[BITList] About Hugh in Port Glasgow

[HUGH MCINTYRE]

Tuesday evening,

I wrote a chronicle of my life in my late teens and burned it in a fit of stupidity - later, I reconstructed it, and it formed the basis for one I started a few years back.  I kept a diary in 1951,  when I was 17-18 (still have it), but it deals mainly with what job I was on in Kincaid's fitting shop, interspersed with reviews of films and girls I'd seen on buses.  I saw one of the latter a few years back, and she'd become what we call a dumpy wee wummin.  Where was the shimmering glamour that kept me awake at night? In BI I kept a diary for part of 1959, and I've kept a full page diary since 1986.

I have a fair recollection of my early life from 2 to 3 onwards, much of it in still pictures, but I won't offer that beyond saying I lived with my gran until I was 4, while my parents with my 2 younger brothers worked out how to settle down in one house without my father falling out with the landlord.  I am the eldest of 6, born in Greenock, educated at Chapelton Primary School, Port Glasgow, and Port Glasgow High School. My father and grandfather attended these schools. I left the latter at 15 - to go further meant transferring to Greenock HS, and few did that.  Even fewer went on to University - I know of only one in my year who did so, ie, one out of about 100.

My first job was as a gateboy in Lithgows East Yard, and I gained more insight into shipbuilding there than in all of the following years. At the end of my year I worked very briefly as a sort of boy labourer to a sheet metal worker in a long vanished firm.  When I told the journeyman I was leaving to serve my time in Kincaids he was scornful - engineers are sheetmetal workers with their brains bashed out, was his opinion. At some point before that I'd failed the entrance exam for Scotts drawing office. In answer to a request on the paper to write an essay about a trip down the Clyde on a river steamer, I wrote that I'd never been on one, so couldn't comply.  Later I was glad of that, for the hull DO business was rather dead end, only one string to the bow.

In my 4th year in Kincaid's fitting shop I sat the entrance exam and transferred to the DO (there was no other means of entry), though I was still a fitter till my time was out.  National Service was postponed till we were 23, and when that came up I was given the choice of HM Forces or BI (literally).  My father and 2 brothers had been a trial to HM Forces, so not for a moment did I wish to inflict myself on them.  Dad got 5 years for mutiny in Jamaica in the 20s (he did 2) - Iain got 112 days detention at least once, and so did Billy, both for insubordination.  So I joined BI.

Any rough edges I had were knocked off in BI - I grew up a lot.  I got my 2nds too quickly for the system, and with about a year of my first spell to go I had to look forward to a year as relieving 3rd around the continent. That was my estimate, and nobody told me different.  By then I had met Janet, and it was easy to slip into a bolshie fog.  When I came out of it I was 2nd with Clan Line and the same thing happened for the same reasons, though one rung up the ladder.  Telling them I'd been conned, I left and joined Denholms, where I gained a lot of interesting but useless experience as 2nd on the free piston gas turbine ore carrier Morar.  There had been plans for BI to have a go with that plant in one of the 5-handed steam jobs, comparing it with similar vessels steam and diesel driven, but it came to naught.  To this day I believe that, had BI carried out the plan, the fpg turbine might have succeeded.  Denholms hadn't a clue - their throughput of staff and total lack of what I might call company spirit did nothing to help.  All we did was get the gasifiers going when they (frequently) stopped, and between times read the manuals.  I had ideas, but nobody to tell them to.  My old boss in Kincaids DO was part of the team that had developed the plant for the Morar, and he was often aboard with his staff running tests, the ER festooned with wires, but there was never a chance to sit down and talk.

After bidding the Morar a fond sailor's farewell I went back to the drawing board in various places.  I did 2 spells with Babcock & Wilcox (Renfrew), 3 with Fergusons (Port Glasgow), 2 with Scotts (Greenock), 1 with Yarrows (Scotstoun), and 2 years in Odense, Denmark, with the Odense Staalskibsvaerft.  In Odense we (a bunch of us went over, from the Lower Clude, Barrow and Tyne & Wear) were given chartered engineer status - the Danes had 3 types of engineer - Academy, Civil and Technical.  We were the latter type.  We had a nice bungalow in Odense, in a pleasant suburb.  I went out by myself for a month, and Janet and the kids followed with the furniture.  Our first house was a bungalow in Munkebo, a village about 20km from Odense, on the fjord. The new (Lindø) yard was there, but the technical offices were still in Odense at the old yard (still in use).  Getting sick of commuting in other peoples's cars I looked around for a house in Odense, and I noted a fine bungalow sitting on a rise that seemed empty. I called at the housing office (the yard owned the houses) and I was told it was let to a Norwegian engineer who was elsewhere a great deal.  I expressed an interest and they said they'd look into it.  It turned out he had no further use for it, so it was ours for Dkr 2000 deposit.  Not having that amount of ready cash I donned my brass neck and went round to the yard cashier.  No problem, he said, and I got an advance on my salary, repayable in easy stages, interest free.  A number of people who had had an eye on the property were aggrieved, but that's life. Some of my UK colleagues tried to get the same financial deal, but nothing doing. To this day I've no idea how I swung it.

We left Odense in 1967 (don't ask why, we still can't work out the rationale for such a naff decision) and that was when I had my Yarrows experience. In some respects it was bizarre, but I'll come to that.  The first job I was given was to get a boiler suit on and go aboard "the Malarian Frigate" to see what ailed all the expansion joints in the various exhausts and pipes.  This frigate, for Malaya, had become infamous - I can't recall why offhand - and complaints about ill-fitting expansion joints had piled up until they caught sight of me.  I went down and looked around, took sizes, delivered a report - it was all pretty obvious, but I can't remember the details.  The bizarre bit came later. The Chief was an oddball.  Before I'd arrived, some sort of war had been going on, but I was unaware of it till I realised he had never once spoken to me, so I inquired of a colleague.  The firm had blocked off the door from his office into the DO, leaving only the one from the corridor. He refused to interview staff, and had open wars of words with other managers. I was offered the post of head of the hull piping department, but there wasn't enough engineering in it for me, so I declined it. Though the Chief situation shouldn't have bothered me, it did, and I left.  His boss called me in and apologised for it all on my last day.  One memory that stands out was seeing the QE2 just launched, sitting in the river, while we were going back down river after work.

I went back to Kincaids in 1980, having succeeded at what I'd vowed would be the last attempt. When I came back from Denmark in 1967 I'd had some experience of Stal Laval's new AP turbine, and Kincaid had a couple of contracts involving same, but my application didn't even rate a reply.  This puzzled me, for I'd left in 1956 on good terms.  I was to learn that one of the 1967 Directors had been a draughtsman with me in 1956, and for some reason known only to him he'd conceived a dislike of me.  This barsteward became a plague to me, to the point that, when I did get in, in 1980, he decreed that I be interviewed first.  And interviewed I was, by Alf, who had also been a draughtsman with me, and who in 1980 had risen to Assistant Chief.  My refusal to take the interview seriously discommoded him, as did my habit of calling him Alf - dear heavens, when I got married in 1961, I'd asked the prat to take the photos. I have photos showing the same Alf and half pissed in a hostelry in Gourock.  I had entered a Kafkaesque universe.  Just to show me who was boss, I was required to start at the bottom rate.  For reasons of my own I accepted.  This nonsense lasted about 3 weeks, till Fergie, the MD (I had bigger frriends than Alf & Co), stopped to chat one day and told me I was now on the top rate, in such terms as made it clear he was displeased by the previous.  I won't dwell on the rest - it would fill a book, and I've told some of it before.  I moved to the Design Office and finally left in the late 80s for Sir JH Biles (Consultants) where I got paid for doing very little on a Harland & Wolff contract for the MOD.

I recall one day when the Assistant Chief there (he and I had been at the board together in Kincaids and Scotts) had taken the H&W rep out for a lunchtime drink, and the pair came back steaming and inclined to sing.  Hamish, the Chief (at the board with me in Scotts - it's a small world), came round to ask if any of us were sober enough to drive the one to his hotel and the other home to Greenock. It was that kind of place.  When the chap who collected the pools coupons left, they advertised internally for a replacement - must be good at lotteries, sweepstakes, and organising staff nights out.  Such a one was deemed absolutely essential for good staff relations.

My last but one stop was with Kvaerner in Govan.  A humdrum few years where, in retrospect, I realised I had been treated with suspicion at the start.  I never found out why - some tittle tattle from down the river, no doubt.  Some years after I joined I was asked if I'd agree to be loaned to Fergusons in Port Glasgow to work on the design of oil rig support vessels for the North Sea.  I said OK, it would certainly make travelling to work easier - at the time, the whole yard started at 7.30am, and I was in the habit of getting up at 5.30am. Fergusons is just down the hill from us, a 15-20 minute walk.  There was a catch - would I be able to work with so and so, who had been Chief Design Engineer in Kincaids (after I turned the job down), and was now with Fergusons?  How trivial gossip gets around, I thought. I was only one of a great host of people that question might have been addressed to - he was obnoxious.  However, I'd been away from Kincaids for a number of years, and I couldn't see a problem, if he couldn't.  So I turned up at Fergusons.  There was no problem, we had a civil relationship - if I needed information, he got it for me, if I saw a problem, he dealt with it.  But our way of working offended someone somewhere - apparently we weren't using the channels. When I was with Ferguson's in the early 60s the only channels were (a) the one in the river, and (b) the rolled steel ones in the store. Communication was often carried out by pushing up the sash window in the DO and shouting down to the yard below.  Of course, we built far more vessels in a year in those days, maybe that's why we didn't need channels.  The upshot was, I was recalled to Govan, just as the rumour mill was starting and people got obsessed by the chance of being made redundant.  I forestalled it all by volunteering, and I was accepted.  Our younger daughter got what they call an amicable divorce from her husband, and for the past 5 years she's been going around/living with the son of the Kvaerner Personnel Director with whom I negotiated my redundancy terms.

A young chap who'd been working in the same area as me on the last vessel I worked on at Govan, left not long after me and got a job with a firm in Port Glasgow who did swimming pools, all the way up to big sports centre pools.  They were keen to get their estimating system computerised, and young Alan told them he knew the very man for the job, so I got started with them. Right away I noticed the lack of a computer on which to set up anything. Nothing daunted, they responded to my questions by saying, how about you do this for the time being - I was given a list of enquries and my job was to chase them up by phone. So I looked for a phone, and I didn't have a phone.  I managed the list via other people's phones, and I was then handed a list of firm enquiries and asked to produce estimates.  I forgot to say I also didn't have a desk, so I was relegated to a dunny on the ground floor adjacent to the store where I laboured away producing estimates for pools and plant. This, I was told, was to keep me away from the rest, so that I wouldn't be contaminated by their bad practices.  My puzzlement at all of this was not eased when the MD's personal assistant, an attractive lady, started to visit me downstairs and regale me with tales about the incompetence of various members of staff, strictly on a between-we-two basis.  She hinted that it would be a GOOD THING if I were able to take the burden in some way off the MD by means that were never made clear to me.  It did cross my mind that maybe she had a burden she'd like eased, but I didn't pursue the thought.  After a few months of this the MD visited me and said I could leave on Friday, at which I ceased work immediately and spent the time till Friday chatting to the storeman.  A truly strange episode.

In the middle of all of the above I got a BA in Mathematics and most of one in History, learned to play trumpet and guitar, and took up family and local history. I've always written, fiction and non-fiction, though very rarely submitted or published.

Enough already.

Hugh.
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