shipbuilding

shipbuilding was a widely scattered industry before the 18th cent., ships normally varying between 50 and 100 tons. For four centuries the Thames and Medway were the principal shipbuilding rivers for large ships and the location of the main naval dockyards. Technical innovations threw the advantage to the Tyne, Wear and Tees, Mersey, and Clyde with relatively deep water, cheap coal and iron, and expertise in building marine engines.

The Clyde was a latecomer as a major shipbuilding river. The main hull-builders were downriver at Greenock and Port Glasgow. Deepening the river served both commerce and industry, for Glasgow's engine-builders came to dominate British shipbuilding. Labour costs in the new shipyards were lower than on the Thames, and technical innovations gave the Clyde major advantages. In 1813–14 this region produced only 4.5 per cent of the British tonnage, and this market share remained relatively constant until the 1840s. In the production of iron river steamers the Clyde falteringly led the way in the early 19th cent. but between 1840 and 1870 produced two-thirds of British steam tonnage. Early marine engines used fuel prodigally; Glasgow engineers solved this problem and also improved boilers and methods of construction and propulsion: the screw propeller replaced the paddle in the 1840s; compound engines were installed from 1853, dramatically cutting coal consumption; iron hulls increased the scale of shipping, reducing freight costs and encouraging the growth of international trade. Glasgow became the home base for many shipping lines, including Cunard, and their orders tended to go to Clyde yards.

Steam and iron eclipsed wood and sail in the 1850s. Steam tonnage, which in 1850 represented under 7 per cent of British output, accounted for 70 per cent by 1870. About 24,000 of 47,500 men working in shipbuilding in 1871 were resident in Scotland, all but a few employed in the Clyde yards. They produced at least one-third of British tonnage—mostly specialist vessels—every year from 1870 to 1914. The Wear initially challenged the Clyde, producing about one-third of Britain's merchant tonnage in the 1830s, but the north-east increasingly specialized in lower-cost tramp shipping. Belfast was essentially an extension of Clyde capacity, and by 1914 one firm, Harland and Wolff, dominated its shipbuilding just as Cammell Laird on the Mersey and Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow controlled regional output.

The integration of iron, steel, coal, and shipbuilding as major exporting industries explains why the economy which made shipbuilding regions prosperous before 1914 should be a source of economic weakness after 1920. The long decline of shipbuilding had a downward multiplier effect on these regional economies which became the depressed areas of inter-war Britain.

Demand for capital goods declined rapidly after 1920, but shipbuilding suffered most. World capacity had been grossly inflated during the First World War, but peacetime demand was reduced by the decline in world trade. In 1933 launchings from British yards fell to 7 per cent of the 1914 figure. Foreign orders for new ships were markedly reduced. Britain was slow to move into the production of motor vessels which were most in demand; foreign governments provided subsidies to retain orders within their own boundaries. In 1930 ‘National Shipbuilders' Security Limited’ was formed to reduce the number of shipyards and excess capacity. By 1937, 28 firms had been bought and closed, with a capacity of about 3,500,000 tons. The government in 1935 sponsored an ineffective ‘scrap and build’ scheme whereby owners were subsidized to scrap 2 tons of shipping for every new ton they ordered.

Rearmament and the Second World War revived shipbuilding, and after 1945 the world dollar shortage drove shipowners to order in Britain. World trade expanded and kept the boom going, but increasingly foreign yards benefited from this exceptional demand. The Clyde produced a third of British tonnage in the early 1950s (although demand was greatest for tankers and cargo ships); the Wear and Tees a quarter and the Tyne about one-sixth; Belfast, the Mersey, and Barrow nearly one-quarter. In 1956 Britain was third in export sales behind Germany and Japan; by 1977 she produced 4 per cent of world output (compared with 60 per cent in 1910–14), and British owners were ordering ships from overseas. Asia, with its low labour costs and modern equipment, became the most significant continent for ship production. The government responded by further rationalization under British Shipbuilders (1977), a public corporation. Technically backward, the industry was faced with closures and redundancies until the government returned firms to private ownership and a process of private investment in the 1980s. Shipbuilding survives but subject to intense foreign competition. See also merchant navy.

John Butt