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.

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. RSL Fellows (16 March 2016). "Royal Society of Literature» Current RSL Fellows". Rsliterature.org . Retrieved 20 March 2016. He moved through every one of his pieces, in damp Indian basements, toilets with knitted toilet-roll cover, his own living room – careful, querying, gentle but acutely tuned for falsities, contradictions, omissions, keeping the point waiting until the scaffolding of the piece is erected. It is the journalist as contemporary shaper of a Socratic dialogue, always kindly, yet with a “but what about…?” ever ready, to probe through to deeper revelations. No other British journalist was working at that level and he was still working when he died. The edition is far-sighted, in the light of the fact that climate conferences are still debating on the right global response to the increasing threat of climate change. Cut to 2022, and the November international climate summit will see leaders gathering in Sharm El-Sheikh for the 27th round of the Conference of Parties, with data showing that the world is not doing enough to stop global warming despite the warnings. Against the currentIn 2003 there was a ruling by the European Court of Justice about subsidy or state aid for a German bus company, Altmark. CalMac, which had not been broken up at that time, received legal opinion that the Altmark ruling definitely applied to CalMac and allowed tendering to stop without legal consequence. The UK Department of Trade and Industry appeared to agree. Ministers in the Labour/Lib Dem Scottish executive, however, were advised by officials that Altmark did not apply to CalMac. The hugely expensive tendering process went ahead. CalMac was split up into different companies, including the newly created Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL). The biggest area of contention, however, lay closer to the start of the shipbuilding process, with the conversion of the buyer’s specifications into a ‘conceptual’ design, attached when the job goes out to tender, and later developed by the successful bidder into the far more detailed plan the builders will work from. McColl’s argument is that the problems stemmed mainly from CMAL’s failure at this stage: ‘It became evident as we got into this contract that they hadn’t fully developed their ideas of what they wanted … so they came in finalising their ideas as we were building it,’ he said during our conversation in May. He’d commissioned a report from an independent group of naval architects and marine engineers, which endorsed his view. ‘It said that CMAL had hurried the development of the spec and had not spent enough time flushing out what they wanted, or been clear about what they wanted or the consequences of what they wanted.’ He added, ‘again with hindsight’, that this might have been connected with the Scottish government’s rush to make an announcement ‘for PR reasons’.

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.’ 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.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’. As Hobbs later told the audit committee, once you put a ship in the water, everything you do to it costs more money.

The writer and former Observer foreign correspondent Neal Ascherson said: “We have lost one of our great journalists, a writer of enchanting imagination and at the same time a reporter rigidly scrupulous in his insistence on fact. The obvious explanation, that these were the paranoid delusions of a crumbling mind, needs to be revised in the light of later disclosures that sections of MI5 and the CIA had determined that Wilson was a long-serving Soviet puppet, if not actually a spy. Williams now believes that there was ‘a real attempt to try to undo him of a non-constitutional kind’. But really there was no need to supplement the exhaustion, alcohol and poor health that were already undoing him. When another sterling crisis hit Britain in 1976, Wilson’s biggest worry was that dealing with it might affect his plans for retirement. 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. Ian was born in Edinburgh and studied at George Watson's college, where he was John Welsh classical scholar. Exempted from military service, to his great regret, because of his chronic asthma, during the war he went up to Edinburgh University, where he gained a first in English literature, and in 1946 he was appointed James Boswell fellow.

The company limped on through the 1920s with an ageing fleet – replacements were unaffordable – until in 1927, MacBrayne’s annus horribilis, two of its ships ran aground and another caught fire. All three were written off as total losses. The next year, when MacBrayne’s had to renew its mail contract, the criticism was savage and unrestrained: everything wrong with the Highlands and Islands, the age-old litany of depopulation, depression, economic failure and poverty, was laid at its door. In a letter to the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, the Tory MP for Argyllshire, F.A. Macquisten, made unfavourable comparisons with Norway’s coastal services (the same comparison, just as unfavourable, is still being made) and proposed that an efficient railway company took over the fleet. In the subsequent parliamentary debate over the renewal of the mail contract, the radical Labour MP Tom Johnston argued that there was ‘no justification whatsoever for allowing this private company, subsidised by the government, to retain control over these essential means of communication … Today we have an opportunity of breaking one of the cords that are slowly strangling the [Highland] race.’ The question of the contract went down ‘to the roots of the evil which besets the islands of Scotland,’ one MP said, while another added that the fleet was on average 68 and a half years old (untrue; though its most elderly member, the Glencoe, had survived since 1846 and was thought to have been the oldest working steamship in the world when it was withdrawn in 1931). David Kirkwood, a Red Clydesider like Johnston, denounced the company as ‘this petty little firm on the Clyde … ruining one of the most beautiful parts of the world, the Highlands of Scotland’. The Highlands could be ‘opened up’, he said, if the government took this ‘glorious opportunity’. In a local economy now based around call centres and warehousing, apprenticeships were popular: a return to ‘proper skills’, secure employment, good wages – dignity. In 2016, Ferguson’s promised to hire 150 apprentices, but struggled to find skilled workers who could tutor them. Eastern Europe offered an answer, but when Eastern Europeans were hired and accommodation found for them, there was some local dismay, as if a patriotic project had been betrayed. The company’s then managing director, Liam Campbell, explained that ‘we get the benefit of the ingenuity of nationals from other countries who have been immersed in shipbuilding innovation for the last fifteen years where we have missed out. This exposes our workforce and apprentices to modern shipbuilding techniques, and will put us in a more competitive position in the years to come.’ In other words, Port Glasgow had to be taught how to build ships all over again. Some columnists and opposition politicians seemed to imagine a Scotland in which building ferries was an ordinary thing, insignificant compared to building, say, the QE2 or the Forth Bridge. But it isn’t ordinary. Outside defence contracts, Scotland builds almost nothing. Cars, locomotives, bridges, oil rigs, wind turbines, planes, fish-farm boats: the essential mechanics of the Scottish economy are all made elsewhere. In this context, two ferries were quite a big deal. 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’. If you build something undercover, it might cost one unit of price; when you do that in the open air to join the vessel up, it costs two units of price; and when you do that when the vessel is afloat, it will cost four units of price. Basically, we saw units being built at risk, not signed off by us and not signed off by Lloyd’s. What that meant is that, when they were inspected, there were many, many mistakes … mistakes made at the outset by the builder because it did not have approved drawings and, when the units were inspected, they were riddled with errors that had to be undone and then the job had to be done again. 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.

truly began to pervade the national consciousness. It filled doomy books ... It became a melodramatic staple for newspapers, magazines and television programmes. It darkened the work of artists, novelists, dramatists, film-makers and pop musicians. It soured foreign commentary on Britain ... And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. This most refined of journalists did not go to university, but followed a hallowed apprenticeship route to Fleet Street. Born in Farnworth, now in Greater Manchester, at seven he moved with his mother, father and elder brother, Harry, to North Queensferry, on the coast of Fife: his father, Henry, was fourth engineer on a British India Line cargo ship and later worked as a fitter in various companies: his mother, Isa (nee Gillespie), was born in Kirkcaldy to the daughter of a Royal Scot wounded in the first world war, and was a quality inspector in linen mills before marriage.In 2006 the routes went out to tender and one of CalMac’s offshoots won. A year later, in response to an inquiry from the SNP MEP Alyn Smith, the European transport commissioner Jacques Barrot said that if the Altmark principles applied, CalMac’s subsidy would not be regarded as state aid. He made it clear to a delegation of Highland councillors that he thought the Altmark principles did indeed apply. Soon after he moved to Oxford to do research for his DPhil under the formidable Helen Gardiner at Merton College: this, I suspect, is where much of his academic rigour came from. He went on to become a lecturer at Brasenose College in 1950, and senior research fellow in 1955. In 1961 he moved to Cambridge, becoming a fellow of Pembroke College and a university lecturer. He became a reader in 1973, and was appointed to a personal professorial chair in 1976. He retired in 1989. She didn’t mention, and too few of us understood, that Caledonian MacBrayne and CalMac Ferries Ltd were different things. The second ran the ferries, the first was a dormant limited company whose intellectual property rights were owned by CMAL. In other words, Caledonian MacBrayne was a brand: it could be sold. The sudden rush of sentiment – that the dear old name might be evicted from its Highland home – was misplaced. The name and the livery could remain, whoever operated the ships: Serco or the sovereign wealth fund of Dubai. No traditions were imperilled, but jobs were at stake. Since the Scottish government decided on the routes, the levels of service and the subsidy, a new franchise-holder had little room to find a profit by cutting costs, other than in the size of the crews and their wages and conditions. N one​ of this did much good in the long term. By 2019, relations between the two had broken down, and construction work had come to a near standstill. In early summer that year, CMAL reported to the steering group at Transport Scotland that both ships were years away from delivery; that no more than six people were working on vessel 801 and no more than two people on vessel 802 at any one time. More evidence of secret dealings and irregular conduct has emerged in Scotland’s celebrated ‘ferry fiasco’, to add to the details I described last month in the LRB. A BBC Scotland documentary, ‘The Great Ferries Scandal’, broadcast on 27 September, revealed a remarkable level of co-operation between the Scottish government and the shipbuilder, Ferguson’s, to make sure that the Port Glasgow company won the contract against competition from shipyards in Germany, Poland and England. On the evidence of hundreds of documents leaked to the BBC, the principles of transparency and fair-dealing embodied in the procurement law of Scotland and England – and of the European Union, to which in 2015 the United Kingdom still belonged – look almost certain to have been broken.