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A century of pride . . . and a toast to a bright future It's 100 years since Yarrow came to the Clyde. Since then, shipbuilding has changed hugely - but it's not the dying industry many believe it to be, discovers Jennifer Cunningham(The Herald Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) WHEN the first of six new Type 45 destroyers for the Royal Navy was launched at the BAE Systems yard at Scotstoun on the Clyde in February, it seemed appropriate that it was named HMS Daring. After all, a century's worth of engineering and technical daring lie behind the most powerful vessel of its kind ever built in the UK. One hundred years ago, Sir Alfred Yarrow moved his shipbuilding business from the Isle of Dogs on the Thames to Scotstoun. It was a farsighted calculation from a particularly innovative man. Yarrow recognised that, although his business was thriving, shipbuilding on the Thames was dying and the labour supply was shrinking fast. His dictum - "If we imagine we are cleverer than other people in overcoming adverse conditions, we make a mistake. We must move while we can to some district where shipbuilding is growing and thriving" - brought more than 400 relocation invitations from towns throughout Britain. Glasgow was chosen for its strategic position close to steelworks, while the Clyde itself was wide enough for safe launchings. It was a bold step which involved not just setting up on the Clyde, but the transfer of 300 men - and their families - from London. (Indeed, it was to house these workers, who wanted to live in houses with gardens, not tenement flats, that the Yarrow Cottages were built - to local scepticism. They are still standing and give a curiously English character to their corner of the city. ) AJ Stanyard, the company secretary for 40 years and a director for nine, was one of those who came north from London. He recalled green fields and cows grazing on what was to become the yard. When Alfred's grandson Eric Yarrow - now the 86-year-old Sir Eric, having inherited the title - joined the company in 1946, there were still Cockney accents to be heard in the yard. Sir Eric recalls that, during war service in Burma, he had to sink a number of ships which had been built in the family yard for the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, in order to prevent them being used by the Japanese before the long retreat. "You could see the plate with the Yarrow name, " he says, adding that there was no time for remorse: "We were too busy doing what we had to do and getting out. When I came back and told them we had to sink some of their ships, they said, 'Why didn't you sink some more, so that we could build replacements?'" After training with the English Electric Company, Eric joined the firm founded by his grandfather as assistant manager, and became chairman in 1962. "Although it was the family firm, it had been a public company since 1925. The family holding was diluted over the years, " he says. "Latterly, I owned 1-per cent." While shipbuilding has always been a fluctuating business, Yarrow has always been an innovative company. In 1922, Harold YarrowAlfred's son, and Eric's father - had the idea of using the company's expertise in manufacturing marine boilers to supply land boilers during a downturn in the shipping business. A separate department was set up, which supplied a stream of orders for power stations, paper mills and factories all over the world. AFTER the Second World War, the demand for merchant ships was enormous. Among the huge variety made by Yarrow were several built on the Clyde with temporary bolts so they could be dismantled and sent in crates, mainly to Africa. They were put back together with the help of identifying marks (green for starboard, red for port) on every plate and angle. Since then, shipbuilding has been a barometer of the decline of heavy industry in the UK. Only three of the 23 Clyde yards are still operating today - but even by the 1960s shipbuilding was in recession. The government set up a committee of inquiry under the chairmanship of Reay Geddes, chairman of the Dunlop tyre company, to establish how to make it competitive again. Geddes recommended that the yards on the upper Clyde be merged. "Reay Geddes invited me to his office in London the day before his report was published and told me I wasn't going to like it, " recalls Sir Eric. "I said, 'It won't work.'" But Yarrow reluctantly joined Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), with 51-per cent of its shipbuilding interests owned by UCS and 49-per cent by Yarrow and Company Ltd. Sir Eric still regards it as a shotgun marriage, with Yarrow the only profitable partner of the five companies involved. By 1971 Yarrowwas able to extricate itself - and its specialisation in warships paid off when the government appointed it one of three specialist shipbuilders for naval orders, saying it would require about two-thirds of their capacity. With the remainder available for export orders, Sir Eric followed his own recipe for success: to get out and about, instead of sitting at a desk waiting for orders to come to him. He clearly relished the challenge. "By that time, the countries we used to export ships to were building their own, and were providing fierce competition. It is a great pity that there was not one shipyard in Britain which moved into building cruise liners - but it was not apparent then that there would be a demand." Yarrow always prided itself on good labour relations, and the workforce attended launches in rotation. When a communist shop steward came to the top of the list, Sir Eric was warned to expect trouble - but he insisted the man must receive his invitation. "I'd just got up to say my party piece when he shouted, 'Rubbish!' Of course, everyone thought it was very funny." He smiles. "It might have had more effect if it had actually been in the middle of my speech." There was a long battle to stave off the nationalisation of shipbuilding, but in 1975 the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill was proposed to take the industries into public ownership. Its turbulent passage included a heated debate in May 1976, when the government motion was carried by one vote. Michael Heseltine, leading the Conservative opposition to the bill, seized the mace and held it over his head. Compensation terms for the companies was one of the thorniest issues at stake, and it still rankles with Sir Eric: "In compensation terms, we were robbed. We never got a fair amount." Shipbuilding was nationalised in 1977 - just as the decline in demand for merchant shipping, combined with increased competition from overseas, resulted in the closure of many yards. Yarrow continued to build warships, and therefore bucked the trend. Sir Eric gave up the chairmanship of the shipbuilding company in 1979 in order to devote his time to Yarrow plc. In1985 Yarrow Shipbuilders returned to the private sector and was bought by the General Electric Company. The company name disappeared in 1998, with the rebranding of GEC's defence and shipping businesses as Marconi Electronic Systems and Marconi Naval Systems, with the Scotstoun business becoming Marconi Marine (YSL) Ltd. In 1999 the vast defence business was sold to British Aerospace and the Clyde operation became BAE Systems Marine (YSL) Ltd. At the same time, the announcement by Kvaerner that it was selling all its shipbuilding interests meant the threat of closure for the Govan yard across the river from Scotstoun. A last-minute deal saw GEC buy the yard from Kvaerner just two days before redundancy notices were due to take effect. By the time the deal was concluded, BAE Systems was the new owner of the yard - and the next step was to merge the separate skills and capacities of the yards at Govan, Scotstoun and Barrow into an integrated operation. Although he is long retired, Sir Eric retains a keen interest in the yard - and is upbeat about the future. "BAE Systems have spent a lot of money on getting the place up to date and I think the company has a great future. We must have a navy, although politically defence spending is never popular. It could go on for another 100 years." Vic Emery, managing director of BAE Systems Naval Ships, shares Sir Eric's optimism. "We have a contract for six ships, " he says. "We have already started the fourth, and will start the fifth at the beginning of next year, so the contract is racing ahead." The first ship was assembled in Scotstoun, although the 1000-tonne bow unit was built by VT Shipbuilding (the formerVosperThorneycroft) at Portsmouth. The other ships are being assembled in Govan, where they will be launched; they will then be sailed to Scotstoun, where they will be put in a dry dock and have their equipment fitted. The process should take until 2015. "We will have quite a bright future for quite a few years, " says Emery. "We probably have the biggest fraternity of computer-aided designers, certainly in Scotland and probably in the UK, and spend something like GBP4.5m a year on training and development. The workforce is 3100 strong and will grow to 3300 by the end of this year, and it is likely to remain stable for the next 10 years. "The shipbuilding industry employed tens of thousands of people a few years ago - but they were [making] different types of ships. Alfred Yarrow was famous for designing and building innovative ships, which at the time were cuttingedge, and I don't thinkwe're boasting by saying that the men and women who work for us today do exactly the same thing. We are launching warships which are the most technologically advanced in the world, and I think not only our workforce but the people of Glasgow - and indeed Scotland as a whole - should be immensely proud of that fact." jennifer. cunningham@theherald. co. uk |