The Clyde River in southwestern Scotland has been called "Mother of Great Ships". The shipyards along the Clyde have produced an average of 1 ship a day for 100 years. John Brown and Company Limited, in Clydebank, gave birth to the famous Cunard liners: Lusitania, Aquitania, Caronia, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, QE2 as well as the Royal Yacht Britannia, Empress of Britain and the HMS Hood, to name a few.

The following quotes illustrate the character of Clyde shipbuilders and their work conditions:

From the Clyde Room of the Transport Museum at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, Scotland:

(From a display of shipbuilding tools dating to the early 1900s) "The normal practice was 5 years, 5 years' apprenticeship. It was rather startling insofar as after we got the job we didny have any tools so that my mother had to pawn her wedding ring in order to buy a plane and adze".

Selections from Alan McKinlay's anthology, Making Ships, Making Men:

"When I went into the shipyard at first, I didnae like it. I was stuck in the bowels of the ship. I couldnae believe it; they were throwing red-hot rivets to each other. It was dark and stinking because of the oil lamps they used...I thought I was in hell."

"I was only 16 at the time and I couldnae stand it. But I got used to it. It was a matter of getting used to it; you had to suffer it or be out of a job."

"The foremen all wore bowler hats - that was their badge of office, but the bowler was also his protection. If he was an unpopular man and walking near where a ship was being built and they were riveting up the bows, many a time a hot rivet came down on top of his skull or a spanner just missed him."

"The sheds were only a roof over your head and dirt floors with the wind and rain blowing in on you. I've seen us wi' a heavy job working the punch wi' the sweat blinding ye and the icicles hanging t' the machines. It was that bitter cold that there were icicles but you were sweating you were working that hard!"

"Men would be riveting 80 to 100 feet up, sometimes higher. Men would be working - swinging hammers - on two wooden planks, sometimes only one, without any guard rail. The plank would be bouncing as they worked - we'd have been safer trying to work on a tightrope!"

"It was cruel in the winter. You had to lift pneumatic machines that stuck to your hand. I've got frostbite in my finger wi' using the trigger. You wore a leather glove to protect your hand but you wore it mostly on your left hand because you couldnae grip the machines too well wi' a leather glove on. You had a big pad on your left hand to save it getting burned by the machine.

Riveting in the winter was really cruel. You had the furnace and the first thing you did was get a heat - heat your hands in the morning next to the furnace. Then you had to lift this cold machine to drive in the rivets. Ye drove in about ten rivets and your hands were freezing again. The riveter had no chance of getting a heat if he was up on the deck or outside the shell, so he kept a wee pail of coal to heat his hands. Conditions were pathetic in the shipyard".

"We had been told through the grapevine who was getting restarted. We all collected at the yard gates and waited for the foremen to give us the nod. My brother and me had new overalls on but we worried about how we would stand up to hard work after such a long time idle. That night we went home with aching bones and big blisters but we had smiling faces because we knew we had earned our wages."