Nettles, willowherbs, brambles: nothing suggested that ocean-going tablecloths had once been woven there or a girl's cheese sandwiches had warmed on the hob. In 1959, Mathewson's end hadn't been so long ago – 1930 was closer to 1959 than 1959 is to now – but such complete ruination, weeds replacing work, was one of the things that made my parents and so many others of that place and generation seem like survivors from a previous British age. Of course, nobody then had any idea of how much of this there was to come. As Hobbs later told the audit committee, once you put a ship in the water, everything you do to it costs more money. I hope this reassures you [McMillan] that, in line with the 2012 Ferries Plan, the Scottish government is continuing in its commitment to vessel replacement and providing potential work for the shipbuilding industry in Scotland. Can anyone help with my energy bill? I don’t think I need help paying it, but I would like some control over the family cash flow. Because my wife and I recently had a more efficient boiler installed, our consumption has fallen sharply, putting our account into credit. Two months ago, our energy provider cut our direct debit by a third. Now it has almost doubled it and refuses (or, rather, its algorithm refuses) to let us reduce it. Confusingly, it also says that the full sum won’t be debited because the government’s “energy support” will be taken off. His last big commission was a 17,300-word piece for the London Review of Books on the Scottish government’s mishandling of the vitally needed refurbishment and resupply of ferries between the Scottish west coast and islands in the context of a history of shipbuilding on the Clyde.

By and large, Callaghan has had an indulgent press, but his own judgment of his actions can be found in the nervous breakdown, paralysis of will and complete failure to communicate with civil servants and ministers he suffered across two to three weeks at the end of 1978, going into 1979 – something related to me by his private secretary, Kenneth Crowe, but not included in the standard narrative. The 1970s are perhaps best remembered as a failure so nearly a success as to approach tragedy.He believed this with particular fervour in relation to the intended audience of a work; and he explored this thought with skill and insight in his book The Poet and His Audience (1984), looking at Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson and Yeats, and exploring the ways in which their voice, choice of subjects and tone were influenced by an awareness of the audience for whom they were writing. The ferries were busier than they had ever been, thanks to a decision by the Scottish government to implement the Road Equivalent Tariff (RET), which used a formula linking ferry fares to the cost of road transport over an equivalent distance. RET has its origins in the ferries that cross the Norwegian fjords and was first mooted in Scotland in the 1960s by the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB), originally, Clark writes, ‘to neutralise decades of islander complaints about MacBrayne’s freight charges’, and later and more broadly to make the islands cheaper to access, and in that way to level up the economic gap between island and mainland living. The HIDB formally proposed the scheme to the Westminster government in 1974, to have it rejected by successive UK administrations, Tory and Labour, for the next 25 years. RET-based fares would cover only a quarter of the operating cost. The Scottish Office minister Bruce Millan reflected conventional political opinion when he argued in 1975 that the fares needed to be anchored in some economic reality or the subsidies would be uncontrollable.

A few other important things haven't made it into the received record. The voluntary incomes policy, so successful until late 1978, owed its melancholy collapse essentially to James Callaghan, but for deeper reasons than the famously complacent ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ Callaghan had played with the notion of replacing Healey with the protectionist Tony Crosland and had withdrawn support in cabinet for a 2 per cent increase in the minimum lending rate until Healey threatened resignation. Initially sceptical about the voluntary incomes policy, when it prospered he promptly pushed it too far. An amazed and derisive Roy Hattersley tells how in 1978, a civil servant from the PM’s office, Kenneth Clucas, informed him that ‘Number Ten is thinking about 3 per cent.’ So CMAL had signed off the contract without recommending it. How had this happened? Transport Scotland knew what ministers wanted; ministers knew they needed Transport Scotland’s approval; CMAL’s objections had been quietened by the letter of comfort. There was something almost Johnsonian about it – Let’s Get Ferries Done! In his Guardian obituary, Jonathan Glancey described Allan as ‘the world’s best known and probably its most successful railway publisher’. The only books now published by his successors at the Ian Allan Group are about Freemasonry: A Guide to Masonic Symbolism, A Handbook for the Freemason’s Wife, Laughter in the Lodge and so on. The railway side of the business has been sold off; the book and model shop in Lower Marsh was the last thing to go. When we were young, he took me to that bridge. What I remember is the jargon. New numbers were ‘copped’. A cry of ‘Manny peg’ meant a train had been signalled for Manchester. ‘Coffee Pots’ were elderly Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway goods engines. ‘Ju-Jubes’ were Jubilees, a class that entered service during the 25th anniversary of George V’s accession and whose engines were named after imperial possessions, famous warships and English heroes. The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name. By 1955, the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club had 230,000 members, and Allan was publishing lists of almost every mechanical moving object (I’m not sure about tractors) that could be seen on land, sea and air, devoting ABC booklets to British Liners, British Tugs, British Warships, British Airliners, British Buses and Trolleybuses, sometimes narrowing the field to sub-groups such as London Transport, Clyde Pleasure Steamers and the Battleships of World War One. There were specialist magazines – Trains Illustrated was one – as well as more ambitious books that had narratives rather than lists. He took over other small publishers; he started a travel business and took over a car dealership; he moved into offices at Shepperton in the West London suburbs, where he installed a vintage Pullman car as the company boardroom. His publishing output now had unusual specialisms that included masonic rituals: Allan was a member of three local lodges and an officer in the United Grand Lodge of England, where he served as Past Junior Grand Deacon from 1992 until his death in 2015, a day before his 93rd birthday.And, deep down, everyone in the SNP (outside of the Palace Guard) and everyone in Scotland who is actually paying attention knows that Ms. Sturgeon's legacy is the emptying out of that hope. Some of the complaints were reasonable, others less so. The island of Colonsay had nine sailings to and from the mainland every month, when the steamer called on its journey between Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides. In 1931, Colonsay had a population of 232 and the government estimated the average traffic per trip totalled half a dozen passengers and a few dozen boxes of rabbits and lobsters. Nevertheless, Colonsay’s owner, Lord Strathcona, a former Tory minister, consistently agitated for more steamer calls. John Lorne Campbell, described by Andrew Clark as ‘the ever-whining proprietor of Canna’, more often remembered as a historian and folklorist, was outraged when MacBrayne’s substituted a smaller boat on the service to the Small Isles. Mallaig, the mainland port, was only two and half hours away and Canna’s population was 24, but Campbell felt they deserved the cabins and the full catering service offered by the previous vessel. The mollifying response, Clark writes, ‘was the provision of soup’.

McNeill: We became aware that FMEL could not provide a Clyde Blowers Capital guarantee on 21 August 2015. We were not aware until about 25 September that it was also having problems producing a guarantee from a bank or an insurance company, and it gave its final position in relation to that on 7 October, by which time it was already the preferred bidder and we had stood down the other bidders. Charles III is a disappointment. Many thought he would be unable to restrain himself from meddling in politics and expressing his contentious opinions on architecture, education and medicine. But he has made it clear that he accepts the restraints of his new role.Complaints came from landowners with political influence as well as crofters with none. In 1919 the factor to Lord Leverhulme, who was on the verge of buying Harris, wrote that for seven weeks from January to March no cargo at all had been landed from Glasgow, with the result that for the last ten days of that time there had been no food in the local shops: ‘the people were without butter or margarine, no sugar, no bacon … The whole position is really becoming quite intolerable … If the government have got the interests of the people at heart, they must begin with the steamer question and reorganise the whole service.’ In the same year the people of Loch Skipport in South Uist complained that a community whose ‘sons and brothers have had to face the hunnish foe in a foreign land for King and Country, should be so exploited by rapacious Steamer Companies’. It was obvious by the late 1950s that competition from shipyards abroad using more modern methods would lead to the end of British yards. As they drifted towards unproductivity, there was a rare burst of resistance when in 1960 we apprentices undertook a successful six-week strike to gain day-release so that we could attend technical college. The government of the time had been content to leave industrial training to employers, but in 1963 a bill was passed to create industrial training boards funded by a levy on employers in all sectors. Costs could be recouped by employers when training was provided. In 1971, the British Oxygen Company funded my studies, including an annual week’s study leave, from the levy. Formed in 1886, BOC is one of Britain’s oldest industrial companies; it is now owned by the German Linde Group. He was born in Lancashire, but his Scottish parents returned to North Queensferry when he was seven. He started work as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965. Before his death, he was preparing a book about the Clyde, helped by (among others) the actor Bill Paterson, a native Clydesider in awe, in their talks, of Ian’s grasp of detail and meaning.

In McColl’s version of events, the most spectacular consequence of CMAL’s hurry was the premature launch of hull 801. The plan had been to build the two sister ships – identical twins, as he understood it – simultaneously, side by side on the slipways. Since the working space around the slipways was cramped, partly thanks to FMEL’s new offices and fabrication shed, the yard planned to start building the ships from the stern, the end nearest the water, rather than from midships, which is more usual. This would enable materials to be supplied from the bow end rather than the narrow space at the sides.Like Weir Pumps, Clyde Blowers had its origins in steam technology. It manufactured a device that could blow soot from the boilers of steam engines – in locomotives, ships, factories and power stations – without the boilers having to be shut down. The ship or the factory could continue, the flow of steam to its engines unaffected. ‘Most of the Clyde-built ships had Clyde Blowers in them, including the royal yacht Britannia,’ McColl told me when I spoke to him in May, although by the time he bought the company its focus had shifted to coal-fired power stations. In 1992, it was the smallest of eight similar firms scattered across the world. In the following five years, McColl bought six of the other seven. ‘We ended up with 60 per cent of the world market and that included a very big market in China, where we set up a very successful factory,’ he said. ‘When I bought Clyde Blowers we were making 600 soot blowers a year. When we sold the Chinese factory, it was doing 6000 a month.’ and little trains whirred past little stations, rattling over points, past signals, through tunnels and model cuttings. Eyes sparkling, Galland turned to Bader, looking like a small boy having fun. The interpreter said: ‘This is the Herr Oberstleutnant’s favourite place when he is not flying. It is a replica of Reichsmarshal Goering’s railway, but of course the Reichsmarshal’s is much bigger.’