The Riveters

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Feature Story: The Riveters

“It took four people, working as one, to drive a single rivet home. The Clyde built ships on that coordination, thousands of times a day.”

Riveting was not a one-person job. It was a team of four, and each one had a name for their role. The heater worked the portable furnace, taking iron rivets to a cherry-red heat before tossing them, underhand and with tongs, to the catch-boy, who caught the glowing rivet in a metal cone or leather-lined bucket and fed it into the waiting hole in the ship’s plating.

The holder-on braced a heavy iron dolly against the rivet head from one side of the plate, often in a cramped or awkward position inside the hull. And the riveter, the one the job was named for, hammered the other end flat and tight from the outside, using a pneumatic hammer by the later industrial period, or a hand hammer in earlier years.

Done well, the whole sequence took seconds. Done thousands of times a day, across dozens of yards along both banks of the Clyde, it produced a sound that people who grew up nearby described for a century afterwards: a continuous, overlapping percussion, audible for miles, that didn’t stop from the start of a shift to the end of it.

The work was skilled, physical and dangerous. Riveting teams were often paid by the rivet, which rewarded speed and punished hesitation. Burns from hot metal were routine. The precision mattered because a badly formed rivet weakened the hull it was meant to seal. Every joint had to hold, in every kind of sea, for the working life of the ship.

We didn’t choose the name The Riveter to be clever. We chose it because that job—unglamorous, exact, done as a team, done properly or not at all—is the closest thing we have to a description of what we’re trying to do with this publication and with the rum itself. No shortcuts. No single hero. Everyone in the chain has to do their part, or the whole thing doesn’t hold.

That’s the Clyde’s real legacy, as far as we’re concerned. Thousands of people who turned up, took the heat, made the catch, held the dolly and swung the hammer. They built ships that changed the world doing it. That’s still how we think about the team today, and it includes you: the people who buy the rum, share the stories and tell a friend.

Inverclyde hasn’t forgotten it either. In 2023, two ten-metre stainless-steel figures went up at Coronation Park in Port Glasgow: a sculpture by artist John McKenna, commissioned by Riverside Inverclyde and Inverclyde Council and chosen by public vote. Locally it’s known as the Skelpies. Its official title is The Riveters.

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Rum & Craft: Patience in the Process

Blending Titan Rum works on a similar principle to a riveting team, even if nobody in our still house would put it that way. Every stage depends on the one before it holding properly.

The Caribbean rum has to be right before it ever reaches Scotland. The Golden Syrup has to be measured, not guessed. The botanicals—raspberry, ginger and vanilla—have to be balanced against a base spirit that already has its own character, or one flavour drowns out the rest.

Rush any one stage and the whole blend shows it, the way a badly formed rivet shows in a hull under pressure. We taste at every stage, adjust in small amounts and treat consistency as harder-won than any single clever idea. It’s not a fast process, and it isn’t meant to be.

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From the Yard

If The Riveter is new to you: welcome. We’ll publish once a month—a feature story from Clyde or Greenock history, a look at the craft behind Titan Rum, a cocktail worth making and whatever is happening at Titan that month.

One more thing worth a look: the small grey figures below are The Yardmen, a set of miniature shipyard-worker sculptures by Greenock artist Jason Orr, installed along Greenock Waterfront in 2021. Twelve inches tall and cast in the likeness of ordinary tradesmen, they are about as close as public art gets to what this publication is trying to do in words.