coal Miners in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

Valerie Wright

Valerie Wright is Research Associate in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Her recent publications include articles in Housing Studies, Planning Perspectives, and Twentieth Century British History.

Jim Tomlinson

Jim Tomlinson is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. His latest book is Managing the Economy, Managing the People. Narratives of British Economic Life from Brexit to Beveridge (Oxford University Press, 2017).