Now I was a fully fledged journeyman, Gourlay’s offered me an extra year at an improver’s rate, which was 10s. under the basic journeyman’s rate. This was usual at the time but did not appeal to me. I felt I had done my apprenticeship and was entitled to the full journeyman’s rate. So I left Dundee and went to the Clydeside where I got a job in a yard in Renfrew called The Ring. This yard did specialised work on dredgers. I worked 53 hours a week for a basic 38s. 3d., 9 hours week-days and 6 hours Saturday.
I held this job for a few months. Then, after the ship was launched, there was a big pay off. It was just before the Glasgow Fair holidays and was a blow to the Glasgow men. No work meant no trip “down the water” for the wife and kids and no whisky and chasers in the pubs with their pals on Saturday nights,
For me it meant looking for another job immediately. I tramped the whole of the reaches of the Clyde, Greenock, Yoker, Partick and Govan, but at every yard the position was the same, no work. Trying to find a job was humiliating. At the yard gates hundreds of men would wait each morning and dinner-time for the foreman to come out. In most cases he did not appear, but if he did he would walk down the line of waiting men and then turn on his heel and go back inside the gates with a grunt of ‘Nothing today”, or sometimes even not a word. There were no employment exchanges then and no dole. The unemployed got 10s. a week from the union for thirteen weeks and then it was reduced. My position became desperate and, unable to find work in the yards, I was forced to find other employment. I got a job with what was called the National Benefit Trust. It had a system in which a draw was held periodically and the winner got his advance of money free of interest to buy a house. My job was to hawk around the doors trying to interest people in the lottery. The whole thing was run by a family who held all the top positions in the firm. Sellers like myself were paid on a commission-only basis. I stuck this for a month. The whole thing revolted me and I had the feeling of being degraded.
Then, by a stroke of luck, I picked up a job in the Arrol Bridge Building Works. A mate of mine, Jimmy Walsh, had an uncle who was foreman in the template shops and he told Jimmy to come and get a start. But Jimmy had also been offered another job at the Linthouse Yard which he preferred, so I went to see the uncle. He was a good sort and when I explained that his nephew had taken a job at Linthouse and hoped I would be suitable, he asked me “Can you draw?” “A barrow,” I replied . “All right,” he said, “start tomorrow and we’ll see how good your barrow is.”
I stayed there until the New Year but it was not my cup of tea. I wanted back to my trade and when I saw an advertisement for joiners for a small shipyard at Annan, I applied and got the job.
Annan is a small market town on the River Annan near the border and naturally, being so far inland, the ships built there were small-stern wheel ships. They were built in sections and exported, mostly to the American lakes. When I arrived, the joiner’s shop was just being erected and I went in with the
pattern makers. In fact, I was the only ship joiner in the yard. The manager, a little fellow who wore a bow tie and was always very smartly dressed, but a decent fellow to work for, asked me if I could get more joiners, so I wrote to the Glasgow union committee and asked for another five to be sent. I went
up to the station to meet them when they arrived and asked to see their union cards. One of them said, “Christ! I’ve left mine at home.” “Well, you had better go home and get it because you can’t start here without one,” I said. Fortunately, the other four had their union cards up-to-date and I said they were all right. I can imagine their astonishment next morning when they found out I was the only other ship joiner in the yard. Now that I had some mates I did a lot of union canvassing on the building sites in the area and we soon formed an Annan union branch of the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners.
Annan was a nice place to work in. The countryside was beautiful in summer. It was a great temptation to throw up a brick and if it came down you didn’t go to work that day. The laws of gravity being what they are, one day we did throw up a brick on the job and down it came, so we had the day off. We went to the hostelry and hired a two-horse brake. No motors then, and no traffic jams. We had a run round the countryside and a real good picnic. Next morning, when we turned up at the yard, the manager asked: Where were you all yesterday?” “It was too good weather to work,” I replied. “Where did you go?” “To the Loch Mabon.” “Why the hell didn’t you tell me and I would have been with you.”
In Annan there was a branch of the Good Templars Lodge. A real live lodge it was. We had dancing every week, and fishing competitions, as the River Annan was famed for its salmon and trout. We even ran a regatta, which in those days was considered a real feat of organisation. I don’t know if we took many people out of the public houses, but we certainly did give them a chance to employ their time fully in the Templars Lodge.
I lived with an old lady and her daughter who looked as old as her mother. She kept an excellent house. I had a room of my own for a time but one day Mrs. Patterson came in to apologise, saying she would have to put another lodger in with me. In this way I met Harry Watson, an iron planer from Manchester.
Harry was a good singer, he had done a bit of amateur stage work at the “free and easies” in Manchester and I persuaded him to join the Templars, stop drinking and use his talents. Soon he had more money than he had ever had in his life. He bought himself new shoes, suits, shirts and began to feel and be a man about town, So I said one day, “Harry, now I have introduced you to the finer things in life, I must now introduce you to Scottish culture. Let’s have a walk to Ecclefechan and I will show you where Thomas Carlyle was born.” “Who’s Thomas Carlyle?” asked Harry. So I explained to him as best I could that he was a Scottish writer, explained briefly what he had written, then went off to Ecclefechan which was six miles by road. But Harry remained unimpressed by his introduction to Scottish culture, his final comment being: “Thomas Carlyle must have been a bloody fool to have been born in a place like that!’
One time Harry had a flaming row with his sweetheart. Flora Whimpenny was her name. I remember it well, because many a letter I wrote to her signed “Harry”. I was engaged for a long time trying to effect a reconciliation, which I eventually did. But I never knew how Harry explained these letters to Flora because he could not write a sentence, never mind a letter, and the only papers he ever read were children’s comics. He was not alone in this. The best sellers in the shipyards in those days were Comic Cuts, Chips and other comics specially written for children. I was astounded to find that grown men read such bairn’s weeklies.
One day I was working on a little wooden boat, the type used by the missionaries in Africa. It was being built for some religious society and had only a dozen rivets in its whole construction, but unfortunately a fragment of a red-hot rivet finished up in my eye. I was on the stair panelling, and the riveter knocking off the rivet failed to stop the blaze coming off it. Off it came, and struck me right in the eye. There was no first aid. One man wanted to put carbolic in my eye. That was enough for me. I immediately took the next train home to Dundee where the eye specialist said I was just in time to save the eye. That ended my idyllic situation in Annan.
When the eye healed and I was ready to resume work, the shipyards were still slack but the Boer War had made necessary the building of many more barracks. So I went down to Salisbury Plain and got a job on the building of Bulford Camp. We were a motley lot, drawn from all over the British Isles with the Irish in the majority. At that time there was a strike in Belfast and to save strike pay joiners were sent in mass to Bulford and other camps. You could work as many hours as God sent at 9d. an hour. We slept in the huts as we built them. A hardboard bed with one blanket, which I rolled into and made the best of it. Trade unionism in this setting took a back seat although we had forms of organisation on the job.
In 1900 the shipyards got busy again and I went back to Gourlay’s at Dundee where I became a shop steward and also a member of the yard management committee. The job of the shop steward was to see that members were fully paid up and being paid in accordance with the existing agreements, and so I religiously examined all cards and wage packets from time to time in case anyone was being paid under the rate for the job. Some union organisers today pride themselves on the excellent state of their organisation but in those days in shipbuilding, particularly in places such as Dundee and on the Clyde, there was already well organised labour in the trades.
Naturally, of course, a lot depended on the activity of the delegate and his standing in the trade union branch. The rule was that men more than eight weeks in arrears would not be started, so if a man came on the job the first thing was to see his union card and get it in order. I tried to make it the generally accepted thing that when a man started he would clear his card if in arrears, and sometimes this was done by borrowing the money from me, the money being paid back from his first pay.
It was about this time that I got a job on the building of the Discovery, the ship which took Captain Scott on the National Antarctic expedition. It was most interesting work. The ship was built at the Dundee Shipbuilder’s Company yard and was constructed almost entirely of Scottish oak, with a little greenheart and elm. There were no rivets, no steel plates, no iron nails. With the exception of the funnel the ship was entirely constructed of wood. It was said at the time that they had to dig men out of the Howff (the local graveyard) to get the right labour for the construction. The wood was steamed to get it bent into its proper position and wooden nails called trunnels were used and battered in to hold the beams in position.
When construction commenced, the joiner gaffer on the job was Joe Wyllie, a man with a great respect for the trade unions and respected by the workers, so in the early days the construction went smoothly and well. The job, however, was not being completed fast enough. Joe got the sack and another gaffer was brought from Grangemouth. We called him the Rat, and he was just that. The first thing he did was to have a little glass-fronted bucky built so that he could survey the whole of the shop, and from this perch he would periodically dart down to snarl at some workmen. This was to frighten them and consequently to get more work out of them. I was never able to fathom this type of thinking. I had one brush with the Rat. The joiners had a dispute and I was deputed to by-pass the Rat and go and see the yard manager, Davie Low, who was a very decent fellow. When the Rat saw me standing at the door of the manager’s office, he rushed down, threatening me and demanding to know what I was doing. His attitude sickened me. I said “Get back to your glass bucky, I’m waiting to see the manager and don’t want to be molested by an insignificant pup like you.” “You won’t be paid for this time,” he shouted, but at this point Davie Low came out and I cut it short by informing him that I was on union business, so not to worry about “his” money. Strange how such people as the Rat always scem to think it’s their money that pays the wages. So I saw the manager, told him of the dispute and in the course of it made a few uncomplimentary remarks about the Rat. “Well, Bob,” he said, “I’m only the manager, not the whole company.” Then he explained to me that the Rat had been specially employed to horse on the men and get the ship finished. Like us, the manager didn’t like it but also had to put up with it. In March, 1901, the Discovery was launched. At a reception at the Queen’s Hotel after the launching Captain Scott said “that for some months the preparing of the ship had been handed over to him. It was work that involved great detail, some harassing detail. In fact it got on your nerves occasionally.” I do not know if the new gaffer had rubbed Scott the wrong way but he certainly caused many a disturbance amongst the workers who built the good ship Discovery. But I suppose Lady Markham, who bashed a bottle of champagne against the bows at the launching, would be blissfully ignorant of such mundane shipbuilding affairs.
At this time I had a good run of work and accepted that my employment was steady. So while at Gourlay’s I got married, in 1902, on the 13th of June.
I met my wife Margaret in the Templars Lodge and with the occasional breaks I saw her regularly for some months. In fact we courted for years, then we decided to get married- a decision which I never once regretted in all my forty-eight years of married life. Margaret’s father was a master painter and had a shop of his own. Quite posh in those days. He later emigrated to New Zealand and died there.
With a master painter for a father-in-law we had a beautifully decorated home to start our married life, although it was only one room, kitchen and lavatory. One year after we were married, shipyard order books began to wear very thin. When the pay offs came, I was one of the first to go, as was usual for shop delegates.
I really did not mind this at first because I had a friend in South Africa who had been writing to me extolling the vast opportunity working men had in that great new developing country. I had done him some service previously and he said he would send me my fare to take me out to South Africa. so when the pay off came at Gourlay’s I had made up my mind to accept the offer and try my luck in the promised land. It was summer when I set sail on a ship of the Union Castle Line, the Guelph, from Southampton.
Breaking the Fetters 