Reception and Background

This film too was based on a novel by George Blake. It was generally praised for the scenes in the dockyard and for individual acting performances, although the plot was seen as somewhat predictable: ‘It was a wonderful idea to make a story about the Clyde, and when the film is dealing with the Clydeside it is fine, but when it reverts to its conventional plot it is not so fine’.433 The realist and documentary style filming of the yards and Glasgow life were particularly appreciated:

The Clyde shipyard scenes are real and fascinating and the background life of Glasgow with whining trams and raucous dance hall, the gruesome respectability of the suburban villa, and the ruthlessly genuine accent and idiom lend robustness and some novelty to a banal little story.434

Or as another commentator put it: ‘While this film is confining itself to a documentary account of how ship designers are trained on the Clyde it is reasonably intelligent and sincere’.435 It had been fifteen years since Powell’s Red Ensign had been praised on the grounds of the use of authentic accents, and impressive dockyard scenes. Likewise the Glasgow scenes of The Shipbuilders were considered more successful

433 _{‘Floodtide’, Sunday Graphic, 20 March 1949.} 434

Sunday Express, 20 March 1949. 435 _{‘Floodtide’, Times, 23 March 1949.}

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than those in London. Although the plot of Floodtide was recognised as conventional, there was no note that the way the yards were presented was also something of a cliché. This amnesia must have been partially due to the fact that shipyards were a rare subject for the feature film. What is clear however is that a particular grammar had developed to portray shipbuilding, which could be traced through from the 1930s. In this, anything that deviated from the documentary approach was seen as false.

The film also resembled previous representations in emphasising the pride of the Glasgow shipbuilders and the strength of the tradition of shipbuilding. It opens with sweeping aerial shots of the yards with the subtitle: ‘The Clyde – cradle of shipbuilding. This film is dedicated to all the skilled and devoted men in whose hands the proud tradition of the Clyde is in safekeeping’. As the Daily Graphic’s reviewer indicated, the ideas in this message had already been so effectively culturally communicated as to be widely accepted:

I do not, I blush to say, know the Clyde, but I do know that shipbuilding is a sort of dedication – and here’s a film that gives one a feeling of the small people, the Glasgow boy and the son of a crofter, who do dedicate themselves to producing craft that are known the world over.436

The ideas of tradition and a Glaswegian predisposition for skill in shipbuilding appear throughout the film. David’s uncle, in trying to persuade his father to allow the boy to leave the farm claims ‘the ships are in his blood,’ and that he is ‘a natural craftsman’. When David is frustrated at his lack of progression and ready to leave the yards his uncle tells him:

You’re working on the Clyde and that’s an honour in itself boy if you’ve the sense to see it. Steamship building started here more than 100 years ago. Take away the Clyde and Britain would be sunk in any war we ever have to fight. This is the cradle of the trade my lad.

The film is upbeat with regards to the future of the industry and Blake’s story has an optimism lacking from the novel of The Shipbuilders. It clearly locates itself in a post-war world. There is mention of continued rationing but the prospects for the

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ordinary worker are seen as bright in terms of educational opportunity (‘technical colleges are for everybody’, Anstruther tells David) and in social mobility. David’s social advancement is not portrayed as unproblematic: his loyalty to his old friends is tested, and he has to compromise his lifestyle to fit the middle class respectability demanded by his new position. The idea, however, of ‘bettering oneself’ is seen as a possibility in a way that would have been unimaginable for Danny Shields in The

Shipbuilders.

Although Floodtide was the last British fictional film to focus on shipbuilding in the twentieth century, it is worth considering the documentary Seawards the Great Ships (1960). The treatment was by John Grierson and the film won the 1961 Oscar for best Live Action Short Film. It bore much relation to Rotha’s Shipyard in terms of aesthetics particularly in making a rhythmic poetry of the sound of the yards, although it was more dramatic with an almost fetishistic launch of a ship. Despite the failing industry, which would see almost total collapse in the following decade, the film feted Clydeside as if still in its heyday. The opening rhetoric was on a par with the wartime MoI shorts: ‘Britain is an island nation. An island of islanders and shipbuilders. On its shores generations of craftsmen have made great ships for the world, but nowhere in such profusion as on the River Clyde in Scotland’. Although the film was highly successful, the romantic view, filmed in a style to which shipbuilding had been subject since the 1930s has also been criticised, as Colin MacArthur notes:

The elementalism and gigantism of the visual and verbal imagery...seem shabby and hollow in the light of what has become of the upper Clyde. Starkly in retrospect, the breast-beating and tub-thumping of Seawards the

Great Ships offers no comfort to Clydeside workers or guidance to the

historical processes which have put them out of work.437

The film was co-financed by the Films of Scotland Committee (first set up in 1938) and the Clyde Shipbuilders Association. This followed a long tradition of Scottish film which had largely consisted of non-fiction and commissioned promotional

film.438 The context of industry and Empire that had fostered the documentary

movement also dictated the initial output of the Films of Scotland Committee as their

437 _{Colin McArthur, Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982), p.63.} 438

Richard Butt, ‘The Films of Scotland Documentaries History’, Scran, www.sites.scran.ac.uk/films_of_Scotland/History/index.htm [accessed 30 July 2011].

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first seven films were produced for the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition.439 The

impetus behind Seawards the Great Ships was not dissimilar to those of the documentary movement during the 1930s in promoting the industry during a downturn, perceived decline and an increasingly competitive international market. It portrayed the workers in terms of their skill, using a familiar rhetoric but was not designed to articulate the plight or reality of the situation of the workers or the community. It borrowed the British rhetoric of the seafaring nation rather than a discretely Scottish voice.

It is perhaps surprising that nobody has made the romantic or nostalgic shipbuilding equivalent of Brassed Off (1996), and Billy Elliot (2000), dealing with the decline of the mining industry, or The Full Monty (1997), dealing with the decline in the steel

industry. In the 1970s playwright Peter McDougall wrote a trilogy440 of BAFTA

winning television plays based on the Glaswegian gang fighter, Jimmy Boyle. These used the ailing yards as the backdrop to a dysfunctional Glasgow underclass. The demoralised workforce, knowing that the closure of the yards is inevitable, is presented as work-shy. There is no longer a sense of tradition: instead the emphasis is on immediate gratification through alcohol, violence and sex. Pride and self- confidence are gained only through attaining a ‘hard man’ image. McDougall’s work presents an unremittingly depressing picture and an antithesis to all previous incarnations of the shipbuilder on film.

7. Conclusions

The maritime sphere beyond the naval film remained a relatively unexplored area. In this, film largely replicated the absence of the maritime industries in comparison to naval action in the dominant Victorian narrative of British history. It is also noticeable that much of the rhetoric used in the deliberate projection of the maritime industries in national causes was borrowed or indistinguishable from naval rhetoric. This was necessary in terms of propaganda because the naval rhetoric drew together

439 _Ibid. 440

These were shown as part of the BBC Play for Today series, directed by John Mackenzie: Just

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the disparate parts of the commercial maritime sector to align it with the grand narrative of Britain and the sea. The grand narrative had of course been predicated upon and was recognisable through naval tradition.

In the early twentieth century the proliferation of filmed ship launches was the most prominent indicator of merchant activity to the general public and was symbolic of national unity. These, however, sidelined the worker who increasingly became to play a more central role in the representation of shipbuilding through the documentary movement and in the fictional film after 1930.

From The Shipbuilders onwards, there was a line of continuity in which the industry was used to question the nature of society as well as the nature of the shipbuilding. What is also clear is that the image of the shipbuilder in fictional film was associated only with Glasgow. Only in the MoI shorts were other regions of the United Kingdom represented.441 The use of regional identity, however, was not used in representation of itself but rather to reinforce national identity: that is in emphasising the relationship of Britain with the sea. The great similarities between the representation of shipyard workers and fishermen demonstrated a homogenised and romantic approach to the worker that tended to obscure regional diversity.

The main cluster of shipbuilding films occurred between 1934 and 1945 and it is perhaps a mistake to look for regional difference. The inclusion of a broader range of class representations and socialist principles did not signal a more nuanced reading of the range of British identities on film. The 1930s films were produced at a point where Britain was deliberately promoting the industries of nation and Empire and emphasising her technological advancements. The films of the Second World War promoted national co-operation. In both cases the diversity and capacity of industry within the stable homogeneity of ‘nation’ were the keynotes: not regional identities and difference. In this sense they were very ‘British’ films representing Britain as a

441 _{This needs further analysis in comparison to other regional identities in the United Kingdom.} Bellamy asks the same question in Shipbuilding and Cultural Identity on Clydeside and suggests that other regions such as Merseyside and the North East were more associated with the docks and coalmining respectively. There is also the possibility that it is linked with the romantic image of Red Clydeside and the strength of the Unions which emanated largely from the Glasgow yards. In addition Greenock existed only because of the yards, they were its identity, and while other locations prospered through shipbuilding it was not the reason for them being built.

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nation state. As propaganda they did not admit decline even if the impetus behind the production of these films may have been prompted by fears of decline. All the shipbuilding fictional films were about solutions: the main one being a Britain united across both class and regional boundaries. This is underlined by the fact that films did not create a new rhetoric but used the Victorian rhetoric of navy and nation in the representation of the maritime industries. Even the Scottish made Seawards the Great

Ships employed this same approach, evoking the island-nation’s relationship with the

sea rather than a purely Scottish maritime identity. It is noticeable that with the collapse of the shipbuilding industry the community as represented in the later television plays was insular and cut off from wider national issues. Here there was regional specificity, although it came at a point when the shipbuilding industry had all but collapsed and was no longer as valuable as propaganda either in the promotion of Scotland or a wider Britain.442

The mode of presentation for the industrial maritime film was remarkably consistent. It was rooted in a documentary tradition, and the films were judged on how far that criterion was met. A particular socialist realism aesthetic became the norm in the presentation of shipbuilding, which was linked to an expression of leftist sympathies in the films. The maritime film also became one of the few locations that broached a serious consideration of industrial relations and conditions of workers in the first third of the twentieth century: although this was tempered by simplistic solutions through class co-operation and paternalism.

The cluster of films about shipbuilding that were made between 1930 and 1945 were representative of wider cinematic shifts. First film saw a greater acknowledgement of the working classes as serious protagonists on screen. Before the Second World War working class characters on screen were usually secondary, fulfilling either a comic or criminal role. The virtual conservative hegemony was challenged by a social democratic stance on film by the documentary movement. This was, however, limited by a homogenous approach towards workers of any industry, emphasising issues of class rather than regional diversity. The subjects that interested the movement tended to be those which affected social conditions – such as housing, education,

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infrastructure, as well as technological development. Tallents’ call for a new way to represent Britain on film had found new subjects and a new aesthetic but not a new rhetoric. British industry was placed at a forefront in the light of increasing global competition and assimilated into the ‘story’ of Britain’s maritime history becoming on screen as representative of nation as much as any traditional institution.

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