I heard on the news yeterday morning of the death of Jimmy Reid.

He came to notice as one of the leaders of the work-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the early 1970s during Ted Heath’s government. His speech to the workers was unforgettable, “There will be no hooliganism, there will be no vandalism, there will be no bevvying,” for the world was watching.

That last bit is true. The world was watching. The good lady was in Germany at the time on an exchange visit. (I hadn’t met her yet.) She saw the speech on German television and heard the laugh when bevvying was translated into the German equivalent in the subtitles.

It is the word bevvying which makes the sentence resound. Without it, and Reid’s emphasis on it, the speech would probably have been less remarked. In retrospect it was a very Calvinistic piece of oratory for someone who was at the time a communist.

That in the end, despite a tactical victory in changing the government’s mind, the campaign to save all the UCS yards failed – they are all gone I believe and only Yarrow’s remains building ships on the Upper Clyde and that depends on Royal Navy orders – does not detract from the essential nobility of the effort to maintain the dignity of employment and prevent a descent into joblessness and the blight that follows. It was perhaps the last grand hurrah of the trade union movement.

Reid was the great example of the intellectual from the working class, possibly largely self taught. I remember him on a television chat show relating the typical argument between two such Glaswegians. As one is thumping the other he is saying, “Ah telt ye. There are 45 islands in the Indonesian archipelago.”

As a result of his new found fame he was elected rector of Glasgow University. I was a student there at the time and this was the one and only occasion till a local election some five years ago that my vote ever helped elect anybody.

Jimmy Reid 9/7/1932-11/8/2010. So it goes.