Pride on the Clyde

Singer still stands in Clydebank, John Brown’s, too.

History still counts in Clydebank, it’s the present the residents would prefer to forget.

In the year of the town hall’s centenary, Clydebank has had little cause for celebration. In March, it was revealed to have the lowest house prices in Scotland. In May souvenir hunters picked their way through the remnants of Kvaerner, the town’s last link to ship building, a link that snapped the previous year. While earlier this month Clydebank Football Club, which gave the late Davie Cooper to the game and once battled to the semi-finals of the Scottish Cup, was bought out and then snuffed out. Even the chances of pulling appear to be languishing in the doldrums with the Clydebank Post reporting this week that the town is the second worst place in Scotland for meeting members of the opposite sex.

The only thing that appears to be flourishing is the town’s reputation for violence, misplaced, but helped along by the revelation that only last week a 17-year-old youth was sprayed with petrol, set alight and now lies in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, recovering from extensive skin grafts. Clydebank, like so many other post-industrial Scottish towns, is today struggling to survive in the 21st century, but hope has not yet been extinguished. Instead, it has been rekindled by an ambitious plan to redevelop the waterfront and double the size of a town whose backbone appeared to be broken.

The memories of the town that endured one of the worst bombing blitzes of the Second World War and was a synonym for quality craftsmanship for a century are housed in a small museum within one of Clydebank’s few elegant buildings, the town hall. There visitors can inspect huge models of ships such as the SS Servia and the RMS Queen Mary, examine the dozens of different sewing machines or read of the derring-do of William McKinlay, Clydebank’s own arctic hero, who survived temperatures of minus 70 after his ship was crushed under pack ice during the Karluk expedition of 1914. You can also gaze upon an artist’s impression of the horizon the morning following the night of 14 March 1941, with the skyline ablaze after 439 bombers managed to leave just eight of the town’s 12,000 houses undamaged.

John Docherty, a member of the Friends of Clydebank Museum, often guides visitors round and has grown increasingly concerned by the plight of his home town. "A century ago Clydebank was at the cutting edge of technology, we made ships, we made planes, today the town seems to be spiralling downwards. The heart has gone out of the town and people don’t want to be involved. People have lost their pride in what it once was to be a Bankie."

The demise of Clydebank FC is a case in point. Founded in 1965 by the Steadman family, the club regularly attracted crowds of 20,000 to Kilbowie Park, the first all-seater (well, at least all-bench) stadium in Scotland. During the 1970s the ball skills of Davie Cooper attracted the eye of Rangers who bought him for 100,000, a crucial cash injection. Later in the early 1990s, Wet, Wet, Wet, the town’s contribution to the pop charts, stepped forward as club sponsors and in 1990 the team reached the semi-final of the Scottish Cup. Unfortunately, six years ago the club’s owners sold the ground, assuming planning permission for a new 8,000-seater stadium site at the top of the town would be granted. When Clydebank District Council denied permission, the club, now homeless, began six years of wandering between grounds such as Boghead in Dumbarton and Cappielow in Greenock, where their first match attracted just 29 spectators.

After 18 months in administration the club was this month bought by Airdrie and disbanded, a move that allowed Airdrie to take their place in the league. This was in spite of a last-minute rally by supporters who managed to raise 170,000 to challenge the bid.

"Clydebank has had a rough deal," explains Monsignor James McShane, parish priest of St Margaret’s in the troubled area of Whitecrook. A former chairman of Clydebank Campaign on Employment, he arrived in the town during Singer’s dying days and has since spent the last 25 years fighting to fill the gap left by the departed heavy industry with new employers. He helped secure the HCI hospital for the town and believes that its recent adoption by the NHS will be a welcome shot in the arm, but that local government reorganisation has been a handicap. "We shouldn’t have been amalgamated with Dumbarton, two poor places together, it should have been Clydebank and Milngavie, which is the parliamentary boundary."

In recent years Whitecrook has been at the centre of a running feud between a group of families, one of which claims the dubious high ground of the vigilante. The trouble has seen broken windows, beatings, shotgun blasts at doorways and culminated ten days ago with the immolation of Sean Hagan, a 17-year-old who was doused in fuel and set alight. Last year the police appeared to have successfully contained the problem by putting a team of officers into the area, but no sooner had they turned their backs than trouble flared once again. Small pockets of disturbance such as this have infected the rest of the town, producing a fear of crime that outstrips the actual incidents, which, comparing June 2001 to June 2002, have fallen by 23.5 per cent. However, vandalism, the crime of the dispirited and dispossessed, is rife. There were 1,050 incidents last year which cost West Dunbartonshire Council a fair chunk of the 15 million it had to spend on repairs.

Yet there remain strong signs of life and a degree of hope for the future. The shopping centre owned by CIS has recently received 21 million in investment to expand the range of shops and provide a roof, a remarkable vote of confidence bearing in mind that its competition is the huge new shopping complex at Barrhead, just across the river. The Clydebank Business Park is thriving and a number of inquiries from businesses seeking accommodation have been turned away through lack of space.

The future of Clydebank rests in the hands of Eleanor McAllister. As director of the Clydebank Taskforce, her responsibility is turning the great docks and industrial wasteland from which millions of tons of ships, oil rigs and turbines once emerged into a new town centre, one where the view extends not to factory gates and towering cranes but on to the Clyde and over towards the countryside of Erskine. She wants to give the town a new heart, for the old one has been broken too many times. "This will mark the town’s return to the Clyde and a brighter future," enthuses McAllister, as she sits in the offices of Scottish Enterprise Dunbartonshire. "This is a demoralised community. We’ve got to work with them and help them to invent the future."

For the next six months, McAllister and her team will be travelling through the community, visiting schools, businesses, community centres and youth groups. She hopes to arrange for architects to take up residence with a number of the groups to encourage them to help in the re-invention of their town. In ten years’ time, if all goes according to plan and 400 million of public and private investment is obtained, a new generation of Bankies will be living in attractive riverside accommodation, serviced by a new range of shops, bars and restaurants with work provided by a variety of new businesses. Tony Worthington, the MP for Clydebank and Milngavie believes the project is ultimately viable.

"This is about the rise again of Clydebank. We have been through this phase of what made Clydebank great, that has now gone and we have now got to rebuild, make the town more attractive and exciting and use the riverside to its full effect. We have got to create a new town centre which builds upon the town hall and the library and takes the people down to the riverside from which they have been disconnected."

The first phase is to provide cosmetic surgery to the town. Those who pass along the artery of Dumbarton Road scarcely notice as one corridor of tenements and offices gives way to another. Over the next year, bright new signs are to be erected and the taskforce plans "to add beauty to the area", according to McAllister, whose previous miracle was to transform a portion of Glasgow’s Barras into the Homes For The Future, now among the most desirable properties in the city.

"We need to, and we will, convince people outside Clydebank that the town can be a positive addition to Glasgow. At the moment we are seen as a drain. We have the infrastructure, good roads, rail links, access to the Clyde and the new fast ferries that will be running. We’re 20 minutes from Loch Lomond national park, 20 minutes from the city centre and 20 minutes from Glasgow Airport," she says.

There are those in the town who believe just as the town was built by industry, it will die without it, that the Clydeside development is the last roll of the dice. If that is the case, there will be thousands of Bankies loyal to their town, willing for the dice to come up six. "You can make statistics prove whatever you want but when every day I walk around Clydebank I don’t see lots of people with their head in the gutter," said Geoff Calvert, Clydebank’s deputy provost.

Clydebank through the years

1871 J & G Thomson select a rural site six miles from Glasgow for their shipyard. Housing for employees and a school is built outside the shipyard called Clyde Bank.

1884 Boston-based Singer Sewing Machine Company arrives. Burgh of Clydebank is officially launched.

1902 Town hall is built.

1889 J & G Thomson is taken over and renamed John Brown Shipbuilding & Engineering Company.

1941 On 13 and 14 March 439 bombers attack town and shipyards. Just eight of 12,000 homes undamaged in "Clydebank Blitz".

1965 Keel laid on QE2 and ship is launched two years later. Clydebank FC debuts.

1979 The closure of Singer Sewing Machine factory is announced.

1984 Clydebank celebrates its 100th anniversary.

2001 Kvaerner, the successor to John Brown’s and the last shipyard and engineering work, closes.

2002 Clydebank Football Club closed down.