Glasgow. Home of Ships
Glasgow is a great Scottish city of about one million people, famous for its shipyards, which line the banks of the Clyde river.
Glasgow citizens are proud of the fact that there is probably not a sea or a sizable stretch of water anywhere from China’s Yangtze, Burma’s Irrawaddy and South America’s Amazon to Lake Titicaca in the Andes Mountains, that is not on any day of the year carrying ships built on Clydebank.
What an interesting story the yards there have to tell I They built the Cutty Sark, the most famous of all the sailing clippers, that raced to Britain from China every year with the new season’s crop of tea.
The great Glasgow yards were the birthplace of the three most famous liners: the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mary, and the Queen Elizabeth II.
On Clydebank they design and build everything from a row-boat to a barge, a dredger, a warship, a floating crane or an ice-breaker.
Think of Glasgow and the Clyde and you automatically
There are other industries that go with the making of ships, engines and boilers, for instance. Then there are the coal-cutters, the aeroengines, the machinery for sugar refineries, and so on. Glasgow is almost as famous for its engineering factories, its ironworks and its chemicals as for its ships. Its workshops also make furniture, clothing, shoes, sweets and biscuits. And carpets.
Glasgow workers wove the carpets for Westminster Abbey,3 the carpets in use in the British House of Lords and the House of Commons and those in the Commonwealth Parliament buildings at Canberra, Australia, and in the New Zealand Parliament, Wellington.
Besides being a great industrial town, Glasgow is an important centre of Scottish culture. The Medical School of Glasgow’s ancient University is known all over» the world. The city has fine arts galleries, libraries and a cathedral of considerable architectural interest.
In George Square, Glasgow, you can see the statues of those great sons of Scotland: Walter Scott, who wrote sixty-one books; James Watt, who invented the steam-engine; and Robert Burns, who wrote poems never to be forgotten by mankind.
The working class of Glasgow is proud of its revolutionary traditions. The Clyde Strike of 1919 was one of the greatest in Britain. Over 100,000 workers took part in it, fighting against the police and the army. The strike was suppressed, but the workers have never stopped struggling for their rights, for a better life.
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