I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a very good reason why Gene Roddenberry, writer of Star Trek chose to write the part of the Starship Enterprise’s Chief Engineer as a Scot. It was his nod to the fact that Scots were/are famous for being good engineers and also for travelling around the world, and sharing their expertise. If you read Edith Wharton’s novels you might remember that she also mentions that the best yachts were built on the River Clyde, that was why she had her fabulously wealthy character owning a Clyde built yacht. But shipbuilding in Scotland has been in decline since the late 1960s and we’re down to just a few shipyards now. I remember when the QE2 cruise ship was being built everybody was saying that she would be the last of her kind, shipbuilding was being done cheaper in other countries, maybe cheaper but certainly not better and definitely not with the same style. New cruise ships look like blocks of flats, nothing elegant about them at all.

Anyway, why is she rabbiting on about shipbuilding I hear you ask? Bear in mind that if I had been born a male instead of female I would have followed the family tradition and signed up for an apprenticeship at a shipyard, it was what was expected of boys. Well, today there has been the sad news that shipbuilding in Britain is being pared back yet again and that lots of jobs are going to be lost in various shipyards. Portsmouth which has a 500 year long history of building ships, including the Mary Rose is going to be closed as far as new ships are concerned with only repairs being carried out there. The workers are more than a wee bit upset about that as you can imagine, and they are blaming the fact that Scotland will be voting in an independence referendum in 2014, they feel that Portsmouth is bearing the brunt of the cuts to appease the Scottish workforce. They are understandably aggrieved about it all. Mind you, there are still going to be job cuts on the Clyde and the Forth.

What I want to know is – why did the powers that be decide that the only ships which could be built on the Clyde would be warships? It’s only now that people are talking about diversifying, but they should have been building anything and everything which needed to float on the sea.

My own brother is one of those engineer/ship designers, who moved abroad to work, he didn’t have much choice in the matter when Harland and Wolfe closed down, and the foreign shipyard that he was in charge of spent/spend their time building yachts for the fabulously rich of today, Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs and the like, so the work has always been there. It would be so much more pleasant to be building yachts rather than ships which might carry weapons of mass destruction. I do hope that Scottish shipyards can get a slice of the market for building luxury ships in the future.

If you want to see some videos of the River Clyde of the past have a look here.

I hope you have the time to have a look here at what’s going on along the Clyde nowadays.