Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 13992 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| WE MAKE SHIPS | 1987 | 1987-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Colour Sound: Sound Duration: 38 mins 41 secs Credits: Individuals: Tom Pickard, Les Abrahams, Murray Martin, Norman Hall, Elvis Costello, M. Elliot, T. Harrild, R. Schnidler, C. Hunt, S. Shaw, P. Woodhouse, C. Titchmarsh, G. Denman, E. Woodward, D.Rumsey, C. Martin, A. Mackay, S. Mackenzie, D. Eadington, S. Constant Organisations: Channel 4, Sunderland Port Authority, The Artists Agency, Lindisfarne, Siren Film and Video Co-op, Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions Genre: Documentary Subject: Working Life Industry |
| Summary A Siren Film & Video documentary for Channel Four in which Tom Pickard, poet and documentary filmmaker, returns to the shipyards in Sunderland for 6 months. During this period the Austin and Pickersgill yard experiences a financial crisis and two ships are launched onto the River Wear. The film was originally broadcast on 23 February 1987. |
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Description
A Siren Film & Video documentary for Channel Four in which Tom Pickard, poet and documentary filmmaker, returns to the shipyards in Sunderland for 6 months. During this period the Austin and Pickersgill yard experiences a financial crisis and two ships are launched onto the River Wear. The film was originally broadcast on 23 February 1987.
Title: In 1977 when the shipbuilding industry was nationalised and became British Shipbuilders there were 38,000 men employed in the merchant sector...
A Siren Film & Video documentary for Channel Four in which Tom Pickard, poet and documentary filmmaker, returns to the shipyards in Sunderland for 6 months. During this period the Austin and Pickersgill yard experiences a financial crisis and two ships are launched onto the River Wear. The film was originally broadcast on 23 February 1987.
Title: In 1977 when the shipbuilding industry was nationalised and became British Shipbuilders there were 38,000 men employed in the merchant sector
Title: In early 1987, just 5,500 remain
Title: The complete demise of the merchant sector is now a strong possibility
Title: British ship builders strategy for the retention of a skeleton capacity appears to be the casualization of the remaining workforce
Title: This film was shot in the North East of England on the river Wear, in Sunderland, once the biggest shipbuilding town in the world, with the co-operation of the workforce at Austin and Pickersgill (holders of the Queen’s Award for Industry).
The opening shot depicts two tugboats, the Tynesider and Seasider, sale up the Wear as a shipbuilder on the commentary describes the nature of his job and how it has become easier compared to twenty years ago. Workers move sandboxes on the deck of a ship.
The next scenes depict preparations and launch of a ship the "Johanna Oldendorf Gibraltar".
Title: We Make Ships
The voiceover describes the fragility of the industry and job security. “It’s crazy to think we can have an island without a shipbuilding industry.” The tugs manoeuvre the tanker on the river as the commentary continues.
A shipwright, Brian Tate (on camera), then speaks of family links to shipbuilding and its roots within the community. The closure of Lanes Shipyard and the imminent closure of Docksford Yard are underlined as examples of decline.
Peter Callaghan, Secretary of Austin & Pickergill’s Shop Stewards Committee, stipulates the precise extent of job losses and resultant manufacturing capacity.
In a boardroom setting, Sir Edward Du Cann MP (Conservative), Chairman of the All Party Committee on Maritime Affairs expresses the need for expansion, suggesting that ‘contraction has gone too far.’
Overhead view of ships on the River Wear. Dave Aldridge, a welder, says that there is no interest in keeping ‘the yard’ open, suggesting the government no longer wants a shipbuilding industry. Edward Du Cann then draws a comparison with home industry and industries of the ‘far east’; Korea and Japan both of who are investing and subsidising their shipbuilding industry. In a voiceover, a worker opines that where the Conservative government can’t make a profit, they will allow imports and let the home industry diminish.
Bob Clay MP, Labour, Sunderland and North, speaks: "The reality is that the shipbuilding of Japan and Korea is a slave-labour economy. There’s no trade-unionism. The accident rate in South Korea shipyards is nearly a thousand times higher than in Europe. The wage rates at current exchanges are about £60 per week – that’s for a six-day week, working ten hour shifts per day with compulsory overtime of ten hours on Sunday when the employers require it.” He then poses the rhetorical question of whether British workers have to compete with those working in labour camps for British shipbuilding to be able to survive.
All voiceovers and interviews are intercut with shots of the Johanna Oldendorff Gibraltar on the Wear.
The film cuts to Pat Aldridge, wife of the welder, speaking about the burden of paying bills, which allows us an insight into the low wages of a shipbuilder.
[Music: Sunderland Boys by Lindisfarne]
There is an interview with shipwright, Norman Hall, and Mike Eilliot on a quayside, with dockyards in the background. Norman gestures to several ‘tremendously sophisticated vessels’ behind him, oil tankers which are being built for export. The interviewee suggests that the danger of losing priceless skills as a result of decline would be "criminal." Various shots record the vessels under construction at different shipyards.
Dave Aldridge expands on the conditions requiring inter-changeability of labour, essentially pointing out that Unions have had to organise skills to be shared between different industries so as to prevent further job losses. Several commentators, including Peter Callaghan, then express concerns about sub-contract labour introduced by management and the perils of an industry propped up by a ‘free market’ supply of casual labour. Strike action, it is suggested, is inevitable in these circumstances.
[Music: ‘Sunderland Boys’ by Lindisfarne]
Travelling shot downriver passing many of the shipyards with various ships in berths under repair or construction.
Norman Hall laments the irrevocable loss of essential skills during closures, and the use of sub-contractors to force redundancies on permanent workers.
Tracking shot from river of Lanes shipyard, which has just been closed.
Dave Aldridge further explains the low morale which it appears, is being systematically reduced in order to encourage voluntary redundancies. Pat Aldridge talks about the loss of pride and resulting state of living following redundancy. She talks about the differences in house prices in London and Sunderland. Moving to jobs in other locations present difficulties, including the disparity in wages, the lack of skilled positions. Another worker says ‘you can’t mothball skills’.
Sir Edward Du Cann MP (Conservative), Chairman of the All Party Committee on Maritime Affairs, re-iterates this: “You can’t put skills on ice …”
Norman Hall and Mike Elliot stroll through the site of a former shipyard, once Bartram’s South Dock, now cleared, as Norman reminisces about some of the enjoyable times he had working at the yard. There is a quick montage of old photographs and slides he shows, while the two chat. Includes photos of Brian McCarthy having a nude dinnertime dip in the sea and other colleagues relaxing during breaks and as recreation.
[Music: Shipbuilding by Elvis Costello & the Attractions]
Various travelling shots of the derelict and working shipyard structures include a sign propped up amid steel structures and wooden slabs that reads "Save Our Shipyards."
A description of the myriad of jobs and businesses connected to shipbuilding that will decline, and how the communities will decline.
Street views of Sunderland are intercut with Pat Aldridge, who articulates her sadness at the impact on the community and the town as a whole, the creation of ghost towns. Three lads swing on a metal bar on a former shipyard site, now derelict.
Norman Hall proposes a drive towards public sector orders in which old ships can be replaced. Interviews continue describing the fight left in British shipbuilding, the ways competition could be continued in the British industry and how a sensible government would encourage this.
Footage along the river follows as a launch is prepared. There are shots of council flats, youths gathered on the balcony, graffiti there including ‘East End Boys Street’. These correspond with the commentary expressing the concern for future generations as the shipyards no longer provide a source of employment. An enormous ship, the ITM Challenger, is launched and observed by people gathered in the street and local residents from tenement block balconies.
[Music: Shipbuilding by Elvis Costello & the Attractions]
The ITM Challenger launches successfully, the tugboats (Cragsider for one) at the ready. A general view of the shipyard cranes at sunset ends the film.
End credits:
This film featured:
Dave Aldrich, Pat Aldrich, Peter Callaghan, Sir Edward du Cann, MP, Bob Clay, MP, Norman Hall, Danny Morgan, Brian Tate
Title: Interviews with employees were shot during the 1986 October works holiday. Management refused permission to film inside the yard without the power of veto.
Credits: Special thanks to the workers at Austin and Pickersgill’s shipyard and the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. Sunderland Port Authority. Les Abrahams. Murray Martin. The Artists Agency
Credits:
Still photos Norman Hall
Music:
Sunderland Boys Lindisfarne
Shipbuilding Elvis Costelloe
Interviewer Mike Elliott
Production Manager Tony Harrild
Credits: Camera Roger Schindler
Assistant Chris Hunt
Additional Camera Sarah Shaw
Pete Woodhouse
Electrician Charlie Titchmarsh
Credits: Sound Graham Denman
Eric Woodward
Digby Rumsey
Dubbing Mixer Colin Martin
Credits: Editor Alan Mackay
Assistant Sean Mackenzie
Credits: Produced by David Eadington and Sally Constant
Credits: Written and directed by Tom Pickard
Credits: A Siren Film and Video Co-op Production For Channel 4
©Channel Four Television 1987
Context
On the cultural filmmaking scene of the late ‘60s, a new model of ‘counter-cinema’ emerged with politically-engaged collectives such as Cinema Action inspired by the French workers’ strikes and heady days of the Paris student uprising in May 1968. This explosive protest and critique of modernity, not easily contained by traditional ideological status quos of the left or right, rippled out through space and time in diverse rebellions and protests, from squatting and the women’s movement to...
On the cultural filmmaking scene of the late ‘60s, a new model of ‘counter-cinema’ emerged with politically-engaged collectives such as Cinema Action inspired by the French workers’ strikes and heady days of the Paris student uprising in May 1968. This explosive protest and critique of modernity, not easily contained by traditional ideological status quos of the left or right, rippled out through space and time in diverse rebellions and protests, from squatting and the women’s movement to punk rock and Occupy.
The spirit and potential of the events of ’68 lived on in a British network of financially precarious, indie activist film workshops and collectives that evolved during the economic recession of the 1970s and early ‘80s. In the north east these included Trade Films, Swingbridge, A19, the Amber Film Collective (whose first film in 1968 before re-locating to Newcastle was titled All You Need Is Dynamite) and Middlesbrough-based cooperative Siren Film & Video, set up in 1986 by a group of professional filmmakers to work in an energised independent sector. Co-founder David Eadington also worked on a number of Amber projects, having once studied with founder members Murray Martin and Graham Denman at Teesside College of Art. One intellectual spark for the ‘failed’ revolutionary events of ’68 might be found in Guy Debord’s theoretical text The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and the ‘organisation’ Situationist International (SI), an alliance of European avant-garde artists, writers, poets and political theorists whose goal was to dismantle capitalism through revolutionising everyday life. At moments of conflict and crisis the words of Raoul Vaneigem, another powerful Situationist voice, still ring true: “In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.” British film collectives were frequently embedded in the working class communities, which they sought to document. There was a genuine commitment to enabling community involvement and self-expression, often foregrounding the process of filmmaking rather than the product. Cinema Action’s well-known class struggle: film from the clyde was filmed from the ‘inside’ during the occupation and work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders from July 1971 to October 1972, the signs of British shipbuilding’s demise already in the air. Cooperation between workshops was common, for example in the counter-propaganda of films on the miners’ strike of 1984-85 in The Miners’ Campaign Tape, made to raise funds for the National Union of Miners (Trade Films co-produced with Platform Films) and winner of the 1985 Grierson Award at the British Film Institute. Siren’s collaboration with Leftist Tyneside poet, writer, director Tom Pickard on the £50,000 documentary We Make Ships draws on the tradition of social realism but channels the spirit of the May ’68 protests. As with much of the independent filmmaking of the era, the film challenges the erosion of regional and class identities, the break-up of traditional industries and the fractures in domestic and social life as a result of divisive Thatcherite policies. It lays bare the casualization of labour, the dissolution of old craft demarcations, workers’ rights and trade union powers as the shadow of a high tech future is already changing the physical graft of shipbuilding and its associated trades on Wearside. Elvis Costello’s slow, haunting anti-war song Shipbuilding provides an ironic soundtrack to the film, wedding the recent Falklands conflict to a last stand for struggling shipyards in Sunderland, the words mourning ‘the predicament of a British working class that had recently become expendable both on the battlefield and off it.’ ‘It’s no [sic] a question of pride any longer. It’s more a question of survival ...’ states one third-generation Sunderland shipbuilder with sons at the Austin & Pickersgill yard in one of the many recorded interviews that structure the film as oral history. After a six month stint as writer-in-residence at Austin & Pickersgill, Pickard invited shipyard workers and their families to tell the story as he recorded ‘the death throes of Sunderland, once the biggest ship-building town in the world’. Refused permission by managers to film inside the shipyards, the intended celebration of workers’ skills became instead a partisan polemic and condemnation of the rundown of north east shipbuilding sanctioned by Conservative politics. ‘But they don’t seem to want you to work anymore. They want you to be redundant’ one worker complains, incredulous and demoralised equally. Older shipbuilders wander about the wastelands beside the Wear where shipyards once stood, forlornly, looking back to the days when the river was teaming with ships and there was dignity, pride and camaraderie in the work, tough and dangerous as it was, snapshots of colleagues in the past held up to the camera as evidence. In support of the British shipbuilding industry, there are contributions from Bob Clay, Labour MP for Sunderland North, and old Tory Sir Edward Du Cann, chairman of the All Party Marine Affairs Committee, who complains “You can’t mothball skills”, a sentiment frequently echoed over the coming decades as the traditional backbone of British industry, from coal mining and shipbuilding to steel, crumbled. The last ships were built at A&P berths in 1988 ending 600 years of shipbuilding on the River Wear. Paradoxically, the rise (and fall) of radical independent film and video workshops (and, in fact, the earliest incarnation of North East Film Archive initiated by Trade Films as Northern Film & TV Archive) is closely related to the creation in 1982 of a quasi trade union agreement. The ACTT Workshop Declaration was negotiated between the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians, the main British broadcast union (now BECTU), cultural funding agencies such as the British Film Institute and the Regional Arts Association and, importantly, the new Channel 4 television station with its remit to support innovative broadcasting. As a condition of the Declaration, franchised workshops, with a focus on ethnic diversity and local issues, operated a model of ‘integrative practise’, which included distribution, exhibition, training, archive work and the provision of film and video equipment, along with producing work outside the mainstream of film and television. As Michael Kustow, Commissioning Editor for Arts, wrote at the time, Channel 4 were receptive to experimental work that mixed genres and would 'wrong foot people into illumination'. We Make Ships, broadcast on Channel Four’s late-night slot The Eleventh Hour in 1987, was one beneficiary of the Workshop Declaration in the north east. The film premiered at Amber’s Side Cinema in Newcastle, screened to a small audience that included the “shipyard stars”. After Pickard’s play about the Jarrow March, Left Over People, was banned by the BBC as it shone a unfavourable light on the Conservatives and Margaret Thatcher during an election year, the poet, once destined for a welding job in the shipyards as a teenager before an industry slump, was relieved that a large TV audience would see this film and be made aware of the contemporary crisis documented, which he viewed in parallel with the 1930s depression in the north east. hoyoot was the title of a retrospective collection of Pickard’s poems and songs published in 2014. For a poet and political activist who writes by ear, with a passion for the musical quality of local dialect and song, this Geordie word and its meanings must resonate through turbulent times. The word is used to describe a wedding ritual of scattering pennies for children from a bride and groom’s car, but alternatively means ‘To throw out’ and ‘to make redundant’. Or, perhaps, one last word for the human cost documented in We Make Ships. References: http://www.cinemaaction.co.uk/roguereels/ Roberts, Tom “1982: The ACTT Workshop Declaration provides financial security and new audiences for independent film and video workshops” https://www.luxonline.org.uk/histories/1980-1989/actt_declaration.html Perry, Colin “Experimental TV's Long Revolution” Afterall / Online 6 August 2010 https://www.afterall.org/online/bright-eyes Cranston, Ros “Tales from the Shipyard” Screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1406948/index.html Debord, Guy “The Use of Stolen Films” Bureau of Public Secrets 1989 http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/stolen-films.htm Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism; Edited by Lester D. Friedman, Wallflower Press, 2007 Sandall, Robert “The Lasting Legacy of Shipbuilding” The Telegraph, 5 April, 2007 Vincent, Sally “A Town Sold Down the River” Today, 24 February, 1987 Pratt, Steve “The Shipbuilders: Event!” The Northern Echo, 20 February, 1987 “No Need for Permission: Tom Pickard talks to Chris McCabe about poetry and political activism” Poetry London https://poetrylondon.co.uk/no-need-for-permission-tom-pickard-talks-to-chris-mccabe-about-poetry-and-political-activism/ |
