His heart was pounding and his throat dry.”Did the nightshift leave their notices?” he asked the guard.”Oh aye, Jamie. They’re all in boxes,” he replied.Down in London, Jamie and his colleagues handed over the unopened redundancy offers and headed into another meeting with Kvaerner. The message from the Norwegians was straightforward: the unions would have to pressurise the politicians so that they in turn pressurised GEC into making a deal If they could do that, then Kvaerner would move as well. Afterwards the union men met Gus Macdonald and other senior Labour politicians and passed on the message: it was time to really press GEC.There was now just one week to the deadline. At a mass meeting in the yard the following day, Jamie stood up and told the workers yet again that a deal could be done.

But by 13 July nothing had been signed and management said they’d be issuing compulsory redundancy notices to 241 men – the beginning of the end The atmosphere in the yard was worsening. That afternoon the supervisors went around handing out the redundancy notices to the selected men Jamie’s deputy John Brown was among them. Somebody who met him that afternoon said he was shell-shocked, sitting there in the office, wondering what to do with the rest of his life.In Jamie’s kitchen, Isabel was telling him he’d done his best If it all went wrong, he wasn’t to blame himself And then at around half-past seven the phone rang It was the Press Association from London There was a deal A genuine, cast-iron agreement. There would be 97 redundancies but the majority would be voluntary The threat of mass lay-offs was gone. “Absolute joy!” noted Jamie in his diary.When John Brown got the news from the radio that evening, he sat in his kitchen and wondered what to feel His name was on a list of 97 men to be made redundant. All the fear and frustration of that fighting year coursed through him as he tried to reconcile his happiness for the others with fear about his own future.He was in the yard a few days later when the supervisor came up with some good news.

Another man had volunteered to take redundancy in his place – his job was saved. Though he knew he should feel happy, John felt empty and exhausted.The Kvaerner yard and the jobs were sold for £2.5m. It was the kind of money you would pay for a big house in a fashionable part of London. The following day Jamie was driving down the Govan Road, that broken spine of a community along which defeated men had been tramping in retreat for decades, when he noticed something different about the figures walking in the midsummer morning. “You could see from the way they were walking, from their body language It was a confident walk,” he said.

“There were guys coming up all morning saying ‘Well done, Jamie’, and I said to them: ‘Savour this day, lads. We’ve done something incredible.’”The men of Govan took control of their lives. And they took control of the political agenda in a way that people like them hadn’t managed to do for decades They did it without strikes or sit-ins. They kept doing their jobs, they showed potential buyers that this was a workforce committed to making the yard a viable enterprise again. They pressurised politicians, they used the media as a weapon to shame, embarrass and flatter. They took a simple proposition – that people had a right to the dignity of work – and never let go of it.