Zaha Hadid’s Riverside building is an experience by itself – but what of the purpose for which it was built – the inside story, Continue reading
Tag Archives: Govan
Riverside Transport Museum: playing on Clydeside
It’s a scribble in the sky – a confident one. It challenges and reflects the world around it. It curves, swoops, Continue reading
HMS Diamond to visit Aberdeen on 11th February 2011
HMS Diamond is the third of the six Type 45 – or Daring class – destroyers, Continue reading
Dragon, 4th Type 45 destroyer, completes first sea trials
Dragon, the fourth of the Type 45 destroyers, the Daring class, has now completed her first full sea trials Continue reading
40% of HMS Dauntless doesn’t work
The Clydebuilt part’s OK, though, but £400 million of the Type 45 destroyer, Continue reading
HMS Defender to launch today from BVT Govan yard
Defender is the 5th of the 6 new Type 45 – or Daring class – Continue reading
Tormod: if you never watch television again…
… make sure you see this first: 24th September at 9.00pm on BBC ALBA. Continue reading
Lochgilphead and Helensburgh connections with the famous Argyll motor car
The legendary Argyll cars were built in two periods: 1899-1932 and 1976 to around 1990.
It all began with Helensburgh engineer, Alex Govan (sometimes called Alex Govern) in 1899 in his Hozier Engineering Company. It worked its way up with new models launched around every two years, each around 2hp stronger than the last. The first car – the Argyll Voiturette – was a 2 3/4 hp De Dion engine. By 1903, after a series of increasingly powerful models, the company produced a 10hp twin-engined version whose radiator tubes formed the sides of the hood.
The company became Scotland’s biggest marque and in 1905 moved into the custom built terracotta Argyll Motor Works in Alexandria, near the southern end of Loch Lomond. This building, for the now Argyll Motors Ltd, is described in the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) guide as ‘the most extraordinary industrial palace in Scotland’.
The company was geared up for production on a scale similar to the Henry Ford Motor Company’s when Alex Govan died in 1907 – a blow to the heart from which the business did not recover. It went into liquidation in 1908.
Production restarted in 1910 with the company renamed as Argyll Ltd. It launched a new series of models – the renowned Flying Fifteen (picture above) and a six cylinder monster. Another model, the 12/14 was sold as a taxi, even being exported to New York. The innovative company saw the introduction of four-wheel brakes, the single sleeve valve engine developed by company director, Baillie P Burt and Burt McCollum engines.
In 1913, at the Brooklands race track in Surrey in the south of England, an Argyll car broke thirteen world records and twenty-eight Brooklands track records in a single day. But even this unparallelled achievement did not bring commercial success. There were costly legal battles over Burt’s patents and in 1914 the shareholders lost their confidence. No new backing was forthcoming and the company went into liquidation for the second time in 1914. The factory was sold to the Royal Navy 1914 for wartime torpedo production later that year.
A modest volume of car production resumed at the company’s early Bridgeton Works, led by John Brimlow who had formerly been in charge of repairs. Brimlow did not just restart production. He took the company back to its traditions with a pre-war 15·9 hp model with the addition of an electric starter but with the respected Burt McCollum engine. This, however, did not sell in any great volume.
The company produced the 12/40 sports model in 1926, took a stand at the London Motor Show in 1927 and produced its last cars in 1928, still available until another and far more long lasting closure in 1932.
The next reincarnation began in 1976 with a new manufacturing company making a mid-engined sports car, the Argyll GT at Manse Brae in Lochgilphead. This company was founded by Bob Henderson, a former Mini racer and turbocharger expert.
The company’s new car was named after the original Argyll of 1898, as a tribute to one of the investors in Henderson’s enterprise, whose grandfather had worked in the Argyll factory at Alexandria.
The only model this company ever made was the Argyll GT, using components from other manufacturers. Very few were manufactured. Sales were disappointingly small because the car had a limited appeal and this company turned up its toes around 1990.
See also:
- The story of the Argyll Company
- Argyll Motors
- Argyll Turbo GT
- The Minnow Fish Carburettor and Bob Henderson
The photograph above, of the Argyll Flying Fifteen, is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
Appin Forest provides larch for a boat to be built by GalGael in Govan
The GalGael Trust based in Glasgow’s Govan, formed in the 1990s, is a charitable community project that lays out a route back to work for people with addictions or who have not worked for a long time. They learn to build and sail wooden boats.
One of the problems the project faces is getting supplies of the right timber to build the boats. Last week they had two lorry loads of timber delivered, courtesy of Appin Forest in north Argyll.
How did this come about? Well, the Galgael people have learned not to be backward about coming forward. They asked former Environment Minister, Michael Russell, if he could help them get timber supplies and, as Tam McGarvey from GalGael puts it, Mr Russell ‘came good’. He put them in touch with the Appin Forest people, leading to the 50 tonnes of timber just delivered.
Amongst the delivery were a dozen fully mature and good quality larch trees – ideal for boatbulding and described by GalGael’s Tim Norman as: ‘…the kind that every traditional boat builder in Scotland is after. And there was some oak for the keel and some Sitka Spruce for oars and the like. You could build anything from a boat to a house with this amount of wood’.
The GalGael trainees will now get to grips with the entire timber processing sequence from the forest to the workshop to the Clyde.
This is an inspirational project in so many ways. Michael Russell and Appin Forest will be remembered as the bow of the boat to come cleaves the waters of Scotland’s west coast.
Alexander Robertson & Sons, America’s Cup Yachtbuilders at Sandbank on the Holy Loch near Dunoon
A big player in Argyll’s nautical history was the boatbuilding business at Sandbank on the Holy Loch north of Dunoon which was run by Alexander Robertson and his sons.
Robertson’s parents (his father was a fisherman from the Isle of Skye) moved from Inverkip, where he was born, to Sandbank to take over the Post Office there. Young Alexander was apprenticed as a boatbuilder in Dunoon then in Govan.
In 1876, when he was 25, he began building small wooden boats at his Sandbank workshop, in partnership with Daniel Kerr. Two years later that partnership broke up but Robertson went on to expand the business in bigger premises. He was still Chairman of the company in 1935, two years before he died.
He started by designing himself but later employed many of the leading designers of the day to work on, for example, the 12 metre and 15 metre racing yachts which made the firm its name. The business was obviously a major employer in the area – particularly in its heyday in the early 1900s.
Naturally he was a multi-tasking bigwig in Cowal and in Argyll – representing Cowal on Argyll County Council; being a Parish Councillor; appointed as a Justice of the Peace; being a member of the local School Board; acting as director of Dunoon District Cottage Hospital and being on the Board of Management of the Parish Church.
The company built the first 15 metre racing yacht – the Shimna, in 1907, designed by the famous William Fife.
It built over 55 boats in Britain’s preparations for the First World War. It managed to stay in business during the Great Depression of the mid-1930s as rich businessmen went in for a bout of highly conspicuous consumption by building and racing yachts on the Clyde. (Yacht racing is fairly, if modestly, described as ‘standing in a shower tearing up £100 notes.).
Between the wars, as well as racing yachts for the depressions-proof, the company built lifeboats. It got its first RNLI lifeboat order in 1935. This was for the Charlotte Elizabeth, the first motor-powered lifeboat launched in Scotland, later stationed at Port Askaig, in Argyll’s Isle of Islay. Robertson’s built and maintained ten more lifeboats and also built a series of tenders to service larger boats being built further up the Clyde.
It was during this period that Robertson’s built the Ron, later renamed Ron of Argyll on which For Argyll has published a companion article to this one. Ron was – and is – a 15 metre ketch designed by J A McCallum in 1928. She was followed by Southern Cross – an interesting coincidence, given where Ron of Argyll is currently sailing. Southern Cross was a 16 metre ketch designed by Alfred Mylne in 1930
In the Second World War the yard built a range of the large and fast Fairmile Marine Motor Boats for the Admiralty. These included Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs) and Motor Gun Boats (MGBs), both renamed after the war as ‘fast patrol boats’.
After this war, the company had success in building the one-class Loch Long boats – 6.4metre, 2-man keelboats. Cove Sailing Club on the shores of Loch Long on the Rosneath peninsula describes itself as ‘the home of the Loch Long one-design’. Interestingly, there is a fleet of these still racing in Aldeburgh in Suffolk and there is a class association website, run by Cove Sailing Club, for more information.
As well as this class of boat, Robertson’s were selected to build two of Britain’s 12 metre challengers for the America’s Cup: Sceptre in 1958 and Sovereign in 1964, both designed by David Boyd. Neither won. Sceptre lost to Columbia and Sovereign lost to Constellation.
Business began to slow markedly after this time and the yard spent its time building fast launches for the RAF. They also took on fixed price contracts for two 63′ General Service Mk 1 Pinnaces. These contracts were effectively the end of Robertson’s. Delays, design changes and rising materials costs saw the business in the sort of financial difficulties described as being ‘between a rock and a hard place’.
The Robertson Family sold the yard in 1965.
The footnote is that it became a subsidiary of Glasgow’s Auchinleck Investment Company who built there a wide range of fibreglass (GRP) boats there – like Pipers, Ohlsons, Etchells and Pilot Launches – for 14 more years. They shut down in 1980, faced with rising costs of oil and resin – and tough competition from established GRP yards down south.
The buildings in the lower yard were pulled down in the late 1980s and the site was levelled for re-development. Now all that’s left is the slipway, although some of the classic boats built at the yard – like Ron of Argyll now in the Whitsundays – are still sailing in a wide variety of waters.
The photographs show Alexander Robertson (bearded) with his sons at the Sandbank yard and Alexander Robertson himself. Both are reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.