THERE is something slightly ramshackle about this scene at Glasgow's Springfield Quay in August, 1972. A national docks strike is coming to an end, and these dockers are loading the first boat to leave afterwards, a little ship taking food and supplies to the Western Isles. There are no safety clothes, just some blokes lugging boxes and barrels while a crane swings overhead. Yet the docks were busy then, with 1200 dockers working on the Clyde, and at the time, 27 ships waiting to be offloaded in Glasgow docks.
Above them is the Kingston Bridge which only opened two years earlier. Springfield Quay did not last however as a place for ships to unload and is now a restaurant, cinema and bingo hall complex. We may mourn the passing of Glasgow's industrial history, but in truth I would rather be indoors serving chicken fajitas than standing out in the elements trying to tie three oil drums to a big hook.
The early seventies was a time of great industrial unrest, and the edition of the Evening Times which featured the end of the dock dispute, also ran stories about a national strike amongst building trades workers, a strike by engineers on the Lower Clyde, and a court case involving violence on the picket line at Caterpillar Tractors in Lanarkshire.
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