4 days ago
JOHN MACLEOD: The Clyde no longer clangs with the sound of hammers, but still the silver ferry glides across its waves
It's a muggy day in August 1979 and, atop a bicycle slightly too big for him, a mop-haired 13 year-old heads determinedly through western Glasgow by Anniesland Road, Kingsway and the main drag to Dumbarton.
He's a bit lonely, very bookish and, worst of all, thirteen. But he likes ferries. They suggest change, transition, deliverance.
And so he pulls up his Raleigh Wayfarer at the top of the great cobbled slip and, for long soothing minutes, watches the stately craft chug back and fore, along heavy guiding chains, between Renfrew and Yoker – and life feels that wee bit better.
Negotiating the thunderous local traffic nearly half a century later, I wonder what possessed me. Yoker Ferry Road seems longer than I remember. Much around the slipway has been demolished.
But the Clyde is a great deal cleaner. And, shortly, the wee silver landing-craft purrs across the wavelets. Danny, the perky young skipper, relieves me of £3 and, shortly, I am on my way to the other shore and, indeed, another local authority.
A similar craft is perched high and dry on the Renfrew slip. 'Been there two year,' says Danny. 'They were supposed to change the ramp, and guys duly came and cut the old one off. We never saw them again.'
'Really?'
'They stopped returning our calls,' says Danny darkly.
'Good you're still going. I thought the new bridge...'
'It's hit us, aye – numbers are down half, about half – but there's still many that like the ferry.'
The swingbridge in question, which finally opened earlier this month, is about ten minutes' walk downstream and, already, evidently popular.
I amble across it, add West Dunbartonshire to my footfall, and note not just the steady purr of cars and vans – the new connection is especially useful for Braehead shopping – but a surprising number of pedestrians: young mums and dads with pushchairs.
I glance upriver, and Danny is traversing the straits again, the sunlight glinting on his little 12-passenger vessel.
The Clydelink landing-craft is not, of course, the ship I remember. She – imaginatively named the Renfrew – was a great square double-ended chain-ferry, diesel-electric, built in 1952, able to bear two dozen cars and for an era when thousands crossed the Clyde daily for work.
And when she had occasionally to be drydocked and overhauled, a similar if smaller vessel – steam-powered, repurposed from Erskine upon 1971 redundancy – could relieve her.
It might have seemed prosaic, but in its own wee way the Renfrew ferry is part of Greater Glasgow's rich tapestry.
When the King and Queen in 1934 descended on Clydebank to launch the Queen Mary, it is said the Renfrew ferry that day conveyed some 22,000 excited sightseers.
On two dreadful nights in March 1941, the ship toiled from dusk to dawn, flashes and explosions all around her, conveying ambulances and fire-engines to stricken Clydebank.
And one of the Renfrew ferry crew was even a key witness in the 1958 trial of the murderous Peter Manuel.
Even then, this was still one of many craft – some vehicular; other little launches for passengers only – that criss-crossed the river under the auspices of the Clyde Port Authority and when Glasgow was not just still the Second City of the Empire but the workshop of the world.
All the ferries, in fact, were free, except for those at Renfrew and Erskine which were partly and wholly outwith Glasgow Corporation bounds.
But life then began to grow lonely. Opened in 1963, the Clyde Tunnel was the finish of the ferries at Govan and Whiteinch. Other services – Stobcross, Meadowside, Finnieston – soon disappeared too and, with the demise of the little Kelvinhaugh ferry in 1980, the Renfrew was on her lonesome.
And losing money in epic quantities, jangling back and fore with just two or three cars at a time. It was bonkers and, on a wistful day in May 1984, she voyaged for the last time, children and locals turning out in great number to make rather a gala of the occasion.
It was not the end of the service. Two small bow-loading ferries – for passengers only, though capable of taking an ambulance over in emergency – assumed the crossing, and till 2010 the Renfrew Rose and the Yoker Swan served loyally and well.
But the operational losses were increasingly crazy and they were finally withdrawn for new careers, respectively, on the Cromarty Firth and in the south of Ireland.
Indeed, last year and in her new Hibernian briny the Yoker Swan, laden with finalists, had a chug-on part in Masterchef: The Professionals.
Clydelink now took on the Renfrew to Yoker passage, with their glorified lawnmowers.
1984 was not quite doom for the broad-beamed chain ferries. The Renfrew floats to this day as an static, popular quayside venue upriver and, during the Glasgow Garden Festival, her older sister briefly served in a similar capacity.
But by November 2000 Scotland's last steam-powered ferry, last of the long line of Erskine vessels, had foundered in Renfrew's little harbour, and was shortly demolished.
The Clyde's latest bridges – a passenger swing-bridge opened between Govan and Partick last September – have proved rather a hit.
It's good that the Clyde has now been so cleaned up that salmon have been running it happily, anew, since the late Seventies.
Indeed, they were historically so plentiful that, according to tradition, Govan tradesmen could not feed it to their apprentices more than twice a week.
But, steaming downriver on the Waverley or even just going for a long determined walk by its shores, by derelict this and gap-site that, one feels sad to see one of the greatest rivers in the world reduced to little more than a bit of pretty.
Great tides of working men no longer flood Dumbarton Road as the end-of-shift siren wails, Glasgow is no longer reduced to a ghost-town in Fair Fortnight, and the merry chink and clang of hammers no longer reverberates in Scotstoun and Whiteinch.
Danny is having a joyously busy day and, as I retrace my steps down the Renfrew cobbles, he is just sweeping in with his latest complement of passengers – Maw, Paw and three happy weans.
The children turn and wave exuberant goodbye as I again cross Danny's palm with silver and his little craft backs out with a growl of outboard.
Danny was in Lewis once. Lewis is nice, aye. 'Aye, I get lots of children. Kids just love the ferry…'
And, of course – it was shut for some hours yesterday – the competing new bridge is not always available, adding further joyous footfall.
Danny and colleagues are determined to maintain a service now at least in its fifth century – and I, for one, hope there is always a Renfrew ferry.
