Why Did Glasgow’s Shipbuilding Decline?

Glasgow’s shipbuilding declined through the twentieth century because of foreign competition, underinvestment and a failure to modernise. Once the Clyde built around a third of all British ships, but cheaper yards abroad, first in Japan and later South Korea and China, undercut it, and yard after yard closed. Today only a handful of shipyards remain on a river that once had dozens.

The peak, and the first cracks

At its height the River Clyde was the greatest shipbuilding centre in the world, and ‘Clyde-built’ was a mark of quality everywhere, as our post on why the river mattered describes. But success bred complacency. The yards under-invested in new methods, and the Depression of the 1930s hit brutally, closing and merging yards and throwing thousands out of work. The full rise of the industry is told on our shipbuilding page, and the most famous vessels it launched in our post on the famous ships built on the Clyde.

Why the yards closed

The Second World War briefly revived the Clyde for naval work, but afterwards the decline resumed and quickened. Modern shipyards abroad, above all in Japan and later South Korea and China, could build faster and far more cheaply. Glasgow’s ageing yards, outdated working practices and difficult labour relations left them unable to compete, and the markets of the old Empire fell away. A government report in 1966 pushed the surviving yards to merge, and in 1968 the biggest of them came together as Upper Clyde Shipbuilders.

The Upper Clyde work-in

In 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders collapsed into receivership after the government withdrew its support. Rather than go on strike, the workers did something remarkable: they staged a ‘work-in’, staying at their benches and continuing to build ships to prove the yards were still viable. Led by the shop stewards Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie, and famous for Reid’s insistence on dignity and ‘no bevvying’, the work-in won huge public sympathy, a march of some eighty thousand people, and eventually a government U-turn that saved thousands of jobs. It remains a landmark in the history of trade unionism.

The Clyde today

Nationalised and then privatised, the industry kept shrinking through the following decades. Today shipbuilding survives at the BAE Systems yards at Govan and Scotstoun, which build warships for the Royal Navy, and at Ferguson Marine at Port Glasgow, the last commercial yard on the river. It is a shadow of the Clyde that once launched some twenty-five thousand ships, but the river still builds.