The fire and humour
of the UCS work-in
are still with us
The tree I’ve
just planted
on a dump
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Today’s banner
Blossom in the East End of Glasgow
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
The fire and humour
of the UCS work-in
are still with us
Chris Bartter
‘Many people thought that the workers hadn’t a chance,’ she remembers.
‘But the spirit was abroad. The spark was all-embracing and international donations flooded in.’
Her experiences were ‘everything I could have dreamed of’, she recalls now. The collective first came up to record the demos in early/mid-1971, and produced the campaigning short film ‘UCS 1’. Through this they gained the unique approval of the co-ordinating committee to access the work-in yards, and they travelled up many times over the next months.
They often stayed on floors, in particular the floor of a Paisley folk singer, identified by shipyard apprentice, Stephen Farmer – adopted by the Cinema Action crew – as Danny Kyle. Indeed, Stephen says he once woke up there to find Billy Connolly making breakfast.
In Ann’s view it was this sort of support across the community and internationally that kept the work-in going. ‘Many people thought that the workers hadn’t a chance,’ she remembers. ‘But the spirit was abroad. The spark was all-embracing and international donations flooded in.’
The vision of the shop stewards was also an important factor in the success of the work-in. Ann says she was affronted when – totally against previous experiences – she was told that the film crew weren’t to be allowed into one co-ordinating committee meeting. Thinking that some key decision was to be made that they wouldn’t be able to film, she was flabbergasted to be told after the meeting that the stewards had voted to make a large donation to Cinema Action to fund a documentary – that became ‘Class Struggle: Film from the Clyde’. Ann says: ‘They also voted to give us the use of a car that one of the stewards was using as a sort of dog kennel. We were very pleased to use it too – only it was soon pulled over by the police and condemned as unroadworthy. We had the constant support of the stewards, and they recognised the need to have their side of the work-in documented’.
That support hasn’t diminished. Ann is grateful for the opportunity to revisit some of the places and people that made such a difference 40 years ago. She says: ‘It is excellent that ‘Unite the Union’ was prepared to bring me over and to fund such an important series of events. I was particularly glad to see the films again. I hadn’t seen them for such a long time, and to meet the veterans of the dispute again renewed my enthusiasm for the fight. The work-in was a key victory and should be part of every activist’s training’.
The importance of the political and campaigning leadership of the stewards was crucial, but the films do not come across as a Marxist didactic. That is because the filmmakers get inside the work of the yards – particularly in a section of ‘Class Struggle’ where the cameras follow the workers into the double bottom of a ship. An experience that takes on the sights and (especially) sounds of Hell. It is no surprise that the stewards initially felt that this would be too dangerous for their inexperienced visitors. The films give the workers their voice, not interpreting or narrating, but allowing them to speak for themselves.
Ann is also clear that remembering the work-in is not an exercise in nostalgia. ‘The UCS work-in was about looking forward,’ she proudly claims. ‘We could do with a similar approach from activists now – both politically and industrially. It inspired other takeovers then and should be doing so now. Having spent some time in England I was beginning to lose any confidence in the possibility of people learning those lessons. When I arrived in Glasgow and met the former stewards again, hope and confidence were rekindled. It is possible. That fire, that humour, is not something in the past, it’s there in every man, woman and child in Scotland’.
Chris Bartter has been involved in Scotland’s trade union communications since 1976, first as a Nalgo lay activist, then for 20 years as Unison’s first Scottish communications officer. He retired from that job in 2010, and since then has been involved in training and communications for trade union and other non-profit organisations, in particular the communications and media work for the 40th-anniversary of the UCS work-in
