Juliet Gardiner - The Thirties - An Intimate History of Britain

John Masefield had long hymned the sea and the men who went down to the sea in ships (although he himself was an indifferent sailor who failed in his first choice of career in the Merchant Navy, and on one occasion had to be shipped home from Chile as a DBS — Distressed British Seaman). In 1934 the perfect opportunity to fuse his maritime yearnings with the gravitas of a national event presented itself. Masefield rose to the challenge with a seven-stanza poem entitled, rather unpromisingly, ‘Number 534’. ‘… Man in all the marvel of his thought/Smithied you into form of leap and curve,’ he wrote, ‘And took you so, and bent you to his vast/Intense great world of passionate design/Curve after changing curving, bracing and mast/To stand all tumult that can tumble brine.’ Far from being one of Masefield’s best-known ‘dirty British coaster[s] with a salt-caked smoke stack … With a cargo of Tyne coal/Road-rail, pig-lead/Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays’, ‘Number 534’ was the largest ocean-going liner ever built, the Queen Mary , and the occasion of his tribute was the ship’s launch, when in pouring rain on 26 September 1934 in front of a crowd of 200,000 mostly umbrella-holding spectators, the consort whose name the vessel carried, the wife of George V, dressed in powder blue, smashed a bottle of Australian wine over her bows, pressed a button, and the massive 81,000-ton Cunard liner, ‘long as a street and lofty as a tower’ and looking like a ‘great white cliff’, slipped into the Clyde.

The Queen Mary represented many things. It was a gamble that despite a world depression this luxury liner, this super ship, would enable Britain to recapture its prestige on the seas, would win the coveted Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and would rekindle a glamorous and moneyed lifestyle that seemed lost. And yet, though its elaborate and luxurious interiors, its fabulous menus, its non-stop programme of entertainment seemed to hold out such a promise, the construction of the Queen Mary could be seen as an unfolding metaphor for the ambitious intentions, the rigid yet muddled thinking, the collective misery and dashed hopes of British industrial production in the early 1930s.

British shipbuilding had suffered a similar fate to other heavy industries in the 1920s: a sharp decline from the First World War, when orders had flooded in for battleships, the big yards on the Clyde had expanded their capacity and their workforce to cope with military orders. When the war ended it seemed natural that the requirement for warships would be replaced by the need for a steady supply of merchant vessels, many of them to replace those lost at sea during hostilities. Indeed, foreseeing a boom in merchant orders John Brown & Co. had injected a huge capital sum of £316,000 into the facilities at their Clydebank yard, and shipbuilding companies merged and acquired control of the majority of Scotland’s steel industry. For the first two years after the war it looked as if this would pay off: between December 1918 and December 1920 Clydebank received orders for twelve merchant ships, including seven for the Royal Mail, two large passenger liners, the Franconia and the Alaunia for the Cunard line, and another two, the Montcalm and the Montclare , for Canadian Pacific.

But in fact the industry was facing a series of problems, the most pressing of which was a decline in world trade. Added to this were technical innovations that had improved speeds and shipping capacity, meaning that what trade there was could be carried in fewer ships, fierce overseas competition, and at home overmanning, fractious industrial relations, underinvestment in new technologies — particularly the switch from steam to diesel — unprofitable credit arrangements, cut-to-the-bone profit margins and a high rate of emigration of skilled workers, mainly to Canada. As a result, by 1930, when almost no new orders were coming in, the shipyards had already been in deep trouble for some years. The only hope on the horizon was the announcement in May 1930 of an order from Cunard for an ocean-going liner. Without it, John Brown’s yard would probably have had to close, with the loss of thousands of jobs. The insurance liability for the liner while she was being built and when she put to sea was reckoned at £4 million, but the commercial marine insurance market was only prepared to cover £2.7 million. The whole project was at risk, but eventually the government, only too aware of the political as well as the economic and social implications of thousands of shipworkers being thrown out of work, agreed to cover the shortfall of £1.3 million itself, though The Times had sounded a cautionary note: ‘Is it wise that Parliament should be asked to lend a hand on a project planned on so colossal a scale that private enterprise could not find the means to carry it through?’

On 1 December 1930 the contract was finally signed, and on the day after Boxing Day, ‘a particularly raw, foggy winter’s day [when] the electric lights under the cranes of the building berth had to be put on soon after three in the afternoon’, the hull plate was laid and named Job No. 534. It would mean three to four years’ work, and ‘so strong was the grim enthusiasm of managers, foremen and workers in their determination to have something to show at the end of that first day after all the months of waiting that work continued in the wet and the darkness well into the night’.

By the end of January 1931 the whole of the keel had been laid, and the lower ribs and frame were in position. With three shifts working round the clock the skeleton of the hull had been completed by late spring. By November 80 per cent of the hull plating had been riveted into place and the great liner loomed above Clydebank, its graceful bows dwarfing men and machines. There was a general feeling of optimism that ship No. 534 would be launched in May or June 1932, ready to vie with France’s pride, the Normandie , currently under construction in Saint-Nazaire, for the Atlantic crown.

But that crown was already tarnished. Fewer passengers were making the crossing, about half as many as had done so in 1926, and those who did were less lavish in their spending: British earnings from passenger ships had been over £9 million in 1928; by 1931 they had fallen to less than £4 million, and foreign competition for fewer passengers was fierce.

On Thursday, 10 December 1931, the directors of Cunard in Liverpool decided that the Clydebank project was no longer viable: the plug was pulled on ship No. 534. At seven o’clock the next morning a notice was nailed up in John Brown’s shipyard. ‘The services of all employees … will terminate at noon today.’ Three thousand men directly employed on building the ship were sacked, and 10,000 men and women at work on subsidiary contracts for electrical equipment and all the other parts needed to build and equip such a liner were also affected, either losing their jobs or put onto short-time working.

The directors blamed ‘world conditions’. The Daily Telegraph reported that while the announcement ‘proved somewhat of a shock in the City … the wisdom of the decision was not questioned’, though the newspaper recognised that the cessation of the project was ‘an industrial catastrophe’, and suggested that ‘Even as an emergency measure for the prevention of unemployment a government loan or guarantee of cheap money would be a far sounder business proposition than most of the “unemployment schemes” in which public money has been sunk … here is an obvious case for government help.’

But the government did not see it like that. Speaking in the House of Commons that same afternoon, the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, rejected the idea: ‘I am afraid that any idea of direct government financial assistance is out of the question.’ Offers poured into the Cunard Company from individuals willing to lend money to see the ship completed, and Will Thorne MP, General Secretary to the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, tirelessly lobbied the government to ‘supply the necessary money needed to complete the work at a reasonable rate of interest’. The Labour MP for Clydebank and Dumbarton, David Kirkwood, a trade unionist who had himself worked at John Brown’s shipyard, ‘had “534” engraved on his heart’, and for two years he ‘outdid the importunate widow … I had written, spoken, pleaded, cajoled, threatened men and masters, shipbuilders and ship owners, Cabinet Ministers and financiers.’ But no help was forthcoming. By the beginning of 1932 the Clyde was building fewer ships than at any time since 1860. Almost the only people still employed in the shipyards were ‘black-coated’ workers such as foremen and draughtsmen. Other shipyards were as badly hit as John Brown’s and had either chained their gates shut or kept only a skeleton staff. Since the only other source of employment was the Singer sewing-machine factory, from which half the workforce had been laid off, Clydebank became a town of the unemployed, and the vast, gaunt hulk of the unfinished liner a daily reminder of that fact. And the symbol resonated beyond the banks of the Clyde. ‘I believe that as long as No. 534 lies like a skeleton in my constituency so long will the depression last in this country,’ David Kirkwood told the Commons. ‘To me it seems to shout “Failure! Failure!” to the whole of Britain.’