Jimmy Reid

James Reid was born in Govan in 1932 and raised in the hungry decade, in a family and district where the dole was a neighbour; he left school at fourteen, worked briefly in a stockbroker’s office — a comic apprenticeship he dined out on for life — and was apprenticed as an engineer. His true schooling, he always said, was Govan itself: the public library where he read philosophy by the yard, and the yards where he learned to speak. Self-taught, quick and already magnetic, he led an apprentices’ strike across the Clyde while barely out of his teens.

The Communist Shop Steward

Politics claimed him whole. Reid joined the Young Communist League and rose through the Communist Party of Great Britain to national office, alongside a career as an engineering union official and, later, a Clydebank councillor; by the century’s hinge he was one of the outstanding platform orators in Britain — a working-class autodidact who quoted Burns and Gramsci in the same breath and made both sound like Govan common sense.

The UCS Work-In

History found him in the summer of 1971. Upper Clyde Shipbuilders — the 1968 amalgamation of the river’s surviving yards, told on this site’s shipbuilding pages — ran out of credit, and the Heath government, doctrinally opposed to rescuing ‘lame ducks’, refused support: liquidation loomed for the yards, over eight thousand direct jobs, and by the unions’ arithmetic tens of thousands more along the river. Marches and strikes had been tried before and lost. What Reid and his fellow shop stewards — James Airlie and Sammy Barr chief among them — proposed instead was an inversion of genius: not a strike but a work-in. The workforce would occupy the yards and keep building ships, demonstrating before the world’s cameras not their power to stop work but their right to work.

Reid’s mastery showed in the discipline. Addressing the workforce at the work-in’s launch, he laid down the law that made the campaign unassailable: there would be no hooliganism and no vandalism — and, in the phrase that entered the language, no ‘bevvying’ — because, as he told them, the eyes of the world were watching, and the world had to see the dignity of Clyde workers, not the caricature. It did. The work-in ran for over a year with a discipline that converted sceptics by the newspaper-load.

A National Phenomenon

Support became a phenomenon. Donations to the fighting fund poured in from across Britain and the world — trade unions, churches, pensioners’ postal orders — and, in the campaign’s most retold moment, a cheque for several thousand pounds arrived from John Lennon; Reid’s reported response, that Lenin’s support was one thing but this was ridiculous, may be polished by retelling, and this site serves it as the beloved tradition it is. Eighty thousand marched through Glasgow; polls swung; and in February 1972 the government executed one of the era’s great U-turns, committing tens of millions of pounds to continued shipbuilding on the upper Clyde.

The victory was real and it lasted: of the yards saved, Govan and Scotstoun build ships to this day, and Yarrow’s descendants with them — every warship launched on the modern Clyde stands in a line of descent from the work-in’s discipline. This site’s Decline of Heavy Industry page tells the wider ebb honestly; but 1971–72 is the great counter-example, the moment organised Clydeside dignity beat a government, and Reid was its voice.

In the middle of it all, Glasgow University’s students elected the Communist shop steward their Rector — and his rectorial address of April 1972, titled ‘Alienation’, became the most famous speech ever given in the city. Its theme was the reduction of human beings to economic units; its immortal line — that a rat race is for rats, and we are not rats — rang far beyond Bute Hall. The New York Times, by widely repeated account, printed the speech in full and ranked it with the Gettysburg Address; it is anthologised, taught and quoted to this day, and reads — Reid’s admirers note grimly — more current with every decade.

The Later Journey

The later journey was restless and honest. Reid left the Communist Party in 1976, stood for Labour in Dundee in 1979 and lost, and remade himself as one of Scotland’s outstanding journalists and broadcasters — a columnist of blowtorch clarity and a television natural; by 2005, despairing of New Labour, he had joined the SNP. Through every label he remained recognisably the same voice: socialist, humanist, Govan.

Jimmy Reid died in August 2010 at Rothesay, and his funeral at Govan Old Parish Church — steps from the yards — drew mourners from every party he had joined, fought or scorned; the tributes crossed the political spectrum in a way reserved for those the whole country privately believes. His name endures institutionally in the Jimmy Reid Foundation think tank, and permanently in the phrase every Clydesider knows: the work-in.

His page belongs in this collection because he answered its oldest question — what is a city’s working dignity worth? — in deeds and then in words: the yards that still light the river with welding arcs are the deeds, and ‘Alienation’ is the words. Not rats: that was the whole argument, and Govan won it.

The Glasgow connection

Reid’s Glasgow is Govan: the library that educated him, the Fairfield heritage centre beside the yards the work-in saved, Govan Old parish church where the whole city said goodbye — and Bute Hall on Gilmorehill, where a Clydeside shop steward gave the speech a New York newspaper set beside Gettysburg.