Even so, CMAL had to intervene further to make sure Ferguson’s could be justified as the winning bidder. The scoring system allocated points on two scales, quality and price, and original designs submitted by Ferguson’s measured poorly on the second – they were the most expensive – with no compensating high score on the first. Conversations between CMAL and Ferguson’s produced a series of adjustments that gave the shipyard 36.5 points out of 50 for cost and 38 out of 50 for quality. It was still the most expensive, but a ten-point advantage for quality made it the overall winner – the ‘preferred bidder’.

Stanley Spencer lived on the edge of Clune Park in 1944; one of its tenements appears in a picture he painted from his window. He was in Port Glasgow as an official war artist, commissioned to depict Clyde shipbuilding’s war effort, producing a memorable series of long, narrow canvasses that showed the workers at Lithgow’s yard lit by the flames of their furnaces and oxyacetylene torches and cramped awkwardly – almost like miners in a seam – as they toiled to make a ship from the confusion of its parts. In these pictures, building a ship is a religious act. When he began to tire of shipbuilding (and shipbuilding of him – James Lithgow had imagined more conventional pictures of his products), Spencer found Christ in the municipal cemetery near his lodgings.He was political but never polemical, his column-writing notable more for its accumulation of telling detail than the force of his opinions. He never forgot that he was first and foremost a reporter, and he wrote in a way that accorded the reader respect and invariably gave pleasure. He once observed that “good reporters matter in the media above all else, because without them we can never get near to confidently knowing the truth of an event.” As Hobbs later told the audit committee, once you put a ship in the water, everything you do to it costs more money. When I spoke to him, McColl was keen to point to these as examples of the government ‘rushing … to get [things] out for PR reasons’. But the timing held important benefits for him, too. When he gave evidence to the audit committee seven years later, the convener, the Labour MSP Richard Leonard, suggested to McColl that the announcement of Ferguson’s as the preferred bidder ‘must have strengthened your hand in any negotiations that were taking place’. McColl disagreed: subsequent negotiations had taken longer than he had expected – they had, he implied, been difficult. Leonard pressed him: He started as a trainee journalist at the Glasgow Herald in 1965, before moving to London in 1970 to join the Sunday Times and then joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. He had been a Guardian columnist for the past 15 years. Does it matter? ‘It happens all the time,’ people say, implying that manufacturing industry and governments everywhere will sometimes transgress the rules of procurement, either out of personal corruption or to defend their version of the national interest. In Scotland, there is also the temptation to argue that the Scottish government’s behaviour in Port Glasgow barely registers on a scale of political mistakes and misdemeanours that also includes the Westminster government’s present ruination of the British economy.

N one​ of this did much good in the long term. By 2019, relations between the two had broken down, and construction work had come to a near standstill. In early summer that year, CMAL reported to the steering group at Transport Scotland that both ships were years away from delivery; that no more than six people were working on vessel 801 and no more than two people on vessel 802 at any one time. In 1948, Ian married Jane, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. After a divorce, he married Elizabeth in 1972 and had a son. The last three decades of his life were a period of particular contentment, living with them in a beautiful house in Fen Ditton, Cambridge. He is survived by Elizabeth and his children.

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In 2006 the routes went out to tender and one of CalMac’s offshoots won. A year later, in response to an inquiry from the SNP MEP Alyn Smith, the European transport commissioner Jacques Barrot said that if the Altmark principles applied, CalMac’s subsidy would not be regarded as state aid. He made it clear to a delegation of Highland councillors that he thought the Altmark principles did indeed apply. I consider myself numerate, solvent and in full possession of my faculties. If I am struggling to cope, what of those less fortunate?

Oliver Luft (28 November 2008). "Timeline: a history of the Independent newspapers – from City Road to Kensington via 'Reservoir Dogs' | Media". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 March 2016. I’ve never stopped thinking about this article, written by Ian in 2016. It is a short masterpiece about national identity, and how the then-recent vote for Brexit had changed how he felt about his Britishness and his Scottishness. Its emotional power is heightened by a touching and unexpected anecdote about his family’s relationship with a German prisoner of war he never met. Ian’s sense of bitter betrayal at the end of the piece makes you shiver, with a sense of dread. Katharine Viner, editor, the Guardian ‘What is sometimes overlooked is what a brilliant reporter and researcher he was’ Before his death, he was preparing a book about the Clyde, helped by (among others) the actor Bill Paterson, a native Clydesider in awe, in their talks, of Ian’s grasp of detail and meaning. Trying to find the birthplace of George Orwell – in Motihari, in Bihar state – he arrives with a headache, in part through re-reading 1984 on the bumpy car journey, observing (an offence against received intellectual opinion) that “as a novel it’s poor, as a prophecy it’s wrong, as an estimate of the human spirit it’s unforgivably bleak”.

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It was obvious by the late 1950s that competition from shipyards abroad using more modern methods would lead to the end of British yards. As they drifted towards unproductivity, there was a rare burst of resistance when in 1960 we apprentices undertook a successful six-week strike to gain day-release so that we could attend technical college. The government of the time had been content to leave industrial training to employers, but in 1963 a bill was passed to create industrial training boards funded by a levy on employers in all sectors. Costs could be recouped by employers when training was provided. In 1971, the British Oxygen Company funded my studies, including an annual week’s study leave, from the levy. Formed in 1886, BOC is one of Britain’s oldest industrial companies; it is now owned by the German Linde Group. For a timid undergraduate coming up to Pembroke College in 1969 to read English, the first meeting with Ian was something to be approached with trepidation. Already established with a high reputation from his early book Augustan Satire (1952), his volume in the Oxford History of English Literature covering the late Romatic period (1963), and his masterful Keats and the Mirror of Art (1967), he was known to be a rigorous and demanding teacher. He was indeed that, but he was a good and kindly one, too, and during my time at Pembroke, as both an undergraduate and postgraduate, he was supportive, helpful and wise, as well as exacting. While he believed in the highest academic standards, he had a genial smile, a warm Scottish brogue, an endearing nervous tic, and always offered a generous welcome.

He was married, first, to Aparna Bagchi. That marriage was dissolved in 1992, and he is survived by his second wife, Lindy Sharpe, and by their daughter and son. He wrote for the Observer and Vanity Fair before joining the team that created the Independent on Sunday, which he edited from 1991 to 1995. From there he moved to the editor’s chair at literary magazine Granta, where he remained until 2007. When we were young, he took me to that bridge. What I remember is the jargon. New numbers were ‘copped’. A cry of ‘Manny peg’ meant a train had been signalled for Manchester. ‘Coffee Pots’ were elderly Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway goods engines. ‘Ju-Jubes’ were Jubilees, a class that entered service during the 25th anniversary of George V’s accession and whose engines were named after imperial possessions, famous warships and English heroes. The jargon made you part of the country’s largest and least violent gang, the drifts of boys of all ages and social classes who gathered at the edge of cuttings, the ends of platforms and the mouths of tunnels: the fellowship of the number and the name. By 1955, the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club had 230,000 members, and Allan was publishing lists of almost every mechanical moving object (I’m not sure about tractors) that could be seen on land, sea and air, devoting ABC booklets to British Liners, British Tugs, British Warships, British Airliners, British Buses and Trolleybuses, sometimes narrowing the field to sub-groups such as London Transport, Clyde Pleasure Steamers and the Battleships of World War One. There were specialist magazines – Trains Illustrated was one – as well as more ambitious books that had narratives rather than lists. He took over other small publishers; he started a travel business and took over a car dealership; he moved into offices at Shepperton in the West London suburbs, where he installed a vintage Pullman car as the company boardroom. His publishing output now had unusual specialisms that included masonic rituals: Allan was a member of three local lodges and an officer in the United Grand Lodge of England, where he served as Past Junior Grand Deacon from 1992 until his death in 2015, a day before his 93rd birthday. Shipbuilding changed as it contracted. His special interest was outfitting – the pieces that were added to the fundamental structure of hull, superstructure and engines – which was done in-house when the yards were busy enough to employ their own carpenters, electricians and plumbers. But now the work was outsourced to subcontractors who ‘like to add on the extras’. When ships lost money for their builders, it tended to be in the outfitting. Other losses were more particular to Ferguson’s. ‘In the old days you could talk to each other about problems you’d come across and good ways to fix them. I liked learning from people and I liked imparting knowledge to others, and for them to at least consider that I might be right.’ The mood in Ferguson’s was more confrontational – the ‘new broom syndrome’, he said. ‘They built these fancy big new offices while the guys working outside made do with portacabins, which had no heating and where you couldn’t even boil a kettle.’ There was the lesson of the midships. ‘There were boxes everywhere. It’s easy to build boxes, but they got in the way, they often needed reworking later, and we needed to build other things first.’ In a local economy now based around call centres and warehousing, apprenticeships were popular: a return to ‘proper skills’, secure employment, good wages – dignity. In 2016, Ferguson’s promised to hire 150 apprentices, but struggled to find skilled workers who could tutor them. Eastern Europe offered an answer, but when Eastern Europeans were hired and accommodation found for them, there was some local dismay, as if a patriotic project had been betrayed. The company’s then managing director, Liam Campbell, explained that ‘we get the benefit of the ingenuity of nationals from other countries who have been immersed in shipbuilding innovation for the last fifteen years where we have missed out. This exposes our workforce and apprentices to modern shipbuilding techniques, and will put us in a more competitive position in the years to come.’ In other words, Port Glasgow had to be taught how to build ships all over again. Some columnists and opposition politicians seemed to imagine a Scotland in which building ferries was an ordinary thing, insignificant compared to building, say, the QE2 or the Forth Bridge. But it isn’t ordinary. Outside defence contracts, Scotland builds almost nothing. Cars, locomotives, bridges, oil rigs, wind turbines, planes, fish-farm boats: the essential mechanics of the Scottish economy are all made elsewhere. In this context, two ferries were quite a big deal.And, deep down, everyone in the SNP (outside of the Palace Guard) and everyone in Scotland who is actually paying attention knows that Ms. Sturgeon's legacy is the emptying out of that hope. RSL Fellows (16 March 2016). "Royal Society of Literature» Current RSL Fellows". Rsliterature.org . Retrieved 20 March 2016. The writer and former Observer foreign correspondent Neal Ascherson said: “We have lost one of our great journalists, a writer of enchanting imagination and at the same time a reporter rigidly scrupulous in his insistence on fact. Some of the complaints were reasonable, others less so. The island of Colonsay had nine sailings to and from the mainland every month, when the steamer called on its journey between Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides. In 1931, Colonsay had a population of 232 and the government estimated the average traffic per trip totalled half a dozen passengers and a few dozen boxes of rabbits and lobsters. Nevertheless, Colonsay’s owner, Lord Strathcona, a former Tory minister, consistently agitated for more steamer calls. John Lorne Campbell, described by Andrew Clark as ‘the ever-whining proprietor of Canna’, more often remembered as a historian and folklorist, was outraged when MacBrayne’s substituted a smaller boat on the service to the Small Isles. Mallaig, the mainland port, was only two and half hours away and Canna’s population was 24, but Campbell felt they deserved the cabins and the full catering service offered by the previous vessel. The mollifying response, Clark writes, ‘was the provision of soup’. Chancellor, Alexander (27 August 2011). "Diary – Alexander Chancellor". The Spectator . Retrieved 29 October 2022.