DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
ARCHIBALD DONALD MCKINNON
“Archie Mac”
2 November 1935 – 5 February 2020
Govan shipyard welder, UCS work-in steward and tenants' champion for twenty-five years
In June 1971, when the government announced it would let Upper Clyde Shipbuilders go to the wall, Archie McKinnon was thirty-five years old with a mortgage, three children and a welder's mask he had worn for twenty years. He did what Govan men have always done at such moments: he went to a meeting, and then he went to another one.
Archie was born in Govan in 1935, the son of a riveter, and walked through the gates of the Fairfield yard at fifteen as an apprentice. He learned to weld on the plates of ships bound for the far ends of the earth, and he took more pride in a clean seam than in any speech he later made. As a shop steward he sat on the committee that organised the work-in, the famous refusal to stop building ships. He was never one for the cameras, just the man who made sure the tea urn was full and the minutes were taken.
The yard survived, after a fashion, and Archie worked there until 1995, teaching apprentices that safety was not an insult. His own father had lost two fingers to a drop hammer, and Archie held to the rule that every young welder should be able to count to ten on both hands at retirement. He married Isa Dunn in 1959 and they raised Maureen, Billy and Fiona in a tenement flat on Langlands Road, where the front door was never locked.
Away from the yard he chaired the Govan Tenants' Association for twenty-five years, recited the Burns Supper address at terrifying volume, and was the unlikeliest Partick Thistle supporter in a district that belonged to Rangers. He claimed the Jags had taught him patience and the shipyards had taught him hope, and that he needed both. He whistled 'Caledonia' while he cooked mince and tatties, always slightly flat.
Archie died on 5 February 2020 at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, with Maureen holding one hand and the football phone-in murmuring on a small radio. He had missed Isa every day since 2014 and was, he told his children, looking forward to finishing an argument. He leaves three children, seven grandchildren and a street that will not be the same.
“A clean seam and a kept promise: that's all a man is.”