Who speaks for

the forgotten town

of Greenock?

Kenneth Roy

If James Dow was still alive, and writing this morning's leader for the Greenock Telegraph, he would not be facing his assignment with much enthusiasm. Whatever else happens overnight in the Inverclyde by-election, a drubbing for his beloved Liberals is guaranteed.
     Jimmy Dow was the minister of Greenock Cartsburn, emigrating in his final years to Lochranza. A Falstaffian figure – he did once play Falstaff in a production at Greenock Arts Guild of that wretched play, 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' – Dow preferred the Scottish bard to the English. He combined amateur acting, an easy scholarship at Burns suppers and a taste for cigarettes and whisky with local journalism, turning out four or five leaders a week for the Greenock Telegraph as well as a column of whimsy which he wrote under the pseudonym Albert Harbour. There were also his parishioners to consider. Yet he gave the unruffled impression of one who had all the time in the world.
     The Telegraph appeared in two daily editions – the One O'Clock Tilly (as it was known in the streets) and the Five O'Clock Tilly. It was an idiosyncrasy of the paper that, except in the event of some local emergency, only national and international news appeared on its front page. From a mysterious department known as the Creed, the domain of Miss Agnes Trotter, masses of material from the PA and Reuters were skilfully recycled to ensure that the working class of Greenock was fully informed of world events.
     When the shipyard workers picked up the One O'Clock Tilly and scanned the headlines, they were reading of distant events, finding any account of their own lives relegated to inside pages. Yet this perverse policy, which ought to have been commercially disastrous, worked a treat: the paper sold 20,000 copies a day, one for every three people living in the district.
     I am describing the vanished world of the mid-1960s, when the people of Greenock were not only educated by their local paper in the affairs of the world but read learned articles by the local minister on the philosophy and policies of the Liberal Party. Although the town was as solidly Labour as any in Scotland at the time, there remained traces of a Liberal tradition, jealously guarded by the Orr family, owners of the paper, whose devotion to the cause was complete. The plain-spoken Dow was their representative on earth, giving a distinctively Liberal twist to issues of the day.
     His routine was unchanging. He would appear at the office, a shambolic figure, around 9am, light a cigarette, survey the national newspapers with no detectable interest, and, lighting a second cigarette, settle himself before a battered typewriter to produce a 600-word leader in around 20 minutes. He would then leave to attend to his parochial duties or whatever else took the amiable man's fancy. Occasionally he would turn up with no laces in his shoes. If he noticed it, the omission seemed not to trouble him. The policies of Jeremy Thorpe were as well supported without shoelaces as with them. It made no difference in the end – or, for that matter, even then. Everyone in Greenock loved Jimmy Dow.

     Arriving in Greenock at the age of 18, having left home to join the Telegraph as its cub reporter, I found it an extraordinary place, clamouring with a rough vitality such as I had never encountered in the dusty working-class villages of my childhood. The voices were louder and sharper, the step of the people quicker. At lunchtime, the girls from the mills, resplendent in beehive hairstyles high enough to be local landmarks, tumbled down into the town centre. 'Want a foti?', they would inquire in a challenging manner of anyone who took a close interest in their appearance. They were known as the hairies.
     The streets had a strange smell which I came to identity as burnt sugar from the local refinery. There was a rope works, too, although that was situated just outside the boundary at Port Glasgow, 'the dirty wee port'. To the south there was the resort of Gourock, where washed-up comics, fumbling conjurors and May Moxon's dancing chorus entertained a scattering of tourists in the cavernous Cragburn Pavilion. The age of music hall was over, but the news hadn't yet reached Gourock, where a few relics were still clinging to the pier. But there were few obvious signs that Greenock, too, was almost over as an idea; that its meaningful existence would soon be extinguished.
     The face Greenock presented to the world – the scene from its shoreline – was majestic. At the yards of Scott and Lithgow they were still building ships awe-inspiring in their craftsmanship. Scotland should have bottled all those practical skills, but instead we let them go, along with more or less everything else of productive utility and value. Had someone told me that, within a generation, it would all be gone, that they would be building houses where the yards used to be, I would have thought it a bad joke.
     I go back occasionally – usually to the Tontine Hotel, one of the few tangible reminders of the Greenock I knew. The town centre is unrecognisable, brutalised by 'redevelopment', and there is now the unmistakeable whiff, not of burnt sugar, but of post-industrial torpor. What would Jimmy Dow have made of this sad scene? Would he have seen in young Nick Clegg, and in the coalition government of the United Kingdom, some hope of a better future for the forgotten town of Greenock? He would have struggled to make such a case; it would have been a six-fag job. He would have struggled, too, to make much of Labour, in its present diminished condition, as an alternative. He might well have come to the same conclusion as I have myself – that, all things considered, the people of Inverclyde will turn tonight to the Scottish National Party.

Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review