In this week's Eye on Millig column, Leslie Maxwell and Alistair McIntyre conclude their three-part look back at Faslane's years as the biggest shipbreaking yard in the Commonwealth...
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ONE LINER which arrived to be broken up at Faslane during the 36 years of Shipbreaking Industries had a brief starring role.
Asturias arrived in 1957, but she had an unexpected last fling which many may remember.
Local historian director Alistair McIntyre has researched the story of the yard, and I am grateful to him for much of what follows.
The Rank Film Organisation were filming for the epic production ‘A Night to Remember’, based on Walter Lord’s 1955 book of the same name, which centred on the sinking of the ill-fated RMS Titanic.
The producers decided that some scenes could be shot on board the Asturias, so in November 1957 she was pressed into service as a film prop.
Built in Belfast in 1925, the Asturias had been pressed into Second World War service as an armed merchant cruiser, later serving as an emigrant ship and as a troop transporter before arriving at Faslane in September 1957 for scrapping.
After shipbreaking finished for the day, filming began, and using powerful arc lights, continued through the night until 6am. Stunts included people jumping into the water.
A lot of extras were needed for crowd scenes. Through the Labour Exchange, 100 people were obtained, and some local people were also engaged. Sailors from HMS Adamant, the depot ship for the Third Submarine Squadron, then at Faslane, were brought in as White Star seamen, stokers and engineers. Some Metal Industries employees were also extras.
The film was completed in 1958, and was thought to be a re-faithful rendering of the sinking. Starring Kenneth More, it was the most expensive film made in Britain up until that time, and it was very successful at the box-office.
It was shown at Helensburgh’s La Scala Cinema in James Street in February 1959, and was eagerly anticipated. Alas for the local extras, the crowd scenes were long-distance, and it proved impossible for those who had taken part to pick themselves out.
One of the Faslane workforce made news in 1958. Stanislaw Zawadski, a married man living in Garelochhead, cut up the whole hull of the corvette Carisbrooke Castle, supported by the beach foreman and labourers. This took 354 hours, spread over eight weeks.
READ MORE: Eye on Millig: The ships and the people behind Faslane's 36 years as a shipbreaking yard
Taken from Krakow by the Nazis, aged 15, Stanislaw was made to do forced labour. He came to this country after the war. Around this time, the maximum weekly pay for a semiskilled worker was £12 16s 5d, for a labourer £11 10/-, and for other grades — watchmen, cleaners, etc — £9 19s 6d.
1958 saw a fire break out in the hold of the liner Otranto, and it developed into a massive blaze, which needed fire units from as far away as Clydebank. They battled through the night to try to control the blaze, and the air was black with smoke.
The yard was now approaching the high point of its life, and in 1959 the Metal Industries Group had profits of over £1,500,000.
The battleship HMS Vanguard came to Faslane in 1960. Launched at John Brown’s Clydebank yard in 1944, she was described as the biggest, best and fastest battleship ever built for the Royal Navy. But she was also the wrong ship built at the wrong time.
Thinking on military strategy was changing, and the future for battleships and cruisers had become bleak. They were too vulnerable to attack from submarines and from the air, and Vanguard never fired a shot in anger. She did take the Royal Family on a tour of South Africa in 1947, and she served as a flagship for the Reserve Fleet.
Towed to Faslane from Plymouth dockyard for breaking up, at more than 44,500 tons and 814 feet long Vanguard was the biggest warship ever to enter the Gareloch, and she was claimed to be the mightiest ship ever broken up at a British yard.
Unionisation of the workforce took place in 1960, when management and much of the workforce were said to be in favour - although the yard had always paid union rates. This had not happened before because of the rapid turnover of employees and the large proportion of foreign workers.
But salvage work was in decline, and in 1961, the closure of Metal Industries (Salvage) Ltd. was announced, with the loss of some 50 jobs, 20 of them shore-based.
Salvage tugs like Metinda, Salvada, and Plantagenet were sold off. The majority of these ships' crews came from Orkney and the north of Scotland. The nature of the work meant that these little vessels and their crews frequently featured in dangerous and extremely challenging salvage operations. They could be described as unsung heroes.
Salvada served during the war as a Royal Fleet Auxiliary, and she was armed. She saw a great deal of wartime duty, including in the Malta Convoy. Several of the crew were mentioned in despatches in the build-up to the Normandy Landings.
In 1947, she was chartered by Metal Industries. In early August 1948, 12 of the crew were paid off after complaining of overwork, and were replaced by men from Shetland and Faslane.
Later that month, she made news when she daringly towed the stricken Icelandic vessel Foldin from 90 miles off the Butt of Lewis to Aberdeen Harbour. And on January 31 1953, she was one of the vessels which attempted to aid the ferry Princess Victoria, foundering in heavy seas on the Stranraer-Larne run.
Tragically, the Princess Victoriawent down with the loss of 133 lives, the captain saluting as she slid under. Only 44 people were rescued.
Early in 1957, Salvada was one of only several vessels to help clear 40 sunken ships blocking the Suez Canal, in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956. Located at Devonport from 1960-62, she was then sold to a Greek owner.
Metinda III, meanwhile, was launched as Empire Rosa, and also had a very varied life.
Frank Elliott, a crew member, recalled being stationed at Scapa Flow for the first half of 1960, standing by for distress calls from within a radius of 2,000 miles. The crew included three men from Garelochhead, Donald Campbell, William Cormack and Arthur McGuire.
Another salvage employee was Garelochhead man Charlie Hibbert. A former commando, he was employed as a diver, an essential component of the whole operation.
Divers were considered the elite among salvage teams. Such men needed to be very fit, and Mr Hibbert was no exception. In 1960, he set a walking record of 57 minutes for covering the distance from Metal Industries to Helensburgh’s Old Parish Church. The Helensburgh Advertiser offered a prize of £2 to anyone who could beat that time. It is not known if anyone ever did better his record.
An innovation in dismantling vessels was the arrival of a giant set of shears, 26 feet high, 20 feet broad and 66 feet long. Hydraulically operated, they could exert a force of 560 tons.
Built by Lindemann of Dusseldorf, and costing £100,000, the machine was operated by four people. Steel could be cut at the rate of four tons a minute, and, working in conjunction with a 50-foot crane, cut portions measuring 4.5 feet by 25 feet could be loaded directly on to railway wagons. This was a convenient size for feeding into the steel mill furnaces. One of the first new arrivals to be processed by the machine was the U.S. tanker Thelidomus.
READ MORE: Eye on Millig: How a former royal yacht met a sorry end at Faslane shipbreaking yard
1961 was a landmark year when the 100th ship was broken up at the yard. It was calculated that since the opening in 1946, some 650,000 tons of steel had been made available for re-use. By now, the Faslane yard was the biggest employer of labour on Garelochside. Business was booming, and profits for the M.I. Group in 1962 were put at almost £2,452,000.
A new lease of the site was taken out for 30 years, and the quays were renovated, courtesy of the Government. This might have seemed a vote of confidence, but it was ominous - for it emerged that the firm was going to have to give up a sizeable part of the frontage for use by the navy for the Polaris nuclear deterrent system. A claim for compensation was lodged, which eventually went to arbitration.
Another fly in the ointment was the revelation that demand for scrap steel was falling. But ships for dismantling kept arriving thick and fast, including oil tankers, cargo ships, cruisers and destroyers, followed by the Union Castle liner Braemar Castle, and the aircraft carrier Magnificent, the biggest ship to be broken up at the yard since Vanguard.
In 1965, with the retiral of the managing director at the Blyth yard, Max Wilkinson was made a managing director of both. Albert Hyde, formerly general manager at Faslane, was made managing director there. Both men lived in Colquhoun Street, Helensburgh.
Mr Hyde retired two years later, having been with Shipbuilding Industries for 25 years. His position was taken by George Fleming, who joined S.I. in 1947, although he had spent 1950-53 clearing war wrecks off Malta. Max Wilkinson retired from Metal Industries in 1969, after two years as deputy chairman.
This period brought ownership changes. 1967 saw Metal Industries Ltd. taken over by Thorn Electrical Industries. The forecast profits for M.I. Ltd. that year were put at almost £1.5m. The workforce was 200 people. In 1979, Thorn merged with EMI, forming Thorn EMI.
The yard was an endless source of fascination to the media. In February 1966, STV featured the work being carried out there in “Dateline Scotland”, and the following year, BBC TV began making a 50-minute film entitled “Splashdown OK”, intended to be their first-ever colour TV production.
Some footage was shot at Faslane, including Jameson Clark being chased into a boiler by a group of children.
The BBC were back in 1973, to carry out three days of filming for an episode of the series “Sutherland’s Law”, starring Ian Cuthbertson, and featuring some Dutch sailors.
1971 saw the retiral of a wellknown face, Tommy Scott, who clocked up 42 years of service with the firm, of which the last 25 years had been as head foreman at S.I. Ltd.
His special skill was in dismantling masts. They weighed anything up to 150 tons, so taking down a mast was a task not to be taken lightly, and he always tackled the most dangerous jobs single-handed. He received a presentation from Douglas Morrison, the soon-to-retire yard manager.
By now, however, shipbreaking across the country was in crisis. The winning of contracts was becoming harder by the year. The problem was that although plenty of vessels were still being scrapped — the useful working life of the average ship was put at around 25 years — international competition was relentless.
In August 1979, redundancy notices were served to around 30 employees, almost one quarter of the Faslane workforce, to apply from the beginning of October. In May 1980, of 104 workers, 80 faced redundancy, with 24 that month, and another 56 by November.
Some men they had known no life in this country beyond Faslane, and there were real concerns for their future. It was stated that Dumbarton District Council would probably provide accommodation.
But the prospect of being made homeless was too much for one resident, Volodymar Wosockyz, aged about 65 and known as Walter, who threw himself under a railway wagon at Faslane. Yard manager Peter Murray and medical attendant Les Prisk attended, but he was pronounced dead.
The Ukrainian Church offered to provide support for the remaining men.
Shipbreaking at Faslane ended at the end of 1980, and few domestic yards survived beyond the 1980s. Today, the lion’s share of world shipbreaking is carried out in China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It was the end of an era.
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