Fairfield. A Shipyard Success Story 1834-2024. By Ian Johnston. Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley, 2024. ISBN 978-1-3990-8966-1 (Hardback). ISBN 978-1-3990-8967-8 (ePub)
Reviewed by David Hobbs
Ian Johnston has written extensively about the Clydeside shipbuilding industry and ANI members will also be aware of his outstanding book The Battleship Builders, written jointly with Ian Buxton, in which he described the vast industrial undertaking that created the British battlefleet. In this book he describes the historic shipyard at Govan that has survived against the odds for nearly two centuries during which most of its contemporaries have gone out of business.
The yard had its origins in the design and manufacture of advanced triple-expansion marine steam engines from 1830 and then expanded into the construction of ships as well as their machinery from 1884. The book is logically divided into four sections, each of which describes a different era of the yard’s management and ownership.
The first section covers the personalities who began the story and designed world class engines; the second describes the creation of the shipyard built within what had been the Fairfield Estate on the edge of Govan which is on the south bank of the Clyde west of Glasgow. This location led to firm taking the name Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Company between 1885 and 1965. The yard built a wide range of ships including both warships and high-speed passenger liners; several of the latter, including Campania, winning the coveted Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. The third section describes the troubled years from 1966 when ownership changed through Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, Govan Shipbuilding, the nationalised British Shipbuilding to the Norwegian-owned Kvaerner Group. During this period most British yards found difficulty in changing their outdated practices and tired machinery fast enough to compete with newly established shipyards in Japan and Korea but the Govan yard’s successive management teams and the work force did just enough to allow it to compete and survive. In 2000 the yard became part of BAE Systems operations on the Clyde and its continued modernisation and warship construction up to and including HMS Glasgow, the first Type 26 frigate, are covered in section four.
Appendices include extensive details of the yard as it has evolved including scale drawings by the author, a former lecturer on graphic art at the Glasgow School of Art, which show many of the ship types built at Govan and a list of every vessel built at the yard. The first was the passenger cargo ship Macgregor Laird launched in December 1862 for the African Steamship Company and the list includes a number of famous RN warships including the battleship Howe and the aircraft carrier Implacable, both of which served in the British Pacific Fleet and spent time based in Sydney. Fairfield also built the King Edward VII class battleship HMS Commonwealth which was named after the Commonwealth of Australia. There is more immediate RAN interest on page 72 with mention of HMAS Parramatta, the first destroyer to be ordered for the new Australian fleet. There are photographs of her launch by Margot Asquith, wife of the British Prime Minister H H Asquith, on 9 February 1910. Her sister-ship HMAS Warrego was built a year later by Fairfield. Two destroyers of a later generation, the ‘N’ class, HMA Ships Napier and Nestor are described on page 114. The bow of Parramatta still exists, of course, close the RAN Heritage centre on Garden Island and, having stood next to it, I was fascinated to see a photograph of the same bow as it appeared when the ship was launched.
This is a well-illustrated book of high print quality that will appeal to readers with a wide range of naval interests. It gives good descriptions of how the early steam machinery was constructed, how generations of ships were built and fitted out and brings readers right up to date with accounts backed up by drawings and photographs that show how the latest techniques of block construction that the yard used in the construction of Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, Daring class destroyers and Type 26 frigates. The author’s drawings of the yard layout, individual ships and cranes add further value to this detailed and informative book. It will appeal to readers with a wide range of naval interests, not just those centred on the shipbuilding industry, and I thoroughly recommend
