Like Weir Pumps, Clyde Blowers had its origins in steam technology. It manufactured a device that could blow soot from the boilers of steam engines – in locomotives, ships, factories and power stations – without the boilers having to be shut down. The ship or the factory could continue, the flow of steam to its engines unaffected. ‘Most of the Clyde-built ships had Clyde Blowers in them, including the royal yacht Britannia,’ McColl told me when I spoke to him in May, although by the time he bought the company its focus had shifted to coal-fired power stations. In 1992, it was the smallest of eight similar firms scattered across the world. In the following five years, McColl bought six of the other seven. ‘We ended up with 60 per cent of the world market and that included a very big market in China, where we set up a very successful factory,’ he said. ‘When I bought Clyde Blowers we were making 600 soot blowers a year. When we sold the Chinese factory, it was doing 6000 a month.’

The ferries were busier than they had ever been, thanks to a decision by the Scottish government to implement the Road Equivalent Tariff (RET), which used a formula linking ferry fares to the cost of road transport over an equivalent distance. RET has its origins in the ferries that cross the Norwegian fjords and was first mooted in Scotland in the 1960s by the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB), originally, Clark writes, ‘to neutralise decades of islander complaints about MacBrayne’s freight charges’, and later and more broadly to make the islands cheaper to access, and in that way to level up the economic gap between island and mainland living. The HIDB formally proposed the scheme to the Westminster government in 1974, to have it rejected by successive UK administrations, Tory and Labour, for the next 25 years. RET-based fares would cover only a quarter of the operating cost. The Scottish Office minister Bruce Millan reflected conventional political opinion when he argued in 1975 that the fares needed to be anchored in some economic reality or the subsidies would be uncontrollable.Nettles, willowherbs, brambles: nothing suggested that ocean-going tablecloths had once been woven there or a girl's cheese sandwiches had warmed on the hob. In 1959, Mathewson's end hadn't been so long ago – 1930 was closer to 1959 than 1959 is to now – but such complete ruination, weeds replacing work, was one of the things that made my parents and so many others of that place and generation seem like survivors from a previous British age. Of course, nobody then had any idea of how much of this there was to come.

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 moved through every one of his pieces, in damp Indian basements, toilets with knitted toilet-roll cover, his own living room – careful, querying, gentle but acutely tuned for falsities, contradictions, omissions, keeping the point waiting until the scaffolding of the piece is erected. It is the journalist as contemporary shaper of a Socratic dialogue, always kindly, yet with a “but what about…?” ever ready, to probe through to deeper revelations. No other British journalist was working at that level and he was still working when he died. Why were Scottish ministers and their officials so determined not to try to use the Altmark ruling to avoid the costly and disruptive tendering process? When the SNP took over in 2007, its ministers also accepted that there was no option but to go down the tendering route. One can’t help but think CalMac’s recent history might have been a bit happier had that advice been robustly challenged. Joking apart, the IMF visitation of 1976 is still reliably posted as the ultimate failure of a Labour government. In fact, the IMF-precipitating episode of 1976 was sparked by someone at the Treasury, never identified, selling pounds for dollars in the wake of the cuts imposed and recovery achieved in 1975 by the chancellor, Denis Healey. Derek Mitchell, then permanent secretary at the Treasury, would later tell me that the entire 1976 episode, IMF and all, had been ‘strictly a headline crisis’. Indeed as the crisis broke, the scarcely pinko Investors Chronicle had asked: ‘why now, when the real crisis was last year?’ 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’.So CMAL had signed off the contract without recommending it. How had this happened? Transport Scotland knew what ministers wanted; ministers knew they needed Transport Scotland’s approval; CMAL’s objections had been quietened by the letter of comfort. There was something almost Johnsonian about it – Let’s Get Ferries Done! The cemetery opened in 1859, when the dead of Port Glasgow outgrew their old kirkyards and could no longer be dependably counted as Presbyterians. Generations of shipyard workers have been buried here, their lives often shortened by too many shifts in the cold and rain, or squalid housing, or too much drink, or a more 20th-century condition, mesothelioma, which is caused by exposure to asbestos and has a particular prevalence in old shipbuilding towns. But as the draughtman said, ‘it’s not just bodies that die, the skills and the memory of the skills die with them.’ Spencer never seems to have considered that aspect of the resurrection: that it would be useful as well as joyful, this rebirth of so much skill in a land that had lost it. It was pleasant to imagine the resurrected brushing off the earth and reaching for their tools, the just with the unjust, the welder with the fitter, the draughtsman and the joiner, the hauder-on and the putter-in. 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.

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. O n​ a wet and windy Saturday in October a few regulars of the Ian Allan Book and Model Shop gathered inside the premises for the last time. The shop – on Lower Marsh, behind Waterloo Station – would soon be a memory, like many things to do with the railway hobby. One or two customers chatted to the soon to be redundant staff. Others encouraged a yappy terrier to chase a tennis ball across the stretches of empty carpet where the display cases used to be. Most of us did as we had always done and leafed through books and put them down again: men who, perhaps like those in the fetish shop across the street, had deep and almost unreachable reasons for their interests. 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. In 1979 he married Aparna Bagchi; they divorced in 1992. At the Independent on Sunday he met Lindy Sharpe: they became partners, had two children, Bella and Alex, then married in 1998 – a close, mutually stimulating, marriage. The three survive him, along with Harry. 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’.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. As Ian points out, this mess is ongoing - and people trying to make a living, and carve out a decent life, are dealing with the government's sheer indifference 'all the time'.

RSL Fellows (16 March 2016). "Royal Society of Literature» Current RSL Fellows". Rsliterature.org . Retrieved 20 March 2016. McNeill: We became aware that FMEL could not provide a Clyde Blowers Capital guarantee on 21 August 2015. We were not aware until about 25 September that it was also having problems producing a guarantee from a bank or an insurance company, and it gave its final position in relation to that on 7 October, by which time it was already the preferred bidder and we had stood down the other bidders. 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’

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He won a number of accolades throughout his career, including reporter of the year at the British Press awards in 1988 and editor of the year at Newspaper Industry awards in 1993. Charles III is a disappointment. Many thought he would be unable to restrain himself from meddling in politics and expressing his contentious opinions on architecture, education and medicine. But he has made it clear that he accepts the restraints of his new role. 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. As Hobbs later told the audit committee, once you put a ship in the water, everything you do to it costs more money. 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.