This thread was originally written and published in May 2019.

I came across an amazing but bitter-sweet video on Youtube; the launch of the Sealink ferry MV St. Catherine from the Henry Robb yard in Leith on 30th March 1983. Shipyard launches were always a moment of celebration but this one was different, the writing was on the wall for the yard an everyone knew it, and it would be the second last ship ever launched by Robbs and also in Leith.

It’s filmed from the top of one of the yard cranes, so has a spectacular vantage point. You can hear everything from the clapping and cheering of the crowds, the howl of the wind and of course the blast of the ferry’s siren as she slips into the dock basin.

Check out those brave souls in the moving cage suspended from the crane (highlighted below in yellow)!

St. Catherine’s sister, St. Helen, was launched on September 15th that year and has the dubious honour of being the last ever Leith-built ship, the end of a centuries-long tradition.

Shipbuilding on the east coast of Scotland, from Leith and Granton to Bo’ness to Burntisland to Dundee and Aberdeen, had once been a thing, but never on anything approaching the scale of the Clyde. But it flourished nevertheless and found a niche by meeting local needs and also in building smaller and more specialised vessels. As the British industry declined, Robbs had merged with Dundee competitor Caledon Shipbuilding & Engineering Company in 1968 to form Robb Caledon Shipbuilding. They were nationalised into the feckless British Shipbuilders Corporation in 1977 with the Dundee yard closing in 1981. Yard rationalisation through enforced closure – to try and reduce national capacity – was one of the raisons d’etre for the BSC.

After completing the pair of ferries for Sealink there were no orders forthcoming for Robbs and downsizing was inevitably announced. There followed a bitter period of protest. In April 1983, the entire yard (850 workers) marched through Leith at the threat of 50% layoffs.

But the BSC weren’t for listening, they had a strategic goal of taking 9,000 shipyard workers out of the industry. The smaller yards, particularly those which built commercial shipping and could not be fed the lifeline of piecemeal Navy contracts, were particularly at risk. A yard like Robbs was an attractive target and the payroll was cut to 390. A flicker of hope arrived in January 1984 when the Ministy of Defence sent in a submersible target that looked like a miniature submarine for repairs.

But on January 25th 1984, it was announced by the Ministry of Defence that Robbs had failed to win a £28 contract for three offshore diving support and salvage vessels, the work instead going to Hall Russell in Aberdeen. The following day, BSC officials stepped in to try and lock the workers out from completing the work on the submersible target and so the men initiated an occupation and commenced a work-in to complete the repair job in the hope that more work could be found. On the next day, the 27th, BSC announced the yard was closing. “Workers hold sub hostage” reported the Liverpool Echo on the 28th. Local support for the workers was strong and funds were quickly raised to tide the men and their families over.

Local MPs, Labour’s Ron Brown for Leith and the Conservative Lord James Douglas Hamilton for Edinburgh West held out hope for a £3m order to a pair of tugs for the MoD, but things were so desperate in the industry for orders that yards on the Tyne and the Humber would also close without them and competition was fierce. Once again, Robbs were unsuccessful, there was just not enough work and too many desperate yards. In early February, the Labour MP for Edinburgh East, Gavin Strang, challenged Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons to intervene, and to allow the yard to tender for forthcoming state orders from Caledonian Macbrayne. She declined.

There was some steel fabricating work available from the North Sea, but nothing on a scale that could sustain the yard’s overheads without the support of BSC, and with no work, there could be no work-in. Reluctantly, on February 3rd a clear majority of the remaining 250 workforce took the improved redundancy offer from BSC (13 weeks pay, no questions asked) and so the yard was set on a closure course for good. In the face of a lack of support from their national union leadership, the last 14 holdouts from the sit in marched out of the Yard on March 2nd 1984 behind a piper and underneath their union banner. The management locked the gates behind them and the yard was closed for good.

It was a bitter blow to Leith, struggling with industrial and social decline. But the port still maintained its sense of pride and Robbs was immortalised on the 1986 mural outside Leith Library .

The padlocked gates of the decaying yard also feature as a backdrop in the 1987 music video for The Proclaimers lament for the national decline of Scotland, “Letter from America“. The yard and it’s main covered hall can also be seen in the background later in the video as the Twins lead a small but optimistic protest march out of the desolate docklands and into Leith.

This chart below shows production at the yard in the last 20-odd years, it was a small yard and could manage 3 or 4 hulls a year when times were good. There were peaks and troughs due to the cyclical nature of shipbuilding, but it was a long term decline.

Those 4 years with big peaks in tonnage launched were the exception, the rare order of a larger ship. Generally the yard built 300-3,000 ton vessels but occasionally there were a few biggies like the auxiliary helicopter carrier RFA Engadine (6,384t) and the polar research ship RRS Bransfield (4,861t). Engadine was the longest ship ever built at the yard, but not the biggest by displacement, that went to the Garrison Point of 1977, tipping the scales at 7,702t Gross Register Tonnes and 12,382t Deadweight Tonnes. She was broken up in 2000.

Along with the final pair of ferries built for Sealink, Robbs also built a pair of such ships for the state-owned Scottish ferry organisation Caledonian Macbrayne; the Pioneer of 1974 and her bigger sister the Claymore of 1978. Claymore is a ship on which I travelled quite a few times, to and from Islay from Kennacraig. My childhood memories of her are that she felt enormous inside and with a very confusing (but fun to explore) layout over seemingly endless decks and corridors.

Various parts of the yard were reused for engineering and fabrication work into the 1990s, while other bits were just left to rot. Here’s a picture of some toilets in 1994 after a visit from the Leith Young Team. The whole lot was cleared to be replaced by the Ocean Terminal shopping centre in 2001. It can be hard to work out quite how the yard was located in relation to the shopping centre given all the land changes in the area. The below animated image transition should help. The yard occupied the area in yellow here, plus all the land to the right as far as the west pier of the docks. You can zoom in on the aerial photo by viewing the original on Canmore.

It’s really hard to get some of these shots to work because of the changes in the area. Most I can find are taken from vantage points now inaccessible or built on. The image below looking towards Ocean Terminal is an exception:

Footnote – the MV St. Catherine, which is the same age as I and was also born in Leith, is still looking good and going strong as far as I know! She served with Sealink and her successors on the Isle of Wight run until 2009 and was sold to the Italian line Delcomar in 2010 as GB Conte for service to Sardinia. She was joined there by her Robb-built sister St. Helen in 2015, who was renamed Anna Mur.

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