Henry's Songbook

If you were a bird, if you were a buffalo
They'd paint your silhouette against the sky
Gather your bones on the day you died
And hold them up with tears and cries
To mourn forever more
But there were those who were glad to see you go
All the ones with their eyes on a golden past
Who turned their backs while you breathed your last
Who would rather view a nation through a parting glass
Than watch the hot steel pour

Bye bye, Big Blue
Now your working days are through
You stood too proud, you stood too long
Heard too many hammers ringing out their song
And if I had a hammer I would right your wrong
With one stroke bold and true
Bye bye, Big Blue

The forge was father to the furnace
The clachan child was father to the steel-edged man
Who wed the song of science to the lore of the land
Shaped the soul of the Lowlands with a moulder's hand
And a spirit none could tame
And his heart came to be burnished
In shipyard and mine, in bothy and in byre
He trusted it to workers who would never tire
And they welded it to Scotland with the brightest fire
In the history of flame

Bye bye, Big Blue
Now your working days are through
You stood too proud, you stood too long
Heard too many hammers ringing out their song
And if I had a hammer I would right your wrong
With one stroke bold and true
Bye bye, Big Blue

Do they never think to count the cost for us
Broken promises discarded in the dust
How many lives sacrificed to trust
And how cold the calculation of a hard humiliation
That leaves only sentiment and rust
Bye bye, Big Blue

As I walk the streets that surround you
I think of the talk of a nation once again
In a hard-headed steel town, defiant in the rain
No paradise lost, but what could there be gain
For the likes of me and you
I'll be there when the wreckers gather round you
When the fire that built you brings you to your knees
But the torch and the cutter will pay no heed to me
And when I look up to the sky all that I will see
Will be the wrong shade of blue

Bye bye, Big Blue
Now your working days are through
You stood too proud, you stood too long
Heard too many hammers ringing out their song
And if I had a hammer I would right your wrong
With one stroke bold and true
Bye bye, Big Blue

[1996:] The 1,000-acre tangle of smokestacks, rust-red ore chutes and glow-in-the-dark furnaces took three years to build. It spawned lines of grey concrete bungalows and jobs for 10,000 fathers and sons of Lanarkshire. After the last coal was mined and the shipyards closed, it became a symbol of Scotland's industrial past, present and, some hoped, its future.
Today, the dream that ended when the last strip of molten metal produced by the Ravenscraig steelworks cooled from red to dirty grey will be reduced to rubble. At 1pm the decaying mill will be blown up and the land cleared. [...] When British Steel closed Scotland's last strip mill in 1992, many said it would herald the end of Scottish manufacturing. With almost half the local manufacturing jobs dependent on 'the Craig', Lanarkshire - once the centre of both the agricultural and industrial revolutions - looked set to become Scotland's Midwestern badlands. But, in the shadow of the smokestacks, a remarkable transformation is under way. As the metal- bashers leave town, Mr Chips has arrived - the Far East silicon merchants. [...] Seven of the world's ten leading electronics companies, backed by local firms, now employ more than 100,000 Scots - three times the number of steelmen working in the mills in the 1970s.
[Kevin Donnelly] left school at 16 and started on a Youth Training Scheme at Ravenscraig in 1986. Laid off when the plant closed, he now computer tests mobile phones [...]. 'At the Craig it was just lads on the foundry floor,' he says. 'Most were in the Union. We would brew up our tea next to the furnace and sweat under the sparks to produce hundreds of tonnes of steel for ships, cars - even nuclear submarines. Where I work now, there are more women than men, you get bottled water instead of tea, and we produce things so small, you can hardly see them. [...] It's the technology of the future, right enough, and we have to change to prosper. But I preferred the sense of satisfaction and the camaraderie of the Craig.' (John Arlidge, Observer, 28 July)

[1996:] Über Bye Bye Big Blue kann ich heute nur schweren Herzens sprechen, denn gerade gestern wurde 'Big Blue' abgerissen; es handelte sich um den Kühlwasserturm des Stahlwerks in Ravenscraig, eines der letzten industriellen Symbole Schottlands. (Brian McNeill, Progammheft ScFF '97, p. 8)