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Singer's Sewing Machine Factory, Housing and the
Clydebank Blitz.
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Only)
In the early
1800's there were a couple of small boat builder yards
dotted along the rivers' edge, however there was no
large scale shipbuilding of any kind. That all changed
when the Thomson brothers opened their new yard - now
John Browns/UIE/Kvaerner. The two main shipbuilding
yards in Clydebank were Thomson's (then John Brown's)
and Napier's (then Beardmore's).
The Thomson Brothers
In the mid-1800's the Thomson brothers setup a foundry
called the Clyde Bank Foundry in Finnieston Street,
Glasgow, and opened another site at Cessnock in Govan a
few years later. The site at Govan was taken from them
under a Compulsary Purchase Order servered by the Clyde
Navigation Trust in 1872. This meant they had to go
looking for a new site, but had £90,000 from the Trust
to play with.
The site they found at Clydebank was flat and fairly
near to their works at Finnieston Street, so in 1871
they acquired the land and commenced construction. As
transport was non-existent, workers were brought to the
yard via a small paddle steamer. This was the main
transportation method until the Glasgow, Yoker and
Clydebank railway was opened, with a station just off
Cart Street (now closed).
From this yard the Thomson brothers started to build up
a small community around it. They built houses for
their workers (see the
History : Housing
section for
more detail) a small savings bank, and a school.
The yard received regular orders from Cunard for around
30 years, mainly due to the fact that one of the other
Thomson brothers (Robert Thomson) was a superintendent
engineer for Cunard. Orders from other major steamship
comapnies at the time brought increased prosperity to
the company, so much so that by 1880 nearly 2000 men
were employed at the yard.
Thomson & Co. went through a period of
reconstruction, with the Thomson brothers' influence
decreasing as time went on. In 1897 the company was
renamed the Clydebank Engineering and Shipbuilding
Company, however it didn't last long - John Brown's was
about to come to town...
John Brown's
Not many people may realise this, but John Brown's was
not originally a shipbuilding company, nor is it even
Scottish! In the 1800's John Brown Engineering Company
was part of a group of English companies, based in
Sheffield, producing armaments, coal, iron, and steel
armour plate to list but a few.
A spate of company mergers left Brown's in the position
that it could be potentially forced out of the
lucrative Admiralty market unless it could find another
way for it's products to be sold and used by the
Government.
So, they went on the hunt for a shipbuilding company
that had plenty Admiralty work and was ameniable to a
takover. One was found, in the shape of the Clydebank
Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. The yard was bought in
1899 for around 1 million GBP (a lot in those days).
The newly acquired yard became the shipbuilding
division of the John Brown group.
John Brown Shipbuilding Co. and Naval
work
The reason for purchasing the yard quickly became clear
- the company were very successful in winning major
Admiralty orders in the first few years of opening. By
1906 the yard has built 9 ships for the Admiralty, with
more orders coming in all the time.
Brown's was, at the time, the only yard in Britain
capable of building ships that were powered using new
steam turbines. It's not surprising then that when the
Admiralty wanted new battleships and cruisers
constructed using these turbine engines, they turned to
John Brown's.
To handle the spate of orders, the yard was expanded
westwards - towards what we know as Cable Depot. By the
First World War almost 1 million GBP had been spent of
expanding the yards' facilities, and modernising
equipment and facilities.
Diversify or die...
The local management were fairly independent of the
parent company, and realised that they could not
survive simply on building Naval ships. Diversification
into merchant shipping and cruise liner construction
provided many thousands of jobs, and secured the yards'
future for many years to come.
By establishing a relationship with the Cunard Shipping
Co., John Brown's succeeded in landing major contracts
to build five cruise liners - The Saxonia,
The Panonia, The Caronia, The Carmania
and
The
Lusitania. The Lusitania
won the Blue Riband in 1907, crossing the Atlantic in
under 5 days.
Beardmore's
William Beardmore owned a growing steelmaking company,
originally based in the East End of Glasgow, and in a
similar fashion to John Brown's had to seek alternative
markets for his heavy armour plate, and specialised
steel products. He decided to build his own naval
shipbuilding yard in Dalmuir, west of the Thomson's
yard.
Due to financial constraints placed on him by his
participation in some rather 'dodgy' partnerships, as
well as rescuing his brother-in-law's engineering
company at the turn of the century, he had to merge
with Vickers and Son, his main rival.
By 1901 construction of the Dalmuir naval shipbuilding
yard finally got under way - a huge wet dock was
constructed, as were massive engine shops, boiler shops
and gantries. The work took longer than expected,
meaning the yard was not completed until around 1906,
but the yard was one of the finest in the world when
totally finished in 1908.
In almost exactly the same fashion as the Thomson yard,
housing had to be provided for the influx of workers
now employed at the Beardmore yard. William Beardmore
was just one of many house builders in the area at the
time, building the now familiar tenements around the
areas of Caledonia Street, Scott Street and Dunn
Street, to name but a few.
Because the yard was built from nothing, so was it's
reputation. This made work hard to come by, and it took
until around 1910 for the yard to achieve a steady flow
of orders for naval ships and passenger ships.
The yard was not profitable, regardless of how visible
it's success appeared to be - it made a loss up until
the start of World War I. The war brought massive
orders for steel and ships, and the yard became
profitable from this point on. What a price to pay!
The World's Finest
John Brown's and Beardmore's produced the some of the
best ships in the world, with superb craftsman
producing some of the finest quality interiors known to
man. The scale of the work carried out by these yards
has never been equalled.
The Great War
The shipyards were slowly going into decline in early
1914, however the onset of the First World War saw
demand for naval ships stretch the shipyards to
breaking point. The Clydebank yard became an Admiralty
controlled yard in 1915, building destroyers,
battlecruisers, a battleship and even a seaplane
carrier.
The Clydebank yard built more destroyers than any other
British Shipyard during the war. This work meant full
employment for thousands of workers, many of whom had
to be drafted in from merchant shipbuilding yards when
existing workers volunteered for military to fight for
King and Country.
As almost everyone was caught off guard with the
outbreak of war, no-one took much notice of the
thousands of men who willingly volunteere for military
service. In particular nobody thought about who was
going to manufacture shells, mines, fuses and large
fields guns like the Howitzer.
William Bearmore, in typical Beardmore fashion, was
more than happy to install the necessary equipment at
the Dalmuir yard to allow field guns and the like to be
constructed there. Within a matter of days shells and
fuses were being manufactured at the Dalmuir yard to
satisfy the military hunger for firepower.
Orders for mines, destroyers, planes and even two
E-class submarines were placed by thr Admiralty at the
Dalmuir yard. This lead to a massive shortage of
skilled men to do the work, and like the Clydebank
Yard, Beardmore had to draft in external workers, and
try and break down the strict divisions historically
made between the different skilled crafts. This upset a
lot of people, and lead to a strike in 1915.
The strike did not last long, and the Government (not
impressed by the strike action) enforced controls over
the companies who were involved in the war effort. This
gave the yard greater powers, but lead again to strikes
and even shop stewards being deported to Edinburgh - a
place worse than death for someone from Glasgow!