A recent TV documentary about the troubles of the British steel industry, reminded me how, as an awestruck journalist, I spent a day at the great Ravenscraig plant, then in its heyday, watching the whole steel-making process from the raw ore to the finished slabs. This elegy was written in 1992 when the plant was closed. The main union at that time was the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation – hence the reference to confederacy in the poem.

LESLEY DUNCAN

 

NORTH LANARKSHIRE 1992:

FAREWELL TO THE

MEN OF STEEL

The steel-stripped mills are silenced.

Weeds will sprout from stack and cooling tower.

Rosebay’s imperative, outlasting those

Of dreadnought, liner, locomotive,

Will stain the vacant site wine-red,

A kind of natural bleeding to relieve

The hurt these ravaged acres suffered.

Once this was open country

Dipping to the Clyde, admired by

Turner, Wordsworth, and their ilk.

Then industry had its spoiler’s way,

First market forces then the State

Condemning generations to relentless

Noise and sweat and filth

To turn inchoate metals into steel.

And yet the labour was heroic.

Those hard-hatted acolytes

Who served the moloch furnaces,

Or tamed the man-made lava’s

Cooling onrush into slabs,

Perceived themselves as comrades

In masculine confederacy

Against the outside world,

As much as economic pawns.

Their status and their livelihoods

Are now extinguished with the smoke,

Their patch of Scotland doubly wronged:

To make a puddling ground

Where once larks soared

And now through wrecking of

This noble nightmare of a landscape.