Glaswegians quickly dubbed it a “Paddler for a Pound” but the deal, which saw ownership of the PS Waverley change hands on 8th August 1974, wasn’t quite how it appeared.
“The brand new Royal Bank of Scotland One Pound note was actually given to me by the Chairman of the Scottish Transport Group, which I then gave back to him,” says Douglas McGowan, who is now Vice President of the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society which continues to own and operate the vessel. “They were very keen to make the deal an absolute gift in its own right. To this very day I regret not actually asking for the Pound back for posterity!”
Named – like Edinburgh’s principal railway station – after Sir Walter Scott’s first novel, the 693 tonne steamer PS Waverley was launched in October 1946. She entered service the following June, working the London and North Eastern Railway’s Firth of Clyde steamer route up Loch Long to Arrochar. Following the 1948 nationalisation of Britain’s railways, ownership transferred to the Caledonian Steam Packet Company and then Caledonian MacBrayne (CalMac).
By the early 1970s, however, her glory days appeared to be behind her. “My colleague and friend Terry Sylvester, were very conscious that the Waverley, by the early 1970s, had become quite special, in that she had become the last sea-going paddle steamer in the world,” Douglas explains. “We had a number of meetings with the General Manager of Caledonian MacBrayne, John Whittle, persuading them to market the Waverley in a different way from the rest of their car ferry fleet, perhaps paint her different colours, and really advertise that they had something special. We were just a couple of enthusiasts, but they were extremely patient, listened to what we had to say and took on board some of our ideas.”
By September 1973, however, the Waverley needed serious amounts of money spent on her. So when John Whittle asked him in for a chat, Douglas assumed that it was to be thanked for his interest, and then told that the vessel was destined for the ship-breakers. “So you can imagine my huge surprise when John said that, in discussions with their owners the Scottish Transport Group, they had decided to offer the Waverley to our Preservation Society – for a nominal one pound. You could’ve knocked me down with a feather! At first I thought it was a wind-up.”
Not that the vessel was in particularly good shape: the boiler needed re-tubed, the paddle wheels were not in good condition, and the decks were leaking quite badly. The Preservation Society launched a public appeal which raised £100,000 – from mainly the general public in Glasgow and the West of Scotland, with some help from Glasgow District Council and Strathclyde Regional Council. The money was spent on a full refit during 1975, after it had been decided to attempt to run the vessel as a passenger steamer rather than just as a floating club or restaurant for their members.
“We had to be very careful because, in the bill of sale from CalMac, they put in a condition that we should not compete with any of their services,” says Douglas. “So we decided to base Waverley at Glasgow and also Ayr harbour, so that we didn’t get in their way too much.”
Their first season in 1975, however, was “extremely challenging” – not least because running the vessel wasn’t, for either Douglas, Terry or their fellow enthusiasts, a full-time job. “Waverley was very much a pastime, a hobby. I worked for the chocolate company, Terry’s of York – if they’d known half the stuff that went on, I don’t think I’d have had a job!
“Also, although the ship was in pretty good condition, and we had spent as much money on her as we could possibly afford, we still had failures with the boiler and the paddles, which obviously interrupted our schedule. We even had a mutiny one day when the crew walked off at Dunoon! But we had a lot of determination, both on the ship and within the board. We seemed to have the ‘Paddler for a Pound’ public – and even the Press! – on our side. When something did go wrong, they were pretty understanding and supportive.”
In the subsequent decades PS Waverley has won several tourism and engineering heritage awards, and is listed in the National Historic Fleet. A major restoration project, completed in 2003, has returned the vessel to her original 1940s’ livery.
“She has a very special place in Scottish – in fact, UK – maritime history,” Douglas says. “At the turn of the 20th century, there were probably about 30 paddle steamers, perhaps more, on the Clyde – all run by different companies, competing for the business. Now we’re left with just one, the Waverley. But it’s not just about the ship; in my view she keeps alive a very special tradition with Glaswegians of going ‘doon the watter’ from Glasgow all the way to Dunoon and Rothesay and further afield. So she keeps that tradition alive, and I think that’s important in terms of our heritage.
“It really is a miracle, in so many ways, that the Waverley is still sailing, but what gives me enormous pleasure and great pride is to see, on a nice sunny day – and we do get them occasionally on the Clyde – families out enjoying themselves, with children just gazing at those fantastic double-expansion engines whirling round, experiencing the steam and the smell of the hot oil. The kids love watching the paddles going round, they love the fresh air, and the ship is big enough to allow them to run around. It’s a pretty safe environment. So that gives me an enormous amount of pleasure really.
“Of course she goes a lot further than just the Clyde now; she goes right round the UK to the Solent, the Thames, the Bristol Channel. On her ‘backside’ she’s got painted: ‘Waverley, Glasgow’. So she is very much an advert for Scotland.”
First published in The Scots Magazine, October 2016.
