Price of progress

But it hides another tale of aluminium smelting; one of genuine progress in stark contrast to the long narrative of an area deemed unproductive. It provided significant employment, created communities with model housing for its workforce, and prefaced the coming of hydroelectric schemes to the glens.

The great trick was to turn the Highlands' most plentiful resource, water, into jobs. Smelting aluminium needs prodigious amounts of electricity, so the water from Scotland's mountains was used to turn turbines at three Highland smelters.

The aluminium industry had been in the Highlands for almost a century before Invergordon's closure, and it is still here today in the form of the Lochaber smelter at Fort William, which is still working today and judged to be one of the most efficient and environmentally sustainable aluminium plants in the world.

This heavy Highland industry is the subject of a new book to be published later this month by Dr Andrew Perchard, a lecturer in business history and strategy at Strathclyde University.

Its title, Aluminiumville, was the name British Aluminium (BA) had thought of calling Kinlochleven, its second development in the Highlands, which opened in 1909. It stuck instead with the Anglicisation of the existing Gaelic place name Ceann Loch Liobhuinn.

Fourteen years earlier it had established its first Highland plant at Foyers, on the south eastern shore of Loch Ness.

Dr Perchard stresses: "This is a story about the Highlands being at the centre of a global industry. On the eve of the First World War, Foyers and Kinlochleven accounted for 12% of the global production of aluminium. These Highland smelters were the backbone of the aluminium industry in the UK for the bulk of the 20th century."

When Britain went to war, it needed aluminium and it needed a lot of it, which led to an intimate relationship between BA and the government. But it didn't have its problems to seek early in the Highlands, as the book makes clear.

"Among the opponents of the Foyers scheme were the early vestiges of the environmental movement, whose stirrings have been attributed to William Wordsworth," notes Dr Perchard.

The likes of the Duke of Westminster, and the poet, artist and critic John Ruskin were also against it. They were joined by the Conservative Baron Sir William Augustus Fraser, who pledged to donate £100 to any organisation willing to oppose "this act of barbarism" at Foyers. Meanwhile, the editor of a popular Victorian travel guide thought Foyers "the greatest outrage on Nature perpetrated in the present century".

Dr Perchard draws parallels with the furore over the erection of the controversial Beauly-to-Denny power line, and emphasises that the Foyers development enjoyed local support from many desperate for new economic opportunities.

There were hundreds employed building Foyers and between 2000 and 3000 construction workers at Kinlochleven. More importantly there was long-term employment.

"By the late 1930s, British Aluminium was the largest single employer in Argyll, and one of the largest across the whole of the Highlands," says Dr Perchard.

"By late 1930s the company contributed one-fifth of the rates of Inverness-shire and one 20th of Argyll. It meant that non agricultural land-based rate payers were subsidising increased social spending in areas of real fragility in the likes of the Outer Isles."

However, Dr Perchard lays bare the human cost of building the schemes. Admission records for the local Belford Hospital in Fort William reveal that there were 78 (with 28 fatalities) from the Lochaber scheme in 1925–26, with 60% of these caused by machinery or direct trauma such as explosions and rock falls.

The accidents carried on once the smelters had started working and Dr Perchard notes that while British Aluminium's post-war health and safety campaigns attributed high accident rates to worker negligence, it failed to tackle the atmosphere in the smelters, including negligible visibility in the furnace.

It was not just accidents that posed a risk to life and limb. There was an increased risk of occupational carcinomas among aluminium workers.

But BA's and the government's default position was to defend the industry. Indeed, Dr Perchard has found evidence that the Pollution Inspectorate tried to block attempts to pressurise BA into a programme of modernisation, for fear the company might pull out of the Highlands altogether.

Even before Foyers opened in 1895, there was evidence from Switzerland about the negative environmental impact of the smelting process. The evidence was growing in the Highlands as well. By March 1941, Forestry Commission local inspections revealed 90% of Norwegian spruces near the smelters were affected and most were "almost completely defoliated."

But it was neither health nor environment schemes that did for Invergordon. It was the government's determination that Scotland's first Advanced Gas Cooled Nuclear reactor (AGR) at Hunterston would be able to provide Invergordon with enough electricity at a competitive price. Delays to the AGR programme, unsustainably high prices for electricity in the interim and a slump in aluminium prices spelled the end 30 years ago.

BA's directors had failed to sign a proper contract with government, remarkably – and tellingly – relying on a gentleman's agreement.

Dr Perchard says the closeness of BA to the government appears to have blinkered the company, and that its story may provide a valuable insight for businesses today.

Aluminiumville is published by Crucible, £14.99.