[BITList] Fwd: A ship for her times - Lloydslist.com

[HUGH]

Mike,

QE2 was/is definitely a ship for her times.  I saw her launch, albeit from the passenger seat in a car proceeding west on the other side of the river, and I went round her in Inchgreen Drydock, Greenock, when she was opened to the public prior to trials.  I missed her farewell to the Clyde a few weeks back, but I caught her visit last year.  So, no arguments there then, however, I do take issue with the writer's reiteration of what seems by now to be the standard take on the demise of British shipbuilding (and marine engineering, by association).

I don't buy broad brush assertions of "appalling union troubles" and "bad management".  In the 70s and 80s I read enough of the pernicious dross spewed out by hacks who couldn't pump up a tyre to confirm what I had long suspected, that someone somewhere had an agenda, and the survival of British shipbuilding was not on it.  In all of my career, covering 6 shipyards and 2 marine engineering works, I was on strike twice - a one day token strike in the late 80s, and a couple of weeks in 1951 during the apprentices strike.  Never once was I held up by a strike of anyone else, and I know for a fact that the private view of at least one MD was that the occasional short strike could be a welcome break, the only cloud on the horizon being that some scab might wish to come in to work and make life awkward for those who had planned something else.  Strikes over trivia did take place, managements could be obtuse, and working practices were sometimes antedeluvian, but to dip a brush into that pot and wipe it over the whole industry is and was to distort reality.

Many of us did see what was happening, and tried to stop it.  When we travelled south to lobby parliament on the subject - provosts, priests, ministers, union officials and the like, a respectable bunch if ever there was one - what met us at the London terminus?  The massed ranks of the Met is what, with batons, body armour and dogs on leashes.  One or two had the grace to look abashed.  Any fool knows a new yard looks different from an old one, and we were not entirely ignorant of yards in Germany, Korea, Japan, etc - some of us had worked there - but where on earth was the British industry to get the capital for the creation of yards on new sites? I know of no British yard that wasn't close hemmed in by the town that grew up around it.  I heard of no offers of assistance from government to that end, or even to help offset foreign government subsidising of quotations from their yards.  Much of foreign competition was demonstrably unfair, so it's hardly constructive to categorise complaints about it as "whining".

Take it from me, the newspapers of the 70s and 80s are not good sources for the truth about British shipbuilding.

Hugh.
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