It is a tragedy that the name of Yarrows has been airbrushed out

I WAS interested in Ken Smith’s brief historical summary of the rise and fall of the Clyde shipbuilding (“Industry hit by stormy waters has new hope”, The Herald , July 22). He is right that that demise in the 1960s was the result of new modern shipyards being developed in Japan, Korea and other Asian states, utilising modern techniques and facilities and supported by generous government subsidies.

Wage rates in these new distant yards were just a small fraction of those being paid on the Clyde, forced on employers over the post-war years by powerful and militant but shortsighted trade unions. The inevitable result was that Clyde and other UK commercial shipbuilders were hopelessly outbid by their new Far Eastern competitors. Naval shipbuilders did not face such severe competition, but Yarrows was dragged into the mire by being forced to transfer 51 per cent of its shipbuilding subsidiary into the disastrous politically-imposed experiment of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, which had already taken over the four major commercial shipbuilders on the upper Clyde.

Ken Smith states that the UCS work-in “meant that the Scotstoun (that is, Yarrow Shipbuilders) and Govan yards survived”, but this is not strictly correct. After two disastrous years the Yarrow parent company had already rescued its naval shipbuilding from the clutches of the sinking UCS ship, and the Reid and Airlie-led work-in at the Clydebank and Govan yards had no relevance to YSL’s survival. I was Yarrows’ finance director at that time and remember the traumatic events clearly.

In the early 1970s Yarrow Shipbuilders continued to prosper with a succession of UK naval contracts, and then became the victim of the Labour Government’s determination to nationalise all aircraft and shipbuilding companies, cheating the existing shareholders by imposing a disgracefully unfair compensation settlement. Some years later when British Shipbuilders inevitably foundered the Yarrow’s yard was acquired by GEC and then British Aerospace, and has continued to be successful ever since under a succession of anonymous names.

It is a great shame that the worldfamous name Yarrows has been airbrushed out of shipbuilding history and that this company, first established 150 years ago this year, is now referred to in the media as simply “Scotstoun”. Iain AD Mann, 7 Kelvin Court, Glasgow.