They fought for their jobs on a diet of fish suppers

Margaret Wallace yesterday described the adrenaline rush she experienced as she clambered through a factory skylight and slid down a drainpipe to fetch 240 fish suppers for her colleagues barricaded inside.

As a 20-year-old machinist, Ms Wallace had been sent for supplies at the beginning of a seven- month factory sit-in by a mainly female workforce that was to become a defining moment in the history of labour relations.

Long before the Spice Girls were invented, an astonishing display of "girl-power" saw the ladies of the Lee Jeans plant in Greenock stage a dramatic protest against an attempt by its American owners to move the factory to Northern Ireland.

"Doing what I did that night really fired me up," recalled Ms Wallace, now 50, as she cast her mind back to a turbulent time of industrial strife.

"The adrenaline was going that night - that probably started me off, because I had never been involved in politics before. It was not my thing."

Exactly 30 years after those heady days, Lee Jeans veterans staged another sit-in yesterday. This time it was in the public gallery of the Scottish Parliament, and it lasted for only an hour as MSPs paid tribute to the protesters in a debate called by Duncan McNeil, the Labour member for Greenock and Inverclyde, to mark the anniversary.

The fish and chips, washed down by Irn-Bru, sustained the workforce that night as their spirits were raised with a rendition of an improvised song based on the No 1 hit of the time, Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce.

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After the debate, in a quiet corner at Holyrood, Catherine Robertson, 49, rolled back the years and sang: "What did they think we'd do? What did they expect? Go on the burroo? Will we bloody heck! Don't shut uppa da place!"

The first sign that their jobs were at risk came when shop stewards went into a meeting with managers working for the factory owner, the American-based VF Corporation, on 5 February, 1981.

Despite a healthy order book, rumours that the factory was to close and the machines were to be shipped off to Newtonards, Co Down, in Northern Ireland, were proving to be true. More lucrative government grants were available on the other side of the Irish Sea.

It was a time of high unemployment and Scotland was suffering from the collapse of its heavy industries.

Shipyards, coal mines and steelworks were being closed, and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government was deeply unpopular in Scotland.

The action taken by the Lee Jeans women struck a deep chord.And not just with the Greenock men who, as rivals of US servicemen stationed at nearby bases, delighted in the slogan, "We won't let the Yanks take the jeans off our women".

Further afield, the principled and peaceful stance, which saw the women occupy the factory in shifts - organising cleaning and cooking rotas behind doors blocked with plastic chairs - won them many admirers.

In the end, their actions saw a management buy-out save the Lee Jeans factory in August 1981. The 140 workers still occupying it got their jobs back. It was to be a short-lived success, however, and the factory closed its doors in 1983.

To this day, the workers are proud the Militant Tendency did not disrupt their protest led by Helen Monaghan, 74, a shop steward with the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers.

But 30 years on, one impressionable fish-supper smuggler-in-chief recalled that her youthful enthusiasm had to be suppressed.

Ms Wallace was involved in fundraising and her job took her to the SNP conference, universities, trade union rallies and protest marches. One meeting she had was with actress Vanessa Redgrave, a highly controversial political activist who had expressed sympathy with the IRA.

The young Ms Wallace came back from the encounter reporting that the actress suggested "armed insurrection" was the way forward. "Helen (Monaghan] nearly had a heart attack," Ms Wallace remembered.

Of course, common sense prevailed and the women received much praise for the way the protest was carried out. Babies and children were brought into the factory with their mothers and looked after.

As Ms Monaghan said: "People that we've spoken to in the Scottish Parliament today are shocked at what we went through. We slept on camp beds, on two deckchairs slung together for seven months. We started in February when the snow was on the ground. We were fighting for the right to work."