When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde (radio documentary about Upper Clyde Shipbuilders)

Those who have read an earlier post about Donovan's 1972 concert to raise funds for Upper Clyde Shipbuilders may be interested in a radio documentary which fills in more of the background to that event.

Entitled When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde, the programme was originally broadcast in 2011, not long after the death of Jimmy Reid, one of the prime movers in the story. He was the shop steward who, before the "work-in", famously said:

There will be no hooliganism. There will be no vandalism. There will be no bevvying ... because the world is watching us.

It was repeated today on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and as far as I can tell will remain available, for UK and US listeners alike, for at least a month - very possibly longer.

I provided some basic details in that earlier piece, drawing on a memoir by Jimmy Reid kindly provided by Doug Holton, but the opportunity to hear the voices of those directly involved in the struggle for survival, the rawness of their emotion and anger, undoubtedly gives the tale a far greater immediacy.

Some all-too-human details emerge during the programme. The story about John and Yoko donating a bouquet of roses along with financial support is corroborated - the sum is £1000 in this telling - although there is no word either way on whether the Lennons really attended the show in body. I've been listening to some old Lennon interviews which suggest he and Yoko gave financial support to any number of causes in those times, though the personal connection with Donovan means that his presence at Green's Playhouse that day can't be ruled out - unless a chronicler of Lennon's solo years with a Lewisohn-like tenacity can account for his movements on the afternoon of the 30th of April. (If you are out there, please get in touch.)

But that's just setting the scene. The detail which leapt out for me is that the ex-Beatle's flowers were not kept by UCS but given away to a local hospital. A lovely touch, you might think, but no: the female staff just couldn't agree among themselves about who was going to keep them.

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Donovan has been on my mind over the past few weeks for reasons unconnected to the above. He was due to play a concert at London's Cadogan Hall in April, and despite the my reservations when seeing him perform in recent years, chronicled elsewhere in this blog, I went ahead and bought tickets, wanting to see him at least one last time - especially as it is approaching half a century since the Sunday afternoon of that UCS gig, my first ever rock performance - just as Donovan's early album Fairytale was the first LP I ever bought.

I kept revisiting the Cadogan website: concert after concert at the hall was officially cancelled but Donovan's show seemed to be hanging on, almost as though he still believed that asking the audience to clap their hands would be enough to make it stop raining. But it was eventually postponed for six months - and we can only hope that it will indeed happen then.

But in time-honoured news announcer fashion let's end on a happier note (UK readers of a certain age, please to picture the rictus grin of Alastair Burnet as he prepares to dangle the latest Royal titbit).

Those who have read some of the other Donovan posts (there are quite a few of them) may remember that after the disappointment of buying a lo-fi tape of the UCS concert - not to mention the experience of being berated by the bootlegger when I dared to complain - I cut out the middleman and made my own illicit cassette recording of a later Dono-gig at the same venue, by then renamed the Apollo.

In all probability the quality wasn't that much better than the shoddy souvenir of 1972 - but it was mine, and listening to the concert  in my darkened bedroom through the warmth of a valve amplifier my memory was just about able to fill in the gaps.

And then, at some unspecified point, that precious cassette ... just ... disappeared.

(Actually, my father probably threw it out along with other items unwisely left behind in the family home, but that's not such a good story.)

What? No, I didn't suddenly unearth the tape yesterday, sounding an unlikely note of hope amidst the uncertainty which now faces us all, but - well, the next best thing, I suppose.

I found, on the Sugarmegs website, a fairly well recorded  gig from around the same time, and recognised roughly the same order of songs, beginning with Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and going through quite a lot of the Essence to Essence album, only far more appealing in barebones form. He steadily plays quite a lot of new or newish material before making with the hits and it's a strong, assured performance.

My only regret is that no performance of There Is A Mountain has ever matched the one committed to my little cassette recorder that evening at the Apollo. In addition to the different stresses I have heard on various live renditions - "lock  upon my garden gate's a snail" - he bursts into scatting. I have a feeling that this was earlier in the show than the one available online - possibly he felt he had to seize his home audience more firmly - and I've never heard it the same way since. "Nought happens twice thus", as Ramblin' Tom Hardy so rightly said.

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Since writing the above yesterday, I  have been idly searching for more Dono-stuff on youtube and discovered tracks from a tribute album to Harry Belafonte in, I think, 2019, therefore representing Donovan's voice pretty much as it is now.

Listening is an odd experience: strain is often apparent, but there is still something moving in the experience. Donovan has been part of my life for so long, and whatever the joshing in some of the pieces listed below he always will be.

Here's his take on Scarlet Ribbons. I've chosen it partly because it's less demanding vocally than some of the other selections but also because it describes a moment of simple magic. Or idiotic, irrational hope, if you will. You remember idiotic, irrational hope, dontcha?






When the Eyes of the World Were on the Clyde can be found here.


Other posts about Donovan - best read in chronological order:


The TRUE story of how I fell out of love with Donovan

Donovanagain

Donovanagain - again

Donalert aka Belated For-Albert-Hall Plea

Donalert Part Two: A Sign

Donovan: why I'm not going tonight. Probably.

Donovan Albert Hall reviews or How Do You Like Them Gold Apples?

Of Lame and Pregnant Ducks: Donovan's UCS Benefit Concert at Green's Playhouse, 1972

He just went grey all of a sudden ...

Grimful Glee Club (radio play about Thomas Hardy)

I have just heard Adam Thorpe's 2003 radio play Nought Happens Thus Twice, about Thomas Hardy's second marriage, to Florence Dugdale.

There is no more plot than Long Day's Journey Into Night, say, or Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom - in this case it's simply whether or not Florence will agree to accompany her husband on a jaunt - but it remains compelling throughout.

My friend late of North Berwick did not like this kind of play, an attitude I could never really understand. Okay, it's really no more than a camera slowly zooming in on its subjects, but what's wrong with that? It's certainly a difficult trick to pull off because as a writer you don't have the safety net of a plot for the audience to focus on to redeem the play if the dialogue happens to be less than stellar.

As is well known, Thomas Hardy's second marriage had its difficulties. In R.C. Sherriff's autobiography No Leading Lady the writer of Journey's End describes meetings with various literary lions after the success of his play, among them J.M. Barrie and Hardy. (The meeting with Barrie is at once hilarious and sad, but you will have to seek this highly entertaining memoir out for yourself.)

Florence was already Hardy's wife by the time Sherriff was being feted, and when she had a moment alone with the playwright she confided that she had been recently dragged along by Hardy to some muddy field in which he stood for an aeon in rapt contemplation because it evoked in him yet another memory of Wife Number One. Which is great for Hardy (and, indeed, for the world, because the best of his poems about Emma, written after her death, are very good indeed) but not so much so for the woman who is meant to have supplanted Emma in his affections.

Thorpe's play reminded me a little of the Maysles brothers' documentary Grey Gardens (which later became a musical) because we're likewise in the presence of two people who have been locked together for far too long, with no means of escape, and so there are cyclical recriminations, with nothing pushed to its resolution, because this is just one more day in purgatory and neither party is going to walk away. The outside world (the presence of the documentary makers in Grey Gardens, the invitation to see a film crew in Nought Happens Twice) maybe provides more of a focus than usual, but that's about it.

Still, you can't live at that kind of pitch 24 hours a day, and there are moments in the Hardy play when the couple seize on a distraction - the sighting of a grey squirrel as opposed to a red one - to provide respite, or maybe just to show that they do have things in common. There is even a kind of sitcom element - not that this is exactly a laff-o-rama - because it's the classic situation of two people being trapped together in a marriage or quasi-marriage, as with Steptoe and Son. And it may be remembered that Harold is capable of considerable verbal cruelty through the frustration of being trapped forever with his dad. His sarcastic or mocking words are a way of deluding himself that he has free will, but in that context they are no more powerful than that of a prisoner mocking his jailer - another sitcom premise. I am reminded, in fact, of a phrase used by Hardy in a poem about a prisoner and escort at a railway station: "grimful glee". So Florence talks of making a bonfire of Emma's things once Hardy is dead, but she, like Harold Steptoe, has a kind of special license. At the end of the play (spoiler alert) she does agree to visit the film crew - though the twist is that by that point, Hardy is reluctant, for fear that her obvious emotional state after all the conflicts they have been reheating will signal to onlookers that all is not well with the marriage.

It does help if you have some knowledge of Hardy, I suppose, to enjoy the play but it's not absolutely necessary. The piece's great strength is the teasing out of detail to provide an ever clearer impression of the enormous, unscaleable hole into which the two have toppled. It's just one more weary rehearsing of grievances (shades of yet another sitcom), upon which we happen to be eavesdropping.

Florence Dugdale had been a teacher in Enfield, and the poem from which the play's title is taken describes Hardy seeing her on a platform in Liverpool Street Station. Hardy watches her diminishing form as she goes down the platform towards the train - he's at the barrier - and, this presumably being the first youthful flush of their love, he laments that whatever future plans are made this moment, this feeling, will never return. Actually, why don't you read it for yourself here?

And while you're at it, why not read what Cecil Day-Lewis called "Hardy's great farewell to love", At Castel Boterel, here? The latter is a poem I love very much, along with After a Journey and I Found Her Out There - all of them about Emma, not Florence. And that grimfully gleeful sitcom pilot of a poem, more of a minor work, a snapshot, can be found here.


Update 16/8/21: Adam Thorpe's play, starring Patrick Malahide and Sylvestra Le Touzel and directed by Patrick Rayner, can be currently found on youtube here.