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Vince Hunt has worked on the Radio Ballads series for the past year and in the course of this journey he's met steelworkers, hunters & saboteurs & Protestants & Catholics in N. Ireland. Here he talks about his experiences interviewing the men and women who feature in the Ballad of the Big Ships.

It was through a Glaswegian friend at the Â鶹Éç Radio 2 website that I got a lead into the crazy world of shipbuilders. I found myself amid an amazing array of artists, poets, Communists, activists, organisers; hard, proud men with a sense of history and responsibility, who organised themselves, defended their jobs, defeated the Heath government’s yard closure plans ... and took the mick mercilessly.

They told of concert parties on the nightshift, ventriloquists, comedians ... the stories of characters like ‘Half a jobby Bobby’, ‘Walter the giraffe’ and ‘The Great Voltaire’ had me howling. But the dark side of shipbuilding came as a shock. The stories of asbestosis were hard to hear. The final months of mesothelioma - concrete lung - shouldn’t happen to anyone. Just one asbestos fibre can trigger it, and the men who worked in the yards all those years ago - now sitting telling me their stories - were having asbestos snowball fights with no protection. The women who washed their overalls and collected tickets on the buses to the shipyards weren’t spared either. Life can be cruel.

Sadly, ships are a scarce sight today on the Clyde, and it’s the same on the Tyne, birthplace of the Mauretania, the Ark Royal and those colossal supertankers, and both rivers are fighting to keep their shipbuilding history alive. I took a boat trip down the Clyde to the modern Braeside Shopping Centre. It was half an hour before I saw a ship being built, and then it was a navy vessel, one of two being built where once the river would have been full of ships. The work on the Tyne was similarly scant, and again, navy vessels. No liners, no supertankers, not even a dredger. I rang Swan Hunter last week to tell the men I interviewed when the programme was being broadcast: the union shop steward Micky Blench told me only one of the was still working there, and he wasn’t expecting to be there much longer. Their gallows humour had come true. Now there is nothing.

Clearing out a year of research for these Ballads, I found the last message of the Mauretania, radioed back to the thousands of Geordies who lined the banks of the Tyne to bid farewell to this record-breaking daughter, cheering and waving as she set out on her last voyage in 1935, which would take her to the scrapyards of Rosyth: "Thankyou for your greeting. For twenty eight years I have striven to be a credit to you, and now my day is done. Though I pass on, may Tyneside ever reach out to further and greater triumphs. With pride and affection I greet you. Farewell - Mauretania."

There’s a link between men and ships that’s indefineable and unbreakable. I remembered the way those men’s eyes fixed mine when they spoke about the beautiful ships they’d made: that was lovely to witness. It’s a proud job, being a shipbuilder.