He was speaking to several thousand shipyard workers, but Jimmy Reid also knew that he was speaking to the world.
“There will be no hooliganism,” he said. “There will be no vandalism. There will be no bevvying because the world is watching us.” And that was it: the beginning of not only a campaign to save thousands of jobs along the Clyde but also a fundamental shift in trade unionism and politics.
Almost a year after his death, friends and admirers are preparing to mark the 40th anniversary of that famous speech to the workers of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS), and the 15-month campaign to prevent its closure, in a series of concerts and exhibitions in Glasgow.
Mr Reid’s daughter Eileen has also begun organising her father’s archive in preparation for a new book on his life by James Mitchell, professor of politics at Strathclyde University.
Speaking publicly about her father for the first time since his death last year, Eileen, 52, said he never wanted the attention that his speech attracted and was also in no doubt the action it started was only a qualified success.
One of Mr Reid’s former colleagues, Bob Dickie, has also finally cleared up decades of uncertainty over whose idea it was not to have a strike or a sit-in but to have a work-in instead, in which the men carried on working until a deal could be struck. The idea of the work-in, says Mr Dickie, was Jimmy Reid’s.
Quite why the speech that Mr Reid gave on the second day of the work-in on July 30, 1971 should have resonated in the way it did, attracting attention and support from around the world, including celebrities such as John Lennon, is hard to pin down.
On the wall of Eileen’s house in Pollokshields there is a picture of her father giving the speech, and she says she knows for a fact it would have been pretty much off-the-cuff.
“He will have had it in his head and he will have prepared the message,” she says. “And the message was: he really had to take the workforce with him. What I know is he was completely focused on the content of what he was saying, and not himself, and that’s what made him a natural on television and a very good orator.”
Eileen says her father knew if the men of the shipyards were to be successful in reversing the Conservative Government’s decision to withdraw financial support for UCS and force it to go into liquidation, they would have to win over public support.
“Dad knew he had to be persuasive,” she says. “He discussed it with the guys -- look, he said, we’ve got to carry the public, the press, or we lose. So I think he was completely focused on being persuasive and taking responsibility, and it worked. He did it.”
In the longer term, of course --despite then Prime Minister Ted Heath’s U-turn on UCS and a deal with American oil rig maker Marathon to save the yard -- the shipbuilding industry on the Clyde declined anyway and is now a tiny proportion of what it once was. However, Eileen, former colleagues of her father, and the men and women who work at the yards now, see the work-in as a qualified success.
“The success wasn’t just about the yards being kept open,” says Eileen, “it was that it provided a model for how things could be done -- which, for example, Arthur Scargill didn’t follow -- because it’s not just about keeping mines and shipyards open, it’s creating an ethos where workers, management, police and public can work together. But in terms of the shipyards themselves, I don’t think my dad was in any doubt about not being entirely successful in that regard.”
Mr Dickie, who worked alongside Mr Reid and was part of a delegation to Downing Street to try to strike a deal to save the yards, agrees with this analysis but puts it quite simply: if he and Jimmy Reid and the other organisers of the work-in hadn’t done what they’d done, there wouldn’t be any yards left on the Upper Clyde at all.
Mr Dickie was speaking to The Herald in the living room of his house in Clydebank, which is the room where the first meeting of the shop stewards was held after the announcement that UCS was to go into liquidation.
There were about 30 to 40 men at that meeting, and there has been some feeling, resentment even, in the trade union movement around Mr Reid, the feeling that he essentially stole the limelight. Mr Dickie does not agree with that but he does confirm that it was Mr Reid who came up with the idea of the work-in.
“What he said was, if we go on strike, they’ll just put a padlock on the door and that’ll be defeat, so we should take over the yard.
“The question was raised, ‘do we have a strike?’ It was difficult, but the outcome was we decided that we would have a work-in and would take over the yards, and we had a mass meeting and that was when Jimmy made his famous speech.”
What that speech, and the campaign, achieved in the longer term is open to question. “Some trade unionists saw it as a failure because it didn’t lead to all the jobs being retained,” says Professor Mitchell.
“But I think it was a success, a qualified success.”
- An exhibition about the work-in begins at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, on September 25. There will also be a gala concert there on October 1. A parliamentary reception to mark the anniversary will be held on September 15.
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