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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Garvie, Learning Project Manager at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Scotland on behalf of the Greenock War Detectives project and has been added with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

I wasn’t called up during the war as I was working in the shipyards. Shipyard work was a reserved occupation so I didn’t need to fight. I started working in the yards as a boy of 14 and earned 10 shillings and 5 pence a week. I became an apprentice plater and we manufactured all the steelwork on the ship. We worked long hours in the yards from 7.45am to 12, had an hour off for lunch and then worked till 5.30pm. I worked weekends too, sometimes both Saturday and Sunday.

The yard I worked in was the Glen shipyard and this ran from William St to Glenburn. We worked on all different kinds of ships during my time in the yards, for example cargo ships and tankers. To work I just wore any old clothes I had, something warm to keep out the cold. On top I’d wear overalls or a boiler suit and a donkey jacket.

The yards were a very dangerous place to work at times and sometimes people even died. The planks we stood on up the side of the ship could cause problems for the workers. The planks could be quite high and weren’t nailed down, so sometimes they’d move and that’s when accidents happened. Lots of men fell off. I remember when the new rules came in. They stated that 16 year olds weren’t allowed to work on planks and 17 year olds could only work on planks that were no more than 6ft high. The shipyards improved over the years, mainly in their working conditions and more consideration was given to the workers in terms of shelter and heating. That was a good thing.

There were happy times too. The launches were great to watch. Every time you saw a ship going down the slipway was a happy moment although during the war we didn’t have any launch parties, so to speak. We just watched the ships go into the water.

There was a lot of fun and humour between the men in the yards — pinning tails on you, painting your heels when you were working up high, swapping lunch boxes around at lunchtime. Some good moments.

It was a stampede when the horn went at the end of the shift. Everyone would be queuing up at the gate to get out and when the horn blasted sometimes they couldn’t even get the gate open and people would get crushed. If you weren’t quick enough you’d be trampled on. Because there were so many men coming out of the yards at the same time the police had to stand in the street outside directing the traffic.

I really enjoyed working in the shipyards and I’m quite sad that the town doesn’t have much of a shipbuilding industry now. There were lots of good skilled men working in the yards and now all that accumulated knowledge and skill can’t be passed down to anyone. It’s lost.

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