James McMillan

I wasn’t called up during the war as I was working in the shipyards. Shipyard work was a reserved occupation so I didn’t need to fight. I started working in the yards as a boy of 14 and earned 10 shillings and 5 pence a week. I became an apprentice plater and we manufactured all the steelwork on the ship. We worked long hours in the yards from 7.45am to 12, had an hour off for lunch and then worked till 5.30pm. I worked weekends too, sometimes both Saturday and Sunday.

The yard I worked in was the Glen shipyard and this ran from William St to Glenburn. We worked on all different kinds of ships during my time in the yards, for example cargo ships and tankers. To work I just wore any old clothes I had, something warm to keep out the cold. On top I’d wear overalls or a boiler suit and a donkey jacket.

The yards were a very dangerous place to work at times and sometimes people even died. The planks we stood on up the side of the ship could cause problems for the workers. The planks could be quite high and weren’t nailed down, so sometimes they’d move and that’s when accidents happened. Lots of men fell off. I remember when the new rules came in. They stated that 16 year olds weren’t allowed to work on planks and 17 year olds could only work on planks that were no more than 6ft high. The shipyards improved over the years, mainly in their working conditions and more consideration was given to the workers in terms of shelter and heating. That was a good thing.

There were happy times too. The launches were great to watch. Every time you saw a ship going down the slipway was a happy moment although during the war we didn’t have any launch parties, so to speak. We just watched the ships go into the water.

There was a lot of fun and humour between the men in the yards – pinning tails on you, painting your heels when you were working up high, swapping lunch boxes around at lunchtime. Some good moments.

It was a stampede when the horn went at the end of the shift. Everyone would be queuing up at the gate to get out and when the horn blasted sometimes they couldn’t even get the gate open and people would get crushed. If you weren’t quick enough you’d be trampled on. Because there were so many men coming out of the yards at the same time the police had to stand in the street outside directing the traffic.

I really enjoyed working in the shipyards and I’m quite sad that the town doesn’t have much of a shipbuilding industry now. There were lots of good skilled men working in the yards and now all that accumulated knowledge and skill can’t be passed down to anyone. It’s lost.

Alexander Hunter

I started working with Kincaids when I was 14 years old, in 1944. I turned 14 at the end of December and started work at the end of January. My first wage was 6 and thrupence and that was for working a 47-hour week.

Although I was employed by Kincaids I worked in every shipyard from the top of Port Glasgow right down the river. My trade was a copper smith so I worked in the outfitting department. When you were that age you had to look for a trade to go into, so I chose that. You more or less got your choice of trade but it’s not like that nowadays.

I worked with Kincaids for 47 and a half years so I must have seen hundreds of different ships being built over the years, probably 7 or 8 a year. The ships took around 6 months to build and we usually worked on them during the last eight weeks before they were launched, just finishing the ship really.

Looking back, the conditions in the yards were pretty rough. It was dirty and very noisy because of all the riveting going on. There were lot of workers in the yards at that time so it was always really crowded. The yards could be quite a dangerous place to work and there were lots of accidents. There were a lot of bad practices in the early days I remember at one time there were so many accidents we were running out of first aid things.

I loved working in the yards and didn’t miss a single days work in the 47 and a half years I worked there.

Neil Forsyth & William Kane

At Kincaids, where we worked, you’d spend 6 months in trainee school before becoming an apprentice and the apprenticeship lasted 5 years. Everybody you knew worked in the shipyards; they were a huge employer in the area. When you left school you could go straight into work in the yards, no problem. It was very different to how things are now. There were plenty of jobs around and you could get a job almost anywhere.

The shipyards were enormous, with thousands of people working there. They stretched down the length of Greenock and Port Glasgow and we had Scotts, Cartsdyke, Hamiltons, Kingston, Duncans, Lamonts, Roberts and Fergusons. Now we just have Fergusons in Port Glasgow.

The yards were always busy and at any one time each yard probably had 3 boats being worked on at various stages of completion. There would be one boat that was just a base, one half built and one ready to be launched. The River Clyde was a sight to see in those days with the yards and all the boats coming and going.

Shipbuilding hasn’t changed that much over the years since the war. A lot of the processes remain the same and probably the biggest difference would be that quality has improved.

As you can imagine, many parts of the boats were huge and the easiest way to transport them around the yards was by train. In those days all the railway lines had spurs that came off and ran into all of the yards. We had railway lines at Baker Street where there was a big engineering works. The engine for the boat would be built there, loaded onto a train and brought down to the yards. We needed the trains for transport as the engines were huge, with some the size of tenement buildings.

The normal working day would begin at 7.30am and finish at 5.30pm with a dinner break in the middle. When you went to the canteen you had to wear a badge to identify yourself and hand over coupons for your meal because of the rationing. if you stayed on for overtime in the evening you would start back again at 6pm and work until 9.30pm. It wasn’t unusual to work a 12hour day. We didn’t normally work Saturday but working on Sunday was quite common.

The River Clyde was a sight to see in those days, really busy with boats coming and going.