The tide of democracy: Shipyard workers and social relations in Britain, 1870–1950

Part I

The organisation of craft production

1

Markets and firms

The shipbuilding industry in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain presents an interesting paradox. On the one hand, its final products were among the most technically sophisticated of the period. They combined vast metal structures with highly advanced engineering; they included huge cargo ships, powerful naval vessels, and luxurious passenger liners; and their international use was increasingly dependent on the most advanced applied science of the day, including the telegraph and the wireless. Indeed, as a symbol of modernity and national standing shipbuilding had much the same role in this period as aerospace programmes came to have a hundred years later. Yet on the other hand, these superb machines were produced in an environment which was surprisingly crude. It was extremely noisy and dirty, with a great deal of work being carried out in the open and with little provision for refreshment or sanitation; it was very dangerous, as a result of the great heights at which many of the men worked and the chaotic conditions of half-finished ships; and it was difficult to supervise as a result of the widely dispersed indoor and outdoor sites, many of which were hard even to see. Indeed, the key factors of production involved were sheer strength and manual skill, with which management had little contact and over which it had little control.

This was not an image which the firms themselves liked to encourage, and in their official publicity both the texts and the illustrations began with the technical sophistication and huge scale of the products and implied that this was closely paralleled by the conditions of production. In 1909 Fairfields of Govan, for example, proclaimed in a typical style:

Never failing to anticipate the requirements of progressive society, and even directing progress, those to whom the prosperity of the Fairfield Works is due have demonstrated, in a manner that overcomes all theory, the power which well-directed capital can wield as an instrument for general good, as well as the command over the rude forces of nature, which men of prominent ability, industry and wealth can reach.¹

This may have assured potential customers of safe and up-to-date products and added to the political confidence of private property in a period of increasing collectivism, but it did not correspond very closely to the day-to-day realities of managing production in British shipyards.

Among those commentators who were prepared to acknowledge the existence of a major paradox in the industry, the usual response was to argue that it would be resolved in the direction of increasingly rational production by the installation of the latest machinery. However, the repetition of this argument at different points over almost a hundred years suggests that it was always intrinsically over-optimistic. In 1884, for example, the Clydeside naval architect David Pollock was so impressed with the development of hydraulic equipment for riveting that he greatly exaggerated its potential impact on hull construction:

Since the early days of iron shipbuilding, when hand labour entered largely into almost all the operations of the shipyard, the field of its application has been gradually narrowed by the employment of machinery. The past few years have been uncommonly fruitful of changes in this direction, and many things point to the likelihood of manual work being still more largely superseded by machine power in the immediate future.²

Twenty years later he acknowledged that the bulk of riveting was still done by hand, yet he hoped that this would soon be changed by the latest pneumatic equipment then being imported from the United States. Though he issued the scornful warning that ‘partially successful methods have been tried from time to time, with, of course, on the part of inventors, a more or less noisy flourish of trumpets, signifying no less than the complete solution of the problem’, he himself was still prepared to announce that ‘a complete solution of the shell-riveting problem is not now far distant’.³

This same drive to resolve the paradox of the industry in the direction of more rational shipyard organisation can be found in the sessions of regional technical associations following the high pressure of production for the First World War. The enthusiasm of the younger speakers for scientific management and standardisation was, however, effectively crushed during the discussions of their papers by the sceptical responses of the more experienced managers in the audience. Thus after one particularly sophisticated presentation at a meeting in Newcastle in 1921 on the measurement of output and the monitoring of work in progress, the chairman, having thanked the speaker politely, then remarked that ‘the multiplication of statistics was a fascinating pursuit which became almost a vice, and if it was carried too far one could not see the wood for the trees, and as much time might be spent on producing statistics as on producing ships’, a view which was echoed by many others present.⁴ The same audience a year later virtually unanimously rejected the proposals of a speaker on standardisation, making it clear that they agreed with the view which he had begun his paper by dismissing, that shipbuilding was ‘an art, and not a science, encrusted with tradition and hedged about with labour agreements, and to assume that these could be quickly altered or even modified was only to court disaster’.⁵

Standardisation was not attempted again in British shipbuilding during the Second World War, but the increasing introduction of welding began to suggest that the rational shipyard might have arrived at last. By 1960, for example, the economist J. R. Parkinson was enthusiastic about moves towards covered working areas, pre-planning, pre-fabrication, and more highly mechanised haulage systems: in effect a vision of flow-line production, if not of automation. However, he was also realistic enough to appreciate that the industry’s heritage posed a major barrier to rationalisation and admitted that:

the foregoing sketch may have given some idea of the vast scope of re-organisation which is needed to bring the majority of shipyards up-to-date from the inter-war period. There are few, if any, shipyards in this country which can claim to have brought themselves fully up-to-date in all respects.⁶

British shipyards were hampered firstly by the problems of their early start, particularly their cramped locations, and secondly by the deep resistance to standardised production which still characterised both the builders and their customers. In the end Parkinson spent as much time challenging this conservatism and individualism as he did in outlining the revolution he hoped for in production.⁷

The evidence on shipbuilding therefore needs to be handled with some care for, by being over-impressed with the technical sophistication of the product and relying on some of the more easily accessible statements about the industry, it would be possible to conclude that British shipyards went through a series of stages of increasing mechanisation and rationalisation.⁸ However, when such statements from the higher levels of the industry or the more ambitious outside consultants are placed in the context of the responses from those with practical experience of day-to-day yard management, it becomes clear that they did not represent either majority practice or even the views of a significant dynamic minority within the industry.⁹ They were, indeed, little more than wishful thinking and throughout the period of this study shipbuilding in Britain continued to be carried out within the traditional framework of craft production. This fits well with the emphasis by most historians on the slow and uneven nature of Britain’s overall economic development. Even the ‘Industrial Revolution’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is generally seen as having been characterised by relatively small companies, low levels of fixed capital, and practical tinkering rather than major scientific innovations. What makes shipbuilding particularly interesting is that its products were technically so sophisticated yet traditional production methods survived for so long into the twentieth century.

Markets, specialisation and cyclical fluctuations

A large part of the explanation for this paradox of the shipbuilding industry is to be found in the paradox of the market situation which it faced during the period of this study. On the one hand, British shipyards dominated the world market for steam ships and this permitted increasing specialisation and sophistication in their products. However, on the other hand, they were faced with very intense cyclical fluctuations in demand, and this inhibited the adoption of standardised and mechanised production methods.

Throughout the whole period from the 1870s to the 1940s the British shipbuilding industry retained a dominant position in the world market, even though its share fell consistently from its peak as the pioneer of the basic technology of steam power and metalworking in the second half of the nineteenth century. From 80 per cent in the early 1890s, Britain’s share of world ship production gradually declined to an average of 60 per cent between 1900 and 1914 (see Figure 1.1). Between the world wars it declined still further to an average of 40 per cent: however, as this was largely due to an expansion in the overseas output of diesel engines and oil tankers, Britain still retained the lion’s share of its traditional coal-oriented markets and its shipyards continued to be forward-looking and innovative.¹⁰ Given the opportunity of increased demand during and immediately after the Second World War along with the removal of its German and Japanese rivals, the British industry was thus temporarily able to seize over 50 per cent of the world market again, and it was only with the resumption of normal competition after 1950 that the increasing conservatism of British shipbuilders became evident and led to their rapid and terminal decline.¹¹

This dominant position in the world market between the 1870s and the 1940s was based largely on the high level of demand coming from the British shipping industry, for even after the emergence of overseas manufacturing competitors the bulk of their trade continued to be carried in British vessels. Not only was the British merchant fleet therefore very large but the high reputation of its ships led to overseas demand for second-hand ones, producing a higher level of replacement among British shipping lines. Given the economies of scale permitted by this unusually large home market, British shipbuilding companies were able to establish such a lead that even when other countries became more self-sufficient, usually behind tariff barriers and with government subsidies, they were unable to build up the necessary momentum to challenge Britain’s dominant position. As a result, the combined output of the two most serious competitors in the early twentieth century, Germany and the United States, barely reached 30 per cent of British ship production and there was very little overseas penetration of the British home market until the late 1950s.¹²

Figure 1.1 UK share of world shipbuilding output (%)

Source: E. H. Lorenz, Economic Decline in Britain: The Shipbuilding Industry, 1890–1970 (Oxford, 1991), Table A.1, pp. 137–9.

This highly favourable market position permitted British shipbuilders to develop a number of effective forms of specialisation. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, there was a significant degree of specialisation among the suppliers of components to the building yards. Ships’ plates, for example, made up 30 per cent of the national output of the British steel industry before the First World War, thus encouraging a number of firms to focus almost exclusively on this line of work. This was not possible for steel firms in either Germany or the United States, where ships’ plates amounted to at most 5 per cent of national steel output, and consequently tended to be both more expensive and less reliable than their British equivalents. Similarly, the demand for mechanical components, above all marine engines, was high enough in Britain to encourage not only a degree of repetition production but also substantial investment in research and development in a competitive race to lead the field. Again, neither German nor American shipbuilding demand was large enough to permit such developments, and their shipyards remained heavily dependent on British technical innovations and often even on British suppliers.¹³

The second main form of specialisation in British shipbuilding was that between regions, moving from an early nineteenth-century industry which had been widely dispersed along coasts and rivers wherever there was a local demand for ships, to a late nineteenth-century concentration in a handful of northern districts oriented towards the world market. Indeed there were really two main regions renowned for their shipbuilding firms – the west of Scotland and the north-east coast of England – each with around a third of national output, the rest being largely made up by the output of three smaller centres scattered along the western coastline, at Belfast, Barrow and Birkenhead. This local concentration of companies gave a further edge to the efficiency of British component suppliers, who were able to set up operations in the middle of their markets with lower transport costs and a better knowledge of their customers’ changing needs. Perhaps even more importantly, it produced substantial regional markets for skilled labour, within which workers became increasingly specialised and were able to move between firms according to the demand for their specific skills at each stage of ship construction.¹⁴ Such labour markets were distinctly absent in other countries; in France, for example, there was a chronic shortage of skilled labour, a strong pressure on companies to build up more stable and less specialised workforces, and a marked tendency for shipyard workers to continue to move in and out of agriculture at key times of the year.¹⁵ Thus although British shipbuilding employers frequently complained about the behaviour of their workers, outside observers were generally more struck by the comparative advantage of these large local concentrations of highly skilled labour. Adam Kirkaldy, Professor of Finance at Birmingham University, commented that metalworking skill ‘does pass from father to son in a very remarkable way, with the result that in these islands there is a force of highly skilled labour in certain trades, such as no other country possesses, and the world has never previously seen’,¹⁶ and Frederick Talbot argued that:

The native workman in the German shipbuilding yard is the product of one generation: his colleague in the British yard is the product of centuries. In marine engineering hereditary qualifications go a very long way. Son has followed father in the yards of the Clyde and Tyne for so many generations that shipbuilding has developed almost into a sixth sense, and this is the sole reason why Germany cannot secure a footing as a builder of ships outside her own borders.¹⁷

This literature tended to exaggerate the antiquity of metalworking and marine engineering skills but it did point to a significant economic phenomenon, which was dealt with in a more sophisticated way in Alfred Marshall’s pioneering suggestions about the importance of ‘industrial districts’.¹⁸

Finally, this regional concentration encouraged the third main form of specialisation in the industry, that of firms focusing on particular products. The yards on the north-east coast of England grew up near some of the country’s largest coal fields and ports which had long been active in the shipping of coal, and they therefore tended to focus on the production of general cargo vessels or ‘tramps’, especially on the Wear and the Tees. Indeed, it was in this region that some of the most extreme examples of company specialisation were to be found: William Doxford and Sons of Sunderland on the Wear, for example, became famous for their special design of turret-decked cargo steamers. Meanwhile, in the west of Scotland the yards grew up near the main coastal mail routes and the north Atlantic liner ports, and therefore tended to focus on the production of ever faster and more luxurious vessels: the fortunes of the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan on the Clyde, for example, were closely tied to their pioneering designs of high-quality engines and comfortable passenger quarters. Finally, a handful of firms spread across all the regions had a heavy commitment to the building of warships, which required larger yards, heavier equipment, and above all close connections with the Admiralty: this was particularly the case for the more isolated yards like Laird Brothers of Birkenhead and the Barrow Shipbuilding Company (later Vickers, Son and Maxim) which did little else.¹⁹

However, in spite of the close connection between British shipbuilding’s dominant position in the world market and the development of these important forms of specialisation, there were no moves in the direction of standardisation, repetition production, or extensive mechanisation in the industry before the 1950s. This can be traced to a number of factors, above all to the other outstanding characteristic of the market for ships in this period: the intensity of cyclical fluctuations in demand.

Before the post-1945 era of government demand management the whole economy was, of course, affected by a regular seven- to eleven-year trade cycle. However, capital goods sectors like shipbuilding were even more strongly affected, firstly because their products generally had long lives and low levels of regular replacement demand, and secondly because their products were not essential for survival and decisions about new purchases could easily be postponed. In the case of shipbuilding the product had an average life of twenty years and a regular replacement demand of only 5 per cent. Moreover, the particularly long period of construction involved, rarely less than a year and likely to increase in busy periods, frequently led to the delivery of ships just when their value was becoming doubtful, and thus to an acceleration of collapses in new demand.²⁰

However, these features were to be found to some extent in other heavy industries like steel and general engineering, so the particularly unstable production of shipbuilding needs a further explanation. A comparison of Britain’s capital goods sectors in the period suggests a correlation between the complexity of their products and the intensity of cyclical fluctuations in output: mining and quarrying, supplying crude raw materials to a wide range of customers, had the least intense fluctuations; general engineering, in which semi-processed goods for a variety of assembly industries formed a large part of total output, had moderately intense fluctuations; and shipbuilding, which produced only complex finished products for specific customers, had the most unstable market and the most intense fluctuations in output and employment.²¹ The industrial fluctuations of shipbuilding were indeed so marked that they became the subject of an important theoretical debate among economists interested in the general causes of the trade cycle.²²

Figure 1.2 UK shipbuilding output (1913=100)

Source: C. H. Feinstein, National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom, 1855–1965 (Cambridge, 1972), Table 52.

Within the shipbuilding industry itself these fluctuations became a significant obstacle to further specialisation, as few companies were prepared to tie themselves to one line of production in such unstable markets. It was at the more specialised end of the industry, among the tramp shipbuilders of the Wear and Tees, that cyclical fluctuations were most intense, for yards able to produce a range of liners and warships could sometimes persuade customers to place their orders during periods of depression when labour and raw materials were cheaper. Success at both ends of the industry therefore depended on maintaining close relations with a small group of customers to increase the possibility of more stable orders.²³ This then tended to become a barrier to further specialisation, for even general cargo-carrying fleets needed a range of types of ship, and there was strong pressure on builders to make efforts to meet the full range of their regular customers’ requirements. Thus among the tramp shipbuilders of the north-east coast the focus on standard types of vessels did not lead to standardisation of production: Doxford’s turret-deckers, for example, came in a wide range of lengths and weights, and the steel components used in their construction therefore came in an equally wide range of sizes. Meanwhile, in the liner yards even ‘sister ships’ usually came in different dimensions, with different internal layouts and different outfitting specifications: indeed, as in the case of Fairfield’s construction of the Campania and Lucania for the Cunard line in the 1890s, such double projects were often taken on for their prestige and carried out at a financial loss.²⁴

The intensity of fluctuations in production therefore pressurised shipbuilders to maintain a flexible building capacity, avoid the stockpiling of products and, of course, minimise the burden of their other financial overheads. The combination of these pressures led to an avoidance of heavy investment in yard equipment and a reliance instead on the skill and strength of manual labour which could be used flexibly on a wide range of products and laid off when demand was low.²⁵ Thomas Graham of Cunard summarised this situation in appropriately sea-going language during a discussion of shipbuilding methods on the north-east coast in the early 1920s:

Good years were much less frequent than bad years and during the bad years expensive plant constituted a drag on the yard resources … those yards in which labour and progress on the ship as a whole and not in one particular section only, could be kept moving were usually those with the smallest deadweight charges, depending more on a judicious supply of manual labour, and which in periods of depression like the present, weathered the storm better than establishments embarrassed with costly charges and further had less leeway to make up when the demand for ships returned.²⁶

The consequences for labour were obvious. As late as 1949 one experienced observer could remark that:

work in the shipbuilding industry, even in times of relative prosperity, has always tended to be of a casual nature. Workmen are employed for as long as a ship is being constructed, or for as long as a ship is being overhauled. An early completion of the job meant an early period of unemployment.²⁷

With the passing of time there was, of course, a fairly steady stream of technical innovations in production, but in the case of shipbuilding these could generally still be used flexibly on a variety of different products and they made little impact on the instability of output and employment. Moreover, British yards were slow to adopt even these multi-use tools, were slow to invest in new sources of power such as electricity, and were slow to replace manual methods of haulage with the large cranes which became standard equipment in other countries in the 1900s.²⁸ As a result, the proportion of company assets tied up in yard machinery remained low for such a large-scale industry, rising from around 15 per cent in the 1870s to around 30 per cent by 1914. Meanwhile the share taken up by stocks of raw materials remained fairly stable at around 20 per cent, that invested in land and buildings still accounted for as much as 50 per cent of the companies’ own commitments, and this was approximately equalled by the value of work in progress.²⁹ By the late nineteenth century British shipbuilders had evolved a method of financing these large sums tied up for long periods in work in progress, by arranging for their customers to pay in instalments at several clearly defined stages of production rather than waiting to pay the whole sum on final delivery.³⁰ Thus a very large part of what might have appeared to be shipyard assets had already been bought by the customers, and this of course tied the shipbuilders even more closely to their customers’ specific preferences.

These relatively low fixed-capital requirements gave rise to one further feature of the organisation of British shipbuilding which may be surprising for such a large-scale industry: the survival of many relatively small firms and the absence of strong tendencies towards the concentration of ownership. The share of the industry’s output taken up by the ten largest firms did grow, but only slowly, from 30 per cent in the early 1880s to 40 per cent in the early 1900s, at which point it remained fairly stable until the forced paring-down of the industry during the severe depression of the 1930s pushed it up to over 60 per cent. However, these figures probably exaggerate the concentration of production, as the rapid growth in the size of vessels in the late nineteenth century made it possible for the largest firms to dominate a year’s output by launching only a few enormous ships. Meanwhile, at the industry’s lower levels the diversity of ownership seems to have been increasing, for between 1883 and 1913 the number of firms able to produce more than 20,000 gross tons a year more than doubled, from seventeen to thirty-nine.³¹ As a result, the predominant form of company organisation in shipbuilding remained the small or medium-sized family firm, bolstered up by the incorporation of outside technical experts onto the board of directors and frequently, through marriage, into the family itself. The 1890s did see the spread of limited liability as a form of company organisation, but more because of a trend towards closer connections between component suppliers, builders, and customers than because the size of the typical firm was growing substantially. Thus many of the new limited companies remained private, not seeking outside funds on the stock market, and a high proportion of them were at the smaller end of the industry: on the Clyde, for example, seven out of the eleven limited companies which emerged in shipbuilding in the 1890s employed less than a thousand men.³² Moreover, the rationalisation of the 1930s focused on reducing capacity by closing berths or yards, and made virtually no attempt to reorganise the industry’s structure through the amalgamation of firms.³³ As a result, the fragmentation of ownership and the persistence of a large number of relatively small independent firms was still one of the central features of the industry highlighted by economists studying its rapid collapse in the face of intensified foreign competition after 1950.³⁴

A large part of the explanation of the paradoxical relationship in shipbuilding between a modern product on the one hand and a traditional organisation of production on the other, is therefore to be found in the paradox of the industry’s market situation. Despite their large share of world output and the high prestige of their vessels, British shipbuilders, confronted by wide variations in demand, avoided standardisation, repetition production, and heavy investment in machinery. Though there may be scope for retrospective criticism of the legacy this implied for later generations, it is clear that in the period between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century it was a highly effective strategy. Foreign yards, confronted with a shortage of skilled labour and the heavy burden of higher capital investment in years of depression, were unable to produce ships as cheaply as the British, who could often undercut them by as much as 30 to 50 per cent.³⁵ Britain’s comparative advantage included expertise in ship design and the high quality of outfitting, but when it came to price competitiveness the key factors were those which derived from the advantages of the ‘industrial district’: the relatively high levels of specialisation among component suppliers and efficiency in the use of skilled labour. Thus a rudimentary comparison of labour productivity around 1900 indicates a margin of advantage of about the same scale as that for prices: the figure for the United States is only 55 to 70 per cent, and that for Germany only 25 to 40 per cent of the figure for Britain.³⁶ This position was, however, clearly vulnerable to the long-run expansion of overseas shipbuilding, particularly since trends in the world product market after the Second World War began to favour the already existing strengths of Britain’s rivals: simpler products, constructed with cheaper labour in larger, more mechanised firms.³⁷

Notes

1 The Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Works (London, 1909), p. 132.

2 D. Pollock, Modern Shipbuilding and the Men Engaged in It (London, 1884), p. 129.

3 D. Pollock, The Shipbuilding Industry (London, 1905), pp. 100, 112.

4 W. Ayre, ‘Organisation for ship production’, Transactions of the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, 37 (1920–21), pp. 333–80, Discussion p. 361.

5 J. McGovern, ‘Some notes on shipbuilding methods’, Transactions of the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, 38 (1921–22), pp. 349–402, Paper p. 349.

6 J. R. Parkinson, The Economics of Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom (Cambridge, 1960), p. 123; see also L. Jones, Shipbuilding in Britain: Mainly Between the Two World Wars (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 220–1, 227–8.

7 Parkinson, Economics of Shipbuilding, pp. 118–32, 139–53.

8 For older surveys of national economic history which understandably did just that, see J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 2 (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 61–72, 77–9, 114, 116–17, and Volume 3 (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 154, 158–61; F. Crouzet, The Victorian Economy (London, 1982), pp. 246–63.

9 The failure to appreciate this was the underlying methodological flaw in Karl Marx’s ambitious ‘critique of political economy’, and those who have been influenced by his analysis of the ‘labour process’ have consequently exaggerated the impact of dynamic management: see J. Melling, ‘Non-commissioned officers: British employers and their supervisory workers, 1880–1920’, Social History, 5 (1980), pp. 183–221; J. McGoldrick, ‘Crisis and the division of labour: Clydeside shipbuilding in the inter-war period’, in T. Dickson (ed.), Capital and Class in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 143–85; W. Knox, ‘Apprenticeship and de-skilling in Britain, 1850–1914’, International Review of Social History, 31 (1986), pp. 166–84.

10 G. C. Allen, British Industries and their Organisation (London, 1933), pp. 155–6; A. Slaven, ‘A shipyard in depression: John Browns of Clydebank, 1919–1938’, Business History, 19 (1977), pp. 192–217.

11 A. Slaven, ‘Management policy and the eclipse of British shipbuilding’, in F. M. Walker and A. Slaven (eds), European Shipbuilding: One Hundred Years of Change (London, 1983), pp. 78–85.

12 S. Pollard, ‘British and world shipbuilding, 1890–1914: a study in comparative costs’, Journal of Economic History, 17 (1957), pp. 426–44; S. Pollard and P. Robertson, The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979), pp. 37–48; E. H. Lorenz, Economic Decline in Britain: The Shipbuilding Industry, 1890–1970 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 9–10, 82.

13 Pollard, ‘British and world shipbuilding’, pp. 438–40; Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 46–7, 91–2.

14 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 49–58.

15 Lorenz, Economic Decline, pp. 51–5, 61–3.

16 A. W. Kirkaldy, British Shipping: Its History, Organisation and Importance (London, 1914), p. 444.

17 F. A. Talbot, Steamship Conquest of the World (London, 1912), p. 335.

18 A. Marshall, Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business Organisation; and of their Influences on the Conditions of Various Classes and Nations (London, 1919), pp. 283–8.

19 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 58–68, 84–6; for a contrast with France, see Lorenz, Economic Decline, pp. 33–6.

20 D. H. Robertson, A Study of Industrial Fluctuation (London, 1915); Allen, British Industries, pp. 161–5; Parkinson, Economics of Shipbuilding, pp. 82–3; Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 26–8.

21 See data in C. H. Feinstein, National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom, 1855–1965 (Cambridge, 1972), Table 52, and W. H. Beveridge, Unemployment: A Problem of Industry (1st edn, London, 1909), Table 12, p. 71, (2nd edn, London, 1930), Table 4, p. 425.

22 For a summary, see Parkinson, Economics of Shipbuilding, pp. 74–82.

23 Slaven, ‘Shipyard in depression’, pp. 194–203.

24 Parkinson, Economics of Shipbuilding, pp. 26–8, 139–41; M. S. Moss and J. R. Hume, Workshop of the British Empire: Engineering and Shipbuilding in the West of Scotland (London, 1977), pp. 91, 122–5; Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 27–30, 84–5, 92–4; Lorenz, Economic Decline, p. 27.

25 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 28–9; I. Roberts, Craft, Class and Control: The Sociology of a Shipbuilding Community (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 65–6.

26 McGovern, ‘Shipbuilding methods’, Discussion pp. 372–3.

27 R. S. Stokes, ‘A shipyard from within’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, 17 (1949), pp. 88–96, quotation from p. 90.

28 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 115–29.

29 Papers of William Denny and Brothers Ltd, Dumbarton, University of Glasgow Archives, Glasgow, UGD 003/8/1, ‘Inventory Books’, 1871–1879; papers of Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Co Ltd, Govan, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, UCS 2/26/1-2, ‘Insurance Books’, 1896–1904 and 1914–18.

30 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 102–6.

31 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, p. 86; Lorenz, Economic Decline, Table 2.3, p. 32.

32 Papers of the Clyde Shipbuilders’ Association, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, TD 241/19/1-2, ‘Abstract of the Number of Men in Various Classes Employed’; Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 72–6, 92–102.

33 Lorenz, Economic Decline, pp. 30–2.

34 Parkinson, Economics of Shipbuilding, pp. 212–17; Lorenz, Economic Decline, pp. 85–9.

35 Pollard and Robertson, British Shipbuilding, pp. 47–8; Lorenz, Economic Decline, pp. 39–40.

36 T. Schwarz and E. von Halle, Die Schiffbauindustrie in Deutschland und im Auslande (Berlin, 1902), Tables 36–9, pp. 174–9; Pollard, ‘British and world shipbuilding’, p. 438. For a positive view of British shipbuilding up to 1950 in the context of a more general assessment of comparative performance, see S. N. Broadberry, The Productivity Race: British Manufacturing in International Perspective, 1850–1990 (Cambridge, 1997).

37 Lorenz, Economic Decline, pp. 21–2, 103–4.

2

Management and labour

Most descriptions of the production process in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British shipyards present it for the sake of clarity as a series of logically ordered steps.¹ Such a tour would normally begin with the offices (in the bottom right-hand corner of Figure 2.1), where managers and clerks arranged contracts and ordered materials, and draughtsmen prepared the working plans for construction. Then it would move on to the nearby pattern shop and mould loft, where patternmakers and shipwrights turned the plans into full-size wooden moulds and templates for the metal components. From here the next steps would be to follow an individual sheet of metal from its shaping in the ironworkers’ sheds to its assembly on the building berth, all of these tasks being carried out by boilermakers. Meanwhile, in parallel workshops it would be possible to take a quick look at blacksmiths and foundryworkers shaping other metal parts, and at engineers, joiners, plumbers and electricians fitting out the hull with the wide range of components required to finish it off.

However, as the last part of this account itself suggests, the typical shipyard of this period was not organised along a logical production line but rather like spokes radiating out from the hub of a wheel, or like pieces of string snaking towards the centre of a complex knot. Contemporary observers who did more than take part in a quick tour before a launch were therefore generally more impressed by the chaos and confusion of shipbuilding than by any sense of logical order. George Blake, for example, who knew the industry well and had just completed his classic novel The Shipbuilders, visited the John Brown yard at Clydebank in 1935 and reported vividly on the resumption of work on the famous Cunarder 534, later named the Queen Mary:

Some of us were privileged now and again to see the ship as she lay in the fitting-out basin – to be lost in interminable alleyways, to trip over men crouching at work or over their tools and debris, to be half-blinded by the sharp flame of oxyacetylene, and to be deafened by the clatter of riveting machines. One began to understand something of the fantastic crepitation of an ant-hill. Then a vision of the unpainted plates of the main deck would suggest an acre of tennis courts in some public park. Or a flat of cabins in little embryo would make one think of a valley of cave-dwellings. Men were raised to their work in electric lifts and passed along skyey gangways through holes in a white cliff or perhaps some hundreds of painters on narrow staging were turning the white cliffs black with tons of paint. So the work went on, and it was baffling to think how many varieties of it could be economically co-ordinated, with engineers, electricians, carpenters, upholsterers, plumbers and decorative artists apparently falling over each other in glorious confusion. But still there was order. The ship emerged.²

Figure 2.1 Plan of the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Works.

Source: Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Works (London, 1909), Plate XXXVI.

It was something of this glorious confusion which Stanley Spencer captured so successfully in his classic series of wartime paintings Shipbuilding on the Clyde (1940–46), based on first-hand observations as an official artist in the Lithgow yard at Port Glasgow. This was a subject which seems to have attracted Spencer deeply, for he had already unsuccessfully submitted drawings of shipyard trades for a competition to decorate the ballroom of the Queen Mary, and he went on to celebrate his feelings for the shipbuilding community in a second classic series, The Resurrection, Port Glasgow (1945–50). After his personal visits to the shipyard, Spencer recorded being intrigued by the abstract and symbolic shapes of the materials involved, by the wide range of different spaces within which tasks were performed, and by the occupational peculiarities of the workers’ dress and behaviour. He too was impressed by the lack of any obvious logic in the organisation of production, though this sometimes gave him acute difficulties in organising his own series of images:

I like the theme to be continuous and not absolutely cut off item by item as the continuous character helps to preserve the impressions one gets in the shipyard itself, as in wandering about among the varied happenings … These transitional parts … are very important and serve as an interesting nebulous matter in which here and there these different activities form themselves.³

In the end then what was important for Spencer was not so much the existence of any underlying order guaranteeing the eventual emergence of a material product, but rather the constant possibility of a brief vision of paradise in the human qualities brought to their everyday activities by the different groups of workers.

Rationalisation, supervision and independent work groups

On the whole there was little hope of imposing rational organisation on the finishing of ships at the outfitting stage. This involved too many different components and occupations, many of which were not even nominally under the control of the yard since they were often provided by firms of specialist subcontractors. It also involved too much precise coordination of labour and materials, which varied enormously from job to job, and could only really be managed effectively by those directly concerned.⁴

There did seem to be some possibility of a more logically-planned production line for the shaping and assembly of metal parts in hull construction, though, as well as some promise of savings from the more routinised use of the labour and machines involved. Ambitious schemes for pre-planning and standardisation of metalworking were therefore enthusiastically promoted after the First World War by some young managers fresh from building government-sponsored standard ships, but they were quickly squashed by the consensus within the industry which was more concerned about the inflexibility this would imply for ship design and raw material purchases than the savings which might come from standardised methods.⁵ These debates also highlighted the central problems in existing production methods, especially the difficulty of getting the right supplies of labour and parts to each ship under construction in the yard, and the difficulty of guaranteeing accuracy in the positioning of assembly holes in metal components relying on draught plans alone.⁶ As a result the central principle of shipyard organisation, even in the case of hull construction, remained that of allowing priorities to radiate from the point of assembly to the preparation of components, rather than attempting to impose an artificial structure from the drawing office along a notional assembly line. The demand for steel was determined by the state of the ships currently under construction, and the positioning of rivet holes and the cutting of many of the plates themselves was derived, not from plans or pre-arranged templates, but from gaps in the half-completed hulls.⁷ In the 1920s from 50 to 80 per cent of all metalworking measurements were commonly taken from the hulls and even in the 1940s, after considerable progress in the pre-planning of structural items, it was still standard practice to base all of the outside shell plating on the vessel under construction.⁸

This method had the additional advantage of allowing significant alterations to be made in the lines and dimensions of ships up to a surprisingly late stage in construction, to allow for changes in customers’ requirements as they saw the vessel taking shape. Moreover, these vital technical tasks remained the responsibility of the skilled manual workers immediately involved, above all the platers and shipwrights, who therefore determined almost all of the quality control and the pace of work by themselves.⁹ As John Hill of the boilermakers’ society argued during negotiations with the employers in 1932:

[squad leaders] are not only highly skilled craftsmen, but they have that other qualification of being capable organisers of squads. They take the whole care and responsibility from the management and staff very largely. It is simply a matter, when the job comes along, of the foreman saying to Mr So-and-So, ‘Here you are; these are plans of the job; get along with it’, and there is no need to look after them and watch them and see if they are doing it right, or to hurry them on with the job. The whole work is taken and managed so successfully that it is not so much the price as the skill and organisation of the squad that tells in the long run.¹⁰

Because of the complex nature of the product, then, shipyard tasks both in outfitting and in hull construction were organised in the form of contracts handed out to largely self-regulating work groups. The membership of these groups, their style and pace of work, and their sub-employment of assistants and labourers was normally based on ties of family and friendship, as well as on the personal preferences of members of different ages and levels of skill.¹¹ The novelist V. S. Pritchett was very struck by this on his visit to the yards of the north-east coast on behalf of the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, and it became the over-riding theme of his stylish account:

In so much of the work outside of industry a man or woman works on his own. He serves the customer, he drives the lorry, he signals the train, he writes the figures in the ledger and drives the tractor and makes the contract, in a kind of solitude, and does not need the presence of others. Not so in industry. Here the unit is not the man, but the gang or squad, or the man and his mate. Even the man who dictates a letter to his secretary is not so dependent on her as the man in the factory is on his group, on its silent working rhythm, on its timing and understanding: the glance of an eye or the movement of the hand or finger has a meaning that is understood at once and also implies experience and reliance.¹²

Most yards did attempt to enforce more or less strict sets of rules, but these dealt only with the most general issues of behaviour such as entering and leaving the yard, drinking, smoking and pilfering, and most of the direct evidence from the managers of the period suggests that even at this level their success was doubtful.¹³ William Denny, for example, found in 1869 that after mounting a strenuous campaign to tighten up general yard discipline there were still ‘grave suspicions of fellows climbing over walls into their work and also of stuff being handed out of the yard by windows’.¹⁴ First-hand testimony from those involved on the other side of the problem in interviews, memoirs and fiction indicates that such behaviour was still endemic a hundred years