John Brown's Clydebank shipyard was in a unique position when it comes to modern naval history. It was the first British shipyard to employ an in-house photography department, it built many of the most famous British ships of the 20th century, and although it no longer exists as a company, more than 40,000 of their negatives are currently stored at the National Records of Scotland. "A Shipyard at War" is both a successor and companion volume to Ian Johnston's "Clydebank Battlecruisers", published to great acclaim in 2011, including mine. Although that book focused solely on the five battlecruisers built at the shipyard, this one offers up a tasty smorgasbord of rare photographs sure to delight the serious maritime history buff.
The majority of the photographs focus on the building and fitting out of the 54 ships (including 37 destroyers, four capital ships, three submarines, and two ocean liners) constructed at the yard between 1914 and 1919. The book is presented in a chronological scrapbook manner, book-ended by a brief introduction and a timeline of the yard's wartime activities. For the capital ship fans, "Tiger", "Repulse", and "Hood", are all represented by images cut from "Clydebank Battlecruisers", while "Barham" receives a healthy dose of construction shots. The famous Cunarder "Aquitania" occupies almost the entire first quarter, from keel laying to launching and fitting out. The remainder of the yard's wartime work takes up about three-fifths of the book. There are detailed shots of the interior of the submarine "E35", photos of ships passing down the Clyde or arriving for refits and machinery installations, and images of Mark IV tank hulls under construction, machinery components prior to installation, and female "dilutees" at work. There is a LOT of good stuff here - trying to describe it all would be hopeless!
When these photographs were taken, the Royal Navy was the world's largest, and British heavy industry was the envy of the world. Most of the them are presented at extremely high quality, scanned at high resolution directly from the original glass plate negatives. People used to seeing century-old reproductions of warship photographs might have their socks knocked off. You can actually count the number of rivets in the ships' hulls in many shots, and read the chalk markings on structural components. There's even an adorable shot of a tiny narrow-gauge locomotive blowing it's whistle as it steams past the hull of the "Repulse".
The only thing really stopping me from giving this book five stars is the somewhat haphazard presentation of some of the photographs. Seaforth still hasn't gotten the hint that it's a bad idea to plop a photograph of a ship across two pages in such a manner that masts and funnels end up falling into the gutter. The problem isn't quite as epidemic here as it is in some of their books, but it's present enough to be irritating. Some of the photographs are overexposed or damaged, and many are faded along the edges. I suspect that some of the photos in "Clydebank Battlecruisers" were subject to some subtle cropping and Photoshopping, but the overall quality of photo reproduction in this book isn't quite as good.
A couple of minor issues aside, this book is a little treasure trove, and an invaluable addition to the maritime archaeology of 20th century Britain. With this book, "Clydebank Battlecruisers", and "The Battleship Builders" all published in the last five years, Ian Johnston is definitely a naval historian to look out for. I couldn't help but notice that the introduction mentions that John Browns' photographers took 1,016 photographs of the "Queen Mary" between 1929 and 1936. This liner buff would grab a copy of "Building the Queen Mary" if anyone publishes it in the near future
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