A manufacturing heritage buried by cheap competition
ONCE it was once among the largest steel plants in the world, serving the Clyde shipyards which produced a fifth of all ocean-going vessels.
But yesterday’s news that up to 400 jobs face the axe at the plant in Motherwell could bring the relentless decline of Scotland’s steel industry to an end.
Some 140 years ago, the country’s mills and furnaces were at the cutting edge of engineering, being the first in the world to adopt industrial methods of producing steel.
The rise of steel as the world’s dominant industrial material began with experiments carried out by British inventor Henry Bessemer, who in 1856 found that adding air to molten iron made a more malleable metal.
This process was honed until open-hearth furnaces came to the fore in the late 1860s, allowing industrial manufacture of the new stronger and lighter steel.
The Royal Navy quickly saw its potential in the manufacture of warships, and the first market for steel was created. But Scotland’s shipyards were not just building warships – by the 1880s, Scotland was producing half of all British steel and launching a third of Britain’s ships. During the 19th and 20th centuries, around 30,000 ships were built in the Clyde yards.
At the same time, Scottish steel built many of the structures that defined Britain’s history. The Forth Bridge was completed in 1890, requiring an extraordinary 55,000 tons of steel, while the Dalzell mill in Motherwell produced the steel plates for the Titanic.
But it was another disaster that secured Scotland’s position as the world’s steel centre – the First World War. Companies such as Clydebridge Steel, which had closed for five years before the war, roared back into action to meet the sudden demand for steel for explosive shells and ships. Such firms made a crucial contribution to the war effort – the three works of David Colville & Sons produced 630,000 tons of shells alone.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, Clydebridge was the largest steelworks in Britain and was setting world records for the building of giant liners including the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, both at John Brown’s shipyard.
Even after the war, Scottish steel appeared to thrive – Ravenscraig steelworks, built in the 1950s, sought to fill a crucial gap in supply. But the rise of shipyards in the Far East, using labour far cheaper than that in Scotland, meant that by the 1960s a decline was inevitable.
Dr Phillips O’Brien, a history lecturer at Glasgow University, said: ‘It became relatively too expensive to make ships here. Much of the work began shifting to Asia at the beginning of the 1950s and 60s, originally to the Japanese shipyards and now to Korean and Chinese shipyards.
‘What Glasgow has been left with is making warships for the British Government, which will pay the Glasgow price as opposed to, say, the Asian price per tonnage.’
The peak of Scottish steel was reached in the 1970s, after which British shipyards could no longer compete in the new globalised world. Widespread closures of melting shops and mills, no longer supported by the state after privatisation, were forced by the demise of British shipbuilding.
A landmark in this process of decline came in 1992 with the closure of the Ravenscraig works. It left the biggest brownfield site in Europe and it was estimated at the time that 10,000 jobs linked to the works were lost.
The Rev John Potter, chaplain at Ravenscraig from 1972-92, said: ‘There was a sense of collective suffering, as well as personal suffering. The people at Ravenscraig had worked so hard to build up a modern bulk steel- making facility i n the hope that they would have something to pass on to the next generation, and that hope was denied.’
It was not until after Margaret Thatcher stepped down as Prime Minister that Ravenscraig steelworks closed, but many in steel communities believe her policies signed their death warrants. Today, China has taken on Scotland’s mantle and produces a third of the world’s steel.
The industry’s decline has left its mark on communities across the West of Scotland. Historian Stephen Moss, visiting the former Ravenscraig site in 2001, wrote: ‘Ravenscraig was once the pride of Scotland’s steel industry, a huge plant employing 12,000 workers. Now it is a hole in the ground. Nature has reasserted itself and this monument to Scotland’s industrial past has been buried.’
Now it seems that process may have reached its final conclusion.
‘There was a sense of collective suffering’