Not many people can say they literally closed the doors on one of Dundee’s biggest manufacturing success stories.
But that’s the remarkable story retired Caledon Shipyard worker Henry Beveridge can tell as he reflects on a lifetime of experiences ahead of his 90th birthday on December 18.
He went into the yard as a 14-year old boy in 1939 and was the last man standing when the city’s entire shipbuilding industry shut down in 1981.
Opened in 1874, the Caledon was one of Dundee’s biggest employers for more than a century, producing more than 500 ships for destinations worldwide.
More than 6,000 people worked there at its height. Now only a dwindling number of former workers can tell stories of the backbreaking work that went into producing what were regarded as the “best ships in the world”.
Mr Beveridge was one of thousands of young men who found work there at a time when poverty and unemployment was rife in Dundee.
The 89-year-old former Glebelands and Stobswell School pupil left school at 14 and started work at the yard as a ‘catch-boy’.
After a short break, he returned at 16 as an apprentice welder. He quickly rose up through the ranks as a shop steward and union leader, fighting for the rights of the workers.
But after working at the yard over a 40+ year period, interspersed by time working in Swansea and Australia, it was Mr Beveridge who found himself literally locking the gates of the Caledon and symbolically the entire Dundee shipbuilding industry – when the yard closed in 1981.
In an exclusive interview at his Broughty Ferry home ahead of his 90th birthday, Mr Beveridge told The Courier: “I was a head foreman when it closed. The yards were closing all over Scotland because the Japanese and Canadians started to build ships cheaper than we could. Yard by yard the Scottish ones were disappearing.
“When word came Caledon was to close we decided to have a sit in. British Shipbuilding let us do it. Right from the start I was always a shop steward or on committees. We requested a meeting with the British Shipbuilders in London.
“A couple of us went down there and explained why the yards should stay open. We built the best ships and people needed the jobs. I suggested we could build for the oil industry but was told ‘oh no’ for some reason, which I couldn’t understand because the industry was booming.
“So we came back to Dundee and I said to the lads ‘that’s it we’re finished.’
“I just opened the door and said ‘there you go boys’. Everyone got up and left. I shut the door, locked it, went down to the lodge house and handed in the key and said ‘do what you like with it, we’re finished.’
“I never thought I was symbolically closing more than 100 years of Dundee shipbuilding. It never entered my head at the time. Only recently, when I read in The Courier about all the industries that have closed over the years, have I reflected on the significance of it all.”
Born in 1925 at a long demolished tenement in Dundee’s Watson Street, his family moved to Lilybank Road when he was three, later moving to Byron Terrace.
These were times of real poverty. Unemployment was high. His father was a labourer who found occasional work at the docks. There was regularly no food on the table. Of his four sisters and a brother all now deceased two sisters died aged one and four, the latter from diphtheria.
He added: “The area where I grew up was full of shipyard men. When I was 12 we would get to know when there was going to be a launch. We would sneak down there to see it. That was how I become interested in ships. My first job was a catch-boy. Working in the bowels of the ship, the rivet heater would throw the rivet to the catch boy.”
Progressing to welder, Mr Beveridge described conditions as “hard back breaking work”. Many men died there, he said. Health and safety was non-existent.
Mr Beveridge is proud of Dundee’s shipbuilding heritage. But he remains angered at the negligence of the industry. He was diagnosed 15 years ago with asbestosis a result of breathing in asbestos fibres in the engine rooms. “We used to get lumps of it and throw it at each other like a snow storm,”he recalled.
He received a £2000 compensation payout and gets an additional £12 per week pension after his case was taken up by the unions. But he has increasing breathing problems and mobility is becoming more difficult.
Mr Beveridge smiles when he thinks about Dundee’s £1 billion waterfront development.
He said: “It’s amazing to think back. You can’t stop progress. But if a lot of people could wake up in the morning and see how it was, they’d be amazed!”he laughed.