To someone of my age, the name George Blake suggests the Communist spy (actually George Behar), who was caught in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison - only to escape to Russia. This George Blake (1893-1961) was well known in his day, not just in his native Glasgow area, but all over Scotland, thanks to his BBC and journalist careers. I first came across him when I purchased his short sketch on Barrie and the Kailyard School (Arthur Barker, 1951), which was a sustained attack on the genre. He thought their approach was a cheapening, evasive, stereotyped view of Scottish life. The very first sentence of the book set out Blake's credo: The novelist's fundamental concern is with the human soul; its many trials and its occasional triumphs, its humours, its follies, its gropings and its generosities. One can ague that The Shipbuilders does just that. His novels, as a whole, were resolutely realistic, serious, socialistic and nationalistic.
The novel is unevenly split with the narration of two men's lives: Leslie Pagan, the general manager of the shipyard which bears the family name, with a discontented English wife, Blanche, who hates Glasgow - this inveterate grimness of the North - and yearns to be with her own family in Sussex, and a sickly child John; and a father, John Pagan, seventy-eight, but tall and straight as a soldier; clean-shaven, with only a hint of the old-fashioned in his double-breasted buff waistcoat, his stock, and a suspicion of whisker, still ruddy like his thick strong hair, before his ears. A gentleman of the old school, indeed...
Secondly, Danny Shields, a riveter in the shipyard, with an increasingly surly, bitter wife, 36 year-old Agnes; a waster, workshy, keelie teenage son, Peter (his pregnant, newly-wed Rita - let a girly sleep - is more than a caricature); a cheery eight year-old son, Billy, always reading by the fire - it's you and me for it together now; and a baby Wee Mirren. Danny was Leslie's batman in the recent Great War, and the relationship between the two men is movingly detailed throughout the book. Danny's admiration of Leslie was flawless. Danny's home was a tenement block in a featureless street... Kingarth Street, Number 33; two stairs up, one room and a kitchen, at a rent of seventeen shillings a week...the stairs were worn and dirty, and the place had altogether the drab air of a barracks.
Both men experience despair and unhappiness: Blanche, forever wheedling Leslie to move South, using their son's ill-health as near-blackmail; Agnes, increasingly going out to the Pictures (more likely flirting and then worse with Alf Leake from London) with her sister Lizzie, brother-in-law Jim Dunsmuir, turning over big money in mysterious ways, with his flashy motor car and fingers in the betting trades. Danny loses himself in drink and football and his love for his younger children, especially Billy. Leslie fails to find work for the yard. The last order, the Estramadura, goes on her sea trials down the Clyde, with Leslie on board. The second half of Chapter VI Trial Trip, is probably the most moving in the book. It details the journey through the high, tragic pageant of the Clyde...it was a tragedy beyond economics. It was not that so many thousands of homes lacked bread and butter. It was that a tradition, a skill, a glory, a passion, was visibly in decay and all the acquired and inherited loveliness of artistry rotting along the banks of a stream. One after the other, the author lists the names of the closed, empty, decaying shipyards... Greenock's (the author's birthplace) heart lay bare and bleeding...the fall of Rome was a trifle in comparison... out of this narrow river the ships had poured, an endless pageant, to fill the ports of the world. Even the Big Yin, Billy Connelly, surely, must shed a tear.
Two deaths occur: old man Pagan slips away in his big house; Danny goes to the funeral and then gets a job as a general handyman and gardener in the Pagan family home, but not for long. His solace is with the widow, Jess, of the other man who died, Joe Stirling. At first platonic, with chummy visits to the cinemas, it develops once Agnes deserts Danny, taking Wee Mirren with her. At the end of the book, Danny (to Leslie's surprise and mild chagrin) decides to stay in Glasgow and not go South to become the factotum for Leslie again, this time at a posh manor house in west Sussex. I think I'll just stick to my trade, sir.
There are regular passages on the city of Glasgow: its unwieldly vastness - of a hopeless complex of lives and interests all resting on heavy industry in decay, with a canker at its heart; perhaps a city doomed... it is a city where the workless faced him at every second step: men unmistakably and irretrievably stamped with hopelessness and under-feeding, men without coats or collars, their pinched faces grey-green with cold, their hands deep in their jacket pockets, their shoulders hunched in the stoop of the damned.
The author's socialism shines through every so often - the richness of shops catering for the rich, the flaunting of whores and of rich women, not much better, clambering insolently from glistening cars...; as do traces of anti-Semitism.
A final comment. I looked on Amazon for reviews of the book. One women writer from Stirling complained that both wives are bitterly painted - one an English spendthrift with little time for her much older husband, and the other, although it is not clear why, is a verbally abusive and negligent wife - quite horrible. Unsurprisingly, the love interest is a sweet, kind, gentle woman. Dear me! If she had read the story more closely, she would have realised that there is love between Leslie and Blanche. But we are in the 21st century, with very different fare being offered. I don't think I will be reading her forthcoming novel.
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