The book provides a history of two lower Clyde shipbuilding firms, Scotts of Greenock and Lithgows (previously Russell and Co.) of Port Glasgow. Despite their geographical proximity, the two firms had very different backgrounds. Scotts, formed in 1711, had merged with Greenock Foundry by the early 1900s and developed important made-to-order trade links with Alfred Holt and the China Navigation Company, compensating for the modest returns on this work by expanding into Admiralty contracting shortly before the First World War. Russells/ Lithgows was formed much later (in 1874), but soon focused on volume cargo tramp shipping. Specializing in this way, essentially keeping to what they knew best, paid well. Even during the First World War they continued to build economical, semistandardized ocean-going tramp ships rather than naval ships, whereas Scotts became known for the construction of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, as well full-sized battleships.

Scotts suffered serious losses after the war, as Admiralty work disappeared and industrial relations worsened. However, their membership in the elite Warship Group of private shipbuilders did help them to attract government contracts from 1928 and increasingly from 1934. This proved critical to the recovery of their financial position, particularly as the Warship Group successfully prevented the Admiralty from acquiring too much knowledge of costs and profit margins in the private sector yards.

The interwar period worked rather differently for Lithgows; it was far less dependent on changes in government demand. Fully (if not intemperately) convinced of the impeccable logic of his own firm's commercial logic and specialisms, Sir James Lithgow was the obvious person to head National Shipbuilders Security Ltd. in 1930. He put a good deal of time into attempting a rationalization of U.K. shipbuilding capacity in the face of the worst depression the industry had known.

Although the book covers the early histories of both businesses, there is an extant literature that addresses the major changes at both sites up to 1918, and the authors have sensibly chosen to emphasize the changing circumstances and strategies of both businesses since that date. The sections on the interwar period are of considerable interest, but the book's real focus is on “the events arising from the Shipbuilding Inquiry Report of 1965–66 which subsequently led to the establishment of the merged firm” (in 1970), considered against a background of the earlier histories of the constituent firms. The main impetus appears to have been provided by the recent cataloguing of the Scott Lithgow archive in Glasgow; the text is, as the authors state, neither a standard business history nor a work of general reference but a close examination of the period of interwar and postwar decline, based largely on corporate rather than government papers.

A large part of the book is thus concerned with the period since 1965 and provides a detailed, fascinating, and sobering account of the problems of identifying solutions to deep-seated problems that would both command sufficient support and be effective. The financial analysis (with its tendency to cite raw profit figures rather than the rates of return that they provide) could have been a little more precise.

Complications were caused by the independence, if not hauteur of family interests far into the postwar period, although Lady Lithgow's comparative lack of managerial experience when she followed her husband as Company Chair in 1952 did not result in much uncertainty. Instead, as government ministers persuaded themselves that the yards could and should be saved, despite severe cost disadvantages relative to Japanese and other yards, company directors felt free to proclaim their support for a “diversification of the business out of shipbuilding altogether” or for the possibilities of international mergers or indeed anything else that would demonstrate their total contempt for the Labour government. The craft-based unions continued to believe that the government was bound to underwrite operations, given their periodic need for warships, with one shop steward even announcing his conviction that support mechanisms would be forthcoming to accommodate a five- or ten-year renegotiation of demarcation arrangements. The government was heartily disliked for its inability to control inflation, which soon made fixed price contracts uneconomic.

These quite detailed accounts of unhurried negotiation in the face of corporate collapse leave the reader with a better awareness of the intractable nature of sectional interests and of the effects of early mover disadvantages on later industrial structures and expectations. This very modestly priced book includes some photographs and can be highly recommended to all those with interests in shipbuilding and in the human intractabilities that have contributed to interwar and postwar economic decline more generally.