A Shipyard at War: Unseen Photographs from John Brown's, Clydebank 1914-1918
192
A Shipyard at War: Unseen Photographs from John Brown's, Clydebank 1914-1918
192eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Although best known for large liners and capital ships, between 1914 and 1920 the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown & Co. built a vast range of vessels—major warships down to destroyers and submarines, unusual designs like a seaplane carrier and submarine depot ship, and even a batch of war-standard merchant ships.
This makes the yard a particularly good example of the wartime shipbuilding effort. Clydebank employed professional photographers to record the whole process of construction, using large plate cameras that produced pictures of stunning clarity and detail; but unlike most shipyard photography, Clydebank’s collection has survived, although relatively few of the images have ever been published. For this book, some two hundred of the most telling were carefully selected and scanned to the highest standards, depicting in unprecedented detail every aspect of the yard’s output, from the liner Aquitania in 1913 to the cruiser Enterprise, completed in 1920.
Although ships are the main focus of the book, the photos also chronicle the impact of the war on working conditions in the yard—and the introduction of women in large numbers to the workforce. With lengthy and informative captions, and an authoritative introduction by Ian Johnston, this book is a vivid portrait of a lost industry at the height of its success.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848323018 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 66 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
For a country that once dominated the seas, the photographs taken at John Brown's Clydebank shipyard during the First World War offer a remarkable insight into the ships and how they were constructed. This conflict was as much about industrial resources and capacity as it was about battle, and these images form one of the best records of industrial endeavour in the UK, and most certainly of the early years of twentieth-century shipbuilding. Although primarily concerned with recording ships under construction, the photographer's remit extended well beyond that to include a broader appreciation of the shipyard, its people and its setting. If more often identified with merchant vessels and magnificent ocean liners, Clydebank's output in the years prior to the First World War began to be populated with warships, reflecting British determination to stay ahead of Germany's growing naval presence. From August 1914 onwards, John Brown & Co would be a warship yard, building all types from the most iconic of capital ships to the diminutive destroyers and submarines. The completion of Aquitania for Cunard in May 1914 with its unrestrained opulence served to bring to a close an era to which there would be no return. The war years changed all that, and in the peace that followed the industrial, economic and social framework in which shipbuilding existed would never be quite the same again.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
My earlier book, Clydebank Battlecruisers, published in 2012, was based on photographs of British battlecruisers under construction between the years 1906 and 1920 at Clydebank. While there is a chronological overlap with this book, efforts have been made to ensure that no photograph has been duplicated of Tiger, Repulse and Hood and yet the story of the First World War could not be told without reference to these iconic vessels. The general intention has been to present the war years sequentially through the lens of the shipyard photographers at Clydebank.
It seems only appropriate that where the information is available, some reference should be made to the photographs and the people who took them. As far as I am aware, there is no photographic collection in the UK covering shipbuilding in the period from the 1880s to the early 1970s that is comparable with the collection made at Clydebank. It is true that other shipbuilders took photographs to record the progress of ships under construction, but these are more often concerned to record specific points such as launches, trials or notable events like lifting an engine on board. It seems that most shipbuilders hired the services of a local photographer rather than create in-house capability. Why management at Clydebank elected to incur the overhead of a resident photographic unit is not entirely clear.
What is evident in this collection, today and for future generations, is a clear and detailed study of how ships were built during the high period of British industrialisation, when more ships were built in this country than in any other, and when up to 250,000 people at peak times were so employed. That Clydebank shipyard should build many of the most important ships of the day, naval and mercantile, is more than good fortune and that the photographs should largely be of outstanding quality makes the collection exceptional.
ORIGINS OF CLYDEBANK SHIPYARD
Clydebank shipyard was established as one of the country's foremost builders of ships long before the outbreak of war in 1914. The company started in Glasgow in the middle of the nineteenth century when steam engineering was cutting-edge technology. A clutch of talented marine engineers established works by or near the River Clyde, spawning a great industry dedicated to the mechanical propulsion of ships reliably and efficiently. The engineers saw no barriers to building the ships to place their engines in and so shipbuilding came into being, an industry that would dominate and characterise the Clyde for decades to come.
The Thomson brothers, James and George, were engineers of that ilk and such was the success of their skill as designers and manufacturers of marine steam engines that they began shipbuilding at Govan in 1851. Twenty years later the business was transferred to a green-field site at what would become Clydebank. Here, a large shipyard was laid out, fortuitously opposite the confluence of the River Cart, providing ample launching space for the largest ships in an otherwise restricted River Clyde. Almost from the beginning, the Thomsons built large, fast and well-appointed ships for many shipping lines and most notably for Cunard.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Sheffield-based John Brown & Co Ltd had become one of the largest forge masters and manufacturers of armour plate in the UK. Following a pattern established by other armaments companies, and particularly Armstrong Whitworth & Co Ltd and Vickers Son & Maxim Ltd, John Brown added shipbuilding capacity to the business as a logical extension to their existing production. This select band of large firms were to find themselves well placed as Britain's response to German naval and mercantile ambitions accelerated. Added to that, and unforeseen before 1906, was the arrival of the 'revolutionary' battleship Dreadnought, which effectively obliged the Royal Navy to rebuild its battle fleet.
In 1899 the shipyard that John Brown & Co acquired was the Clydebank Shipbuilding and Engineering Co Ltd. John Brown was not the last armament company to diversify into shipbuilding, with Glasgow-based William Beardmore & Co doing the same in 1901 and Sheffield-based Charles Cammell in 1903, with the purchase of Laird's Birkenhead yard.
Although the Clydebank Works was already established in the front rank of shipbuilding, the new management brought with it experience, influence and expectation. Evidence of this was soon to follow in an impressive order book that included the prestigious Cunard liner Lusitania (launched 1906) and the battlecruiser Inflexible (1907). From the end of the 1890s, when war with Germany seemed a distant possibility given the passing of their Naval Laws, British shipbuilders benefited from a further expansion to the Navy, particularly after the introduction of the battleship Dreadnought in 1906, which rendered all existing battleships obsolete. The design and manufacture of heavy gun mountings in Britain at that time was dominated exclusively by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick and Vickers Son & Maxim at Barrow. In 1907, to circumvent this duopoly, John Brown, in conjunction with Cammell Laird at Birkenhead and Fairfield at Govan, established the Coventry Ordnance Works to design and manufacture their own mountings. With existing works at Coventry and new works on the Clyde at Scotstoun, they acquired, with some difficulty, the necessary expertise to design and manufacture these complex mechanisms.
From then until the start of the First World War, John Brown's standing with the Admiralty was further developed with orders for the battle-cruisers Australia (1910), Tiger (1912) and the battleship Barham (1913), in addition to several destroyers and cruisers. From Cunard came the prestigious contract for the large North Atlantic liner Aquitania (1910).
PHOTOGRAPHY AT CLYDEBANK SHIPYARD
For over one hundred years, ships great and small built at Clydebank shipyard were routinely photographed from keel laying to trials. Between the years 1899 and 1968, the shipyard was owned by John Brown & Co Ltd and it was during this period that many of the most significant ships built in Britain left the ways at Clydebank. However, it was not just famous ships that received photographic treatment, as all vessels from the late 1880s onwards were included.
Nearly thirty years before the First World War began and several decades after the dawn of industrial photography, the company then known as James & George Thomson & Co established a photographic unit at Clydebank shipyard to record ships under construction. This activity continued for over one hundred years and the photographs published here represent a small fraction of the collection.
'Progress of construction' photographs, as they were known, were taken by many shipyards to record and demonstrate progress over what could be a build time of several years, as well as for publicity purposes. The photographs generally followed a similar pattern, starting with an image of the keel on the building berth followed by general shots of the hull on the berth with details such as a stern frame or shaft brackets. Launching was covered with a series of shots, while fitting-out included overall and detail shots showing machinery and gun mountings and various superstructure elements being added until completion. Departure from the yard and trial views completed the series. Sensitivity surrounding warship contracts, as well as the Official Secrets Act, did not restrict photography, although very few shots were taken internally of completed warships: of over 500 photographs taken of Hood, for example, none were taken of her interiors.
Work in the shops, where the steel components and sub-assemblies were fashioned, was not usually covered, although completed machinery, turbines, boilers and condensers, etc, were often photographed where they were manufactured. Periodically, the photographers would take general shots of the yard or of groups of people like the John Brown Choir and, from time to time, record images of ships built elsewhere on the Clyde passing by the yard. Inevitably, the presence of an in-house photography department resulted in the occasional passport photo for senior management.
While photographing ships under construction was nothing new, what appears to set Clydebank apart is the scale of the operation. From the company's records, the first mention of photographers is on 29 June 1887, when two men are recorded in the wages books under the heading of photography: J Stuart, paid £6 fortnightly, and D Wallace, presumably an assistant or apprentice, paid ten shillings fortnightly. The employment of photographers at this date coincides with the company winning the prestigious orders for the Inman liners City of New York and City of Paris, then among the largest liners to be built. As an adjunct of the developing shipbuilding and marine engineering business at Clydebank, photography grew and by April 1904 five persons were entered into the wages book under photography:
D Lindsay, £4 10s per week T Berry, £2 6s P Forbes, £2
c W McCreadie, £1 8s J Butters, £1.
This suggests a senior photographer, a photographer and three assistants. In November 1919 nine people are on the books, with Lindsay receiving £5 15s 6d and Berry £3 15s 6d per week. None of the others earned over £1 5s per week. From this it seems certain that the photographs reproduced in Clydebank Battlecruisers and in this book were taken by D Lindsay and T Berry, and to them and the management of the day due acknowledgement must be made for such a fine record of these fascinating ships. At the height of the depression in May 1932, when work on the Cunarder Queen Mary had been suspended and only a few hundred men remained in the yard, Lindsay and Berry were still on the books at £5 1s and £2 14s 6d respectively.
The very first images taken at Clydebank were recorded onto glass plates, 12x10 inches in size although 15x12 and 10x8 plates were used frequently. Large plate cameras continued to be used until after the Second World War when half-plate and 5x4 celluloid negatives, and later two and a quarter square, come into use.
The first warship to be systematically photographed, albeit sparingly, was the battleship Ramillies, launched in 1892. According to a list of photographs kept by the shipyard, the following images were captured of the ship: ten of a model, some of which depicted a working model; two of the hull on the stocks, four of her launch, seventeen of deck details, four showing panels in the admiral's cabin, two showing the electric turning gear in the barbette and eight of the ship on trials.
However, subsequent coverage of warships produced more images, although mostly exterior shots, as shown by this selection from the catalogue:
Barham, battleship, 281
Repulse, battlecruiser, 359
Hood, battlecruiser, 502
Australia, cruiser, 229
Fortune, destroyer, 45
Southampton, cruiser, 104
Duke of York, battleship, over 600
Indefatigable, fleet carrier, 441
Bermuda, cruiser, 209
Barrosa, destroyer, 119.
Passenger vessels, where internal views were taken as a matter of course, fared better in overall numbers:
Lusitania, 76
Queen Mary, 1016
Caronia, 1131
Carinthia, 650
QE2, over 4000.
When the last ship left Clydebank in 1972 following the collapse of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, of which John Brown & Co had become the Clydebank Division, the records of the Clydebank company including the photographs were saved for the nation. There are 23,000 glass plate negatives and at least another 20,000 celluloid negatives plus an additional number of uncatalogued celluloid and small glass plate negatives. While the photographs provided a record of construction and the occasional publicity shot, one immediate product was the creation of bound volumes, often several for a significant vessel, containing contact prints from the glass plate negatives. Today, the negatives and bound volumes are under the care of the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh who are conserving, recataloguing and scanning the collection for posterity.
While it is likely that the attention given to photography at Clydebank was out of the ordinary, it is nevertheless sad to note that the photographic collections of other well known shipbuilders such as Palmers, Fairfield and Armstrongs, as well as many smaller companies, have not fared as well and in some cases barely exist at all. Much of this loss can be attributed to the casual disposal when firms closed of company records that had previously been carefully maintained over the years – tales abound of glass plate negatives and other important documents dumped in skips or thrown on bonfires. This makes the photographic collection of Clydebank shipyard all the more significant.
THE FIRST WORLD WAR AT CLYDEBANK
On the eve of war John Brown & Co Ltd fully expected to play its part in the conflict by progressing urgently required warships as quickly as possible. There were many uncertainties, however, and questions that had no immediate answers. If the war was prolonged, major disruption to seagoing commerce was certain, with consequences for the mercantile trade and the building of merchant ships with which John Brown was established and reliant upon as a cornerstone of its business. If the war was of short duration, and there was a feeling among some that it would be over by Christmas, then the interruption to normal business would be minimal.
When the realisation dawned that the war would not be over by Christmas, coupled to the reality of the war at sea, new and urgent requirements began to affect the types and numbers of ships planned. An early move was away from battleships and the headlines generated by the numbers built which had so characterised the years up to 1914, as it was clear in any case that Britain was winning that particular battle. Serious deficiencies in the number of destroyers, submarines and certain classes of cruisers emerged, but all of this was to some extent overshadowed by the crippling and potentially disastrous merchant ship losses, which came to a head in 1917. These deficiencies and losses had to be made good by a shipbuilding industry already working close to maximum capacity. The longer the war lasted, the more it would place demands on industrial output and closer inspection of how this was achieved. As the scale of these requirements emerged, it became necessary to put in place some form of tighter, more efficient, control of shipbuilding, as for all war-related manufacturing, in order to maximise output and intercede in the supply and direction of skilled manpower, arguably one of the most vital constraints of the war effort. The means chosen by the War Cabinet was the passing of the Munitions of War Act in July 1915, which in the case of ship construction gave the Admiralty wide powers to provide a strategic overview of the shipbuilding industry. Under this Act, factories, shipyards and other industrial concerns deemed essential to the war effort were declared Controlled Establishments. Senior Admiralty appointments were made in each of the shipbuilding districts which monitored the activities of individual yards, with the ability to switch labour from one to the other or to reprioritise the labour attached to a particular type of ship where such vessels were not deemed important. The same applied to ships and even individual machinery contracts themselves or, more particularly, to the resources required to complete them. If spare capacity existed at one yard, where another yard was overstretched, the contract would be switched if it was practically possible. This happened on several occasions at Clydebank, when engine contracts were given to John Brown's where spare capacity existed, and also with heavy crane capacity, such as in the fitting of large calibre ordnance and mountings in monitors. In the rapid construction of Renown and Repulse, labour was repeatedly redirected around and the battleship Ramillies, on the stocks at Beardmore's Dalmuir yard, was denuded of steelworkers in an effort to accelerate Renown. Providing manpower for the armed services militated against ramping up manufacturing output and a partial solution to this was found in introducing women to the shipyards and engine shops, previously unthinkable in those days.
All of these measures cut across established commercial and working practices, as well as long fought for trade union rights, but were deemed admissible, if not essential, given the national emergency. These moves to mobilise all of the nation's resources took hold late in 1914, by which time there was stalemate on the Western Front and a war of attrition underway.
THE WORKS
The Clydebank Works were large by the standards of the day, extending over 80 acres and comprising two separate yards, East and West, divided by a fitting-out basin where hulls were taken after launch for completion. There were five large building slips in the East Yard, the smallest of which could accommodate vessels from 600 up to 900 feet in length. The West Yard had four shorter building slips, although it was possible to build several small ships on all berths should the circumstances require it. The yard was equipped with numerous lattice derrick cranes of 5 tons capacity on each slipway, two covered berths and two large fitting-out cranes, each capable of lifting 150 tons.
The Clydebank Works also included extensive engine and boiler shops where the machinery was constructed for all of the ships built there, as well as for ships building elsewhere. The Company played an historically significant role by installing Parsons turbines in the first turbine-powered liner Carmania in 1905, after first building an experimental turbine in 1904. Moreover, John Brown had become the sole UK developer and licensee of the Curtis turbine developed by Charles Curtis at the Schenectady works of General Electric in the United States. For a time before, during and after the First World War, this turbine found favour with the Admiralty alongside the Parsons type and often in preference to the latter.
Whether by design or accident, Brown's output of capital ships was dominated by battlecruisers, of which no fewer than five were built, from Inflexible (1907) to Hood (1918). Clydebank's only battleship of the period, Barham, thought of as a fast battleship, lends weight to the view that Clydebank's expertise in constructing high-power turbine machinery, not least their own Brown-Curtis type from 1911 onwards, was a factor in this run of contracts.
Maintaining workflow through such a complex industrial operation as a large shipyard, with so many separate processes running concurrently, was a significant organisational achievement. Output from the shipyard was determined by a number of factors which could be equated, in simplistic terms, to the number of building slips available, coupled to the productive capacity of the steel-working shops and the labour applied to it. With those assets, management effort was focused on maximising the amount of material that could be delivered and erected on the building ways – what later came to be known as productivity. Given a constant supply of orders, the worst that could happen was an insufficiency of skilled labour. In the modern history of shipbuilding, apart from trade fluctuations, labour was the most volatile element, either through the lack of it, as evidenced in both world wars, or through poor industrial relations – the blunt interaction between labour and employers regarding working conditions and practices – and manifest, at worst, in the use of the strike by the workforce or the lockout by management.
Throughout the First World War employment at John Brown's was maintained at an average of 10,000 workers, split typically between the shipyard (7000) and the engine works (3000). Up until a ship was launched, the majority of labour required was drawn from the steel trades, or 'ironworkers' as they were popularly referred to at the time, a hangover from the iron era of 1840 to 1880. After launching, the balance of trades shifted from the steel trades to the fitting-out trades: plumbers, electricians, joiners and numerous subcontractors. When order books were full, steelworkers and fitting-out trades were rotated from one contract to maintain continuity of construction and steel throughput. When order books were thin or if a gap in production was unavoidable, men were dismissed and often in great numbers.
The construction time for Tiger, most of which took place during peacetime, was 75.5 weeks from keel laying to launch and 38 weeks from fitting-out until completion, a total of 28.3 months. The departure of this ship was accompanied by the dismissal of 2000 men over a two-month period because of a gap in production. Of the 2000, approximately 1000 were from the shipyard and the remainder from the engine works. Once returned to the job market, they would have been quickly employed in other yards and engine works, on the Clyde or elsewhere. This relationship based on the hiring and firing of labour was nothing new and presented itself habitually to shipbuilders trying to balance employment and the retention of key skills with contracts at different stages in the construction cycle, and always with profit in mind.
Employing the right number of men was crucial in terms of fulfilling contract conditions and thus achieving the expected profit levels. Getting the balance right demanded fine judgement. In January 1914 Thomas Bell, John Brown's Works Manager at the Clydebank Works, lamented the difficulties found in employing additional ironworkers for his burgeoning order book. The Company could employ and retain between 2400 and 2500 ironworkers alone but needed a further 300 to keep, as Bell noted, 'on the right side of the line with our shipyard charges and come nearer to Government delivery requirements.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Shipyard at War"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Ian Johnston.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Sources,
Introduction,
Pre-war,
1914,
1915,
1916,
1917,
1918,
Post-war,
Appendix 1: Shipyard diary,
Appendix 2: Ships built or under construction 1914-1919,