The calamities of Caledonian MacBrayne Ltd

There was once a MacBrayne skipper called Duncan “Squeaky” Robertson — a master-mariner from Skye, of small stature and formidable personality, of whom many tales are told.

Like about the day in the Twenties he took the steamer Plover — a tough little ship; in 1918, she had seen off a U-boat — on what should have been a routine hop from Tarbert (Harris) to Lochmaddy (North Uist.) This was in conditions locals would have thought a bit fresh, southerners as a gale and your American as a hurricane.

The Plover duly vanished in foam and hail, never reached Lochmaddy and rumours — pre-wireless, pre-HM Coastguard helicopter, pre-satellite — fast circulated of her last seen disappearing between two enormous waves.

 Then, after a day or two of fraught silence, she puffed into Kyle of Lochalsh. Ventilators were missing, ladders bent, railings mangled — her funnel heavily caked in salt as the Plover’s whey-faced passengers tottered ashore.

 Squeaky leaned over the bridge-wing. “We had a bit of a breeze,” he announced laconically.

 A century on, what is now Caledonian MacBrayne Ltd — Scotland’s state-owned ferry operator in the Firth of Clyde and the Hebrides — is in its own perfect storm.

An ageing fleet, incessant breakdowns, crumbling infrastructure, incessantly cancelled sailings, repeated delays and, at the Fergusons yard in Port Glasgow, a public-sector procurement scandal for the ages.

Two fat new ferries commissioned a decade ago — for £97 million — should have entered service in 2018. One, the Glen Sannox, finally started chugging this spring. The other, the Glen Rosa, has yet to sail. 

The bill so far? Near £500 million and climbing. This is in large measure because Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister at the time and given to virtue-signalling, insisted that these be “dual-fuel” vessels capable not just of running on diesel but on liquified natural gas.

Low-carbon and so green, you see. And hitherto not chanced on any large passenger vessel anywhere in the world.

Even the 2017 launch of the Glen Sannox had CalMac salts murmuring. Those in charge of First Minister “optics” hit Port Glasgow, all self-importance and clipboards, and insisted that, before Sturgeon arrived to chuck the champagne, the ship be made to look far more complete than she actually was.

 Plywood was acquired. Fake superstructure added. Mock funnels built. Black, counterfeit “windows” painted on. And, half a decade on, the Glen Sannox had still not sailed an inch.

 But still graver problems were building for Caledonian MacBreakdown — if veiled, between 2020 and 2022, by lockdowns and its related travel restrictions.

When, in May, I had to travel from my Isle of Lewis lair to a black-tie bash in Glasgow by the ferry Hebrides from Tarbert to Uig in Skye, some days out from my journey her bow-visor seized up.

She could only load by her stern-ramp, she had to accordingly turn and reverse in at each port, her timetable had to be wholly recast, and even as technicians headed north to help — very slowly — what should have been my straightforward daylight dash down the West Highlands had to include an overnight stop.

That was the least of it for CalMac. That same month, veteran Arran ferry Caledonian Isles sat uselessly in dock with serious hull-distortion and corrosion issues.

 She’s still sitting there. The Sound of Harris ferry, Loch Portain, laboured on restricted service with dodgy thrusters.

 Passengers have had to board at Stornoway by the vehicle-ramp: the mechanised quayside gangway has been broken since 2022.

The vast Isle of Mull, allowed this spring to carry no more than 44 fare-paying passengers because her escape-chutes did not work. Reduced vehicle capacity on the Hebrides because her aft mezzanine deck had conked out.

 Meanwhile, as if to add insult to injury, it was announced in May that the new vessel Glen Rosa — meant, remember, to be sailing in 2018 yet still a static Port Glasgow art-installation — would be delayed by six more months.

Almost every delay or cancellation is blamed on some unspecified “technical issue”

Oh, and £35 million more from the long-suffering taxpayer, please. On top of all this are CalMac’s hopeless comms. It boasts a website that frequently crashes and online booking apps that collapse.

Almost every delay or cancellation is blamed on some unspecified “technical issue”, seemingly covering every woe from a rope wound round a prop to a vessel ablaze from stem to stern. 

 Two years back, the Scottish public were even told the Largs to Cumbrae ferry was out of action, following “contact with the sea-bed”. Meanwhile, as ferries unaccountably grow bigger and bigger — the Glen Sannox serves Arran from Troon, because she is too vast for the rather more convenient port of Ardrossan — piers and tide-adjustable linkspans are being rebuilt throughout the network at eye-watering cost.

This has not only greatly reduced flexibility, as ever more ships become “route-specific” — forty years ago, the sturdy Pioneer could, and did, serve practically every CalMac crossing — but it has wasted lots of money.

Recent construction of Tarbert facilities, for instance, saw the demolition of a ticket-office and passenger lounge completed only in 2004. Then, last year, they brought the veteran ferry Hebridean Isles — built expressly for that route in 1985 — to try the new facilities out.

 She now fitted neither pier nor linkspan and pushing forty, in need of £5 million worth of repairs just to squeeze one more summer out of her, was last November belatedly sent to the knacker’s yard.

Even when the ships are running, at high summer it can be the stuff of Homeric epic for islanders to secure passage at all on booked-out ferries.

Increasingly a national joke, this threatens to become an international one: the New York Times, never averse to bashing Brexit Britain, recently detailed Caledonian MacBrayne miseries with a sort of horrified relish. 

This is not the abstract crisis of an editorial in The Scotsman. All this has very personal consequences. The family who cannot make it to a funeral. Shops in South Uist and Barra running out of little luxuries like eggs, bread and milk.

The small hotelier with guests who cannot leave; guests who cannot come; guests who cut their holiday short and run, lest the ferry not voyage tomorrow. Beautiful live lobsters and prawns, bound for Spain, dying and decomposing on the quayside. Holiday flights missed; Amazon goodies for smaller islands held up for days.

The local ferry can be the best of life. That October 1998 evening when the Hebridean Isles drew in at Tarbert with the Harris Gaelic Choir, home in triumph from the Royal National Mod. They flourished their silverware and, along the railings, broke into glorious 4-part song. And the worst in life: by setting sun, in May 2023, when my father’s coffin was borne ashore from the Stornoway boat as his brother and nephews, darkly suited, bent their heads before the hearse.

When it all goes horribly wrong, the last people we can blame are CalMac’s long-suffering crews and shore staff. They are part of our communities and, in many instances, friends and relatives, as mortified as the rest of us by this unfolding fiasco.

 As the football manager nearly said, this has been a tale of three halves.

It is born in some measure from the desperate moves of a past, Labour-led Scottish Executive to put the CalMac network just beyond reach from new European Union anti-monopoly regulations — and, indeed, rivals eager to “cherry-pick” a few lucrative routes.

Ministers did so by breaking the operation into all sorts of chunks, of which the most significant are Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd — who own and commission ships and shore-works — and Caledonian MacBrayne Ferries Ltd, who actually run the service.

Liaison between CMAL and CalMac is frightful and this in large part accounts for the Port Glasgow fiasco.

But the decree also went forth from ministers in Edinburgh, with an anxious eye on costs — and in disregard for past good practice — that CalMac was to extend the working lives of its ferries as long as possible.

Gaffer-tape, WD-40, the odd firm thump on the top of the set, sourcing spare parts from the British Museum — one exaggerates; but not much.

This is how we have ended up with five major ferries (and nine minor ones) still in service when they are over thirty. The Isle of Arran actually hit forty in 2023. She is so venerable that her lifeboats have oars. Meanwhile — drum-roll, please — the 18-car Isle of Cumbrae turns fifty next year.

Ships age; decay. They depreciate. Sourcing of parts for machinery long out of manufacture grows ever more sapping. Inevitably, such weary rust-buckets break down a great deal.

It was not until 1969 that what is now Caledonian MacBrayne — though two different fleets were not formally united in matrimony till 1973 — came under full public ownership (under the new Scottish Transport Group) and, critically, one management.

In charge was John Whittle, 36. His chief experience had been with buses, but he was exceptionally bright, and determined that every cape and island be eventually served by a modern end-loading car ferry, able to carry any vehicle that could be legally driven on a British road — as soon as possible.

 It was quite a goal, considering what he had. The combined fleet included six ageing pleasure-steamers, several traditional MacBrayne mailboats, various Hebridean cargo-boats voyaging weekly from Glasgow and but glorified puffers, and a few other passenger-only vessels.

No cargo was containerised. Meal or cement went by the sack; furniture, bathroom-fittings, rolls of barbed wire and so on by the piece. There were untold dents, scratches and breakages. Pilferage was a problem in Glasgow transit-sheds, and MacBrayne freight-charges at times bewildered: there was a special rate, for instance, for empty coffins.

 Open wooden launches kept sacred Iona still firmly in the age of the coracle. The seven big drive-on car ferries all side-loaded by hoist and, at low water, very slowly. None of the eight little ones could carry anything heavier than a few tons.

By the time John Whittle stood down from the CalMac board, late in 1988, he had all but done it. The last hoist-loading crossing was converted to roll-on-roll-off by 1994 and, by 2001, even the exposed and scattered Small Isles had a modern car ferry.

 Central to Whittle’s direction was one ruthless rule: with one recently re-engined exception, every ship was flogged off at twenty or twenty-five. 

It was foolish, as well as uneconomic, to keep them running longer, to say nothing of galleys with coal-fired ranges or crew forced to sleep in close, fetid dormitories and with all the comforts of 1947. 

 So, from the cargo-boats to the summer butterflies, all were calmly swept away — save for the Waverley, in 1974 generously sold for £1 to the Paddle Steamer Preservation Society and which sails to this day.

Whittle could point to more. The Scottish Transport Group reported directly to the Secretary of State for Scotland, who in turn presented it to Parliament. And if some MP stood up and asked, say, Malcolm Rifkind how many passengers and cars had travelled between Ullapool and Stornoway in 1986, and if the route had turned a profit, Rifkind would soon be able to tell him. 

Were you to rise in Holyrood today and likewise put the question to Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Transport in the SNP administration, she could not. Long, and quite deliberately, such vital detail has been hidden behind opacity.

 Chatting with me in May 2021, John Whittle, 88, was reflective:

Governments then in power were content to set broad parameters with investment and operational decisions taken by the company and its parent, Scottish Transport Group.  

Things are somewhat different now. CalMac doesn’t own the ships or piers. Caledonian Maritime Assets procures these and leases them to CalMac.

Vital decisions these days, he said — overarching ferries policy, the award of Public Service Contracts, deals and policy on vessel and infrastructure investment — are out of CalMac hands and in the grip of the Ferry Unit, Transport Scotland.

 “Decreeing the routes and timetables which the operator is required to provide, as well as the fares which apply,” sighed Whittle:

CalMac is in the public eye and unfairly criticised when decisions by others have a significant impact on the cost and quality of the service which CalMac strives to provide. Quite frankly, another John Whittle would be seriously handicapped by the present structure.

 Later in 2021, he candidly wrote a Glasgow newspaper, “Transport Scotland is responsible for policy on investment in vessels and infrastructure and it and CMAL have decided to significantly increase the expected life of vessels, creating a long delay in obtaining replacements with the consequences now evident.”

 In a subsequent interview, John Whittle agreed that extending the depreciation-period from twenty to thirty-five years might have saved millions and been a “clever ruse.”

 Yet it “increases the maintenance cost and reduces reliability, problems imposed on CalMac. Obviously, there is a safety problem. As the ships get older, there is [the] reliability issue and mechanical failure and you have to be concerned about safety.”

 An anonymous source at CMAL dismissed such “scaremongering” — but, significantly, no one anywhere went on the record to gainsay John Whittle.

We cannot ignore politics here. Few governments have been as cash-strapped and crisis-tossed as the Labour administration of 1974 to 1979. Yet Whittle still won seven major vessels and four small car ferries from its straitened largesse. Under Thatcher and Major, CalMac did better still — six big car ferries; ten smaller double-enders. Delivered, to date, under eighteen years of Scottish National Party rule? Three, and three.

Edinburgh’s devolved nomenklatura … know nothing about ferries, and care less

Behind this is a cultural factor often overlooked. The men of standing at the time in Westminster and Whitehall — and, in the Seventies and Eighties, they were still largely men — generally knew the Highlands. They enjoyed rod-and-gun vacations, had served alongside Hebrideans in the war and had a feel for the far north-west. Even Thatcher had holidayed on Islay and Jura.

Edinburgh’s devolved nomenklatura do not. They know nothing about ferries, and care less.

 Captain Robertson — till he retired to his croft in May 1949 — ended his career on the Lochmor, a slow 1930 mailboat which ran the involved “Outer Isles Mail” run till yielding to the first drive-on ferry in 1964.

One Friday evening, there was a wedding in Armadale, on Skye’s southern wing, and Squeaky – a local — was determined to make the dancing. So, they tied up for the night — despite the remonstrations of one tweedy passenger, toting his .303, desperate to reach the hills of Harris and start conserving wildlife.

He sent a furious wire to MacBrayne command in Glasgow and, an hour or two later, a telegram rebounded for Squeaky — “What holds Lochmor at Armadale?”

 Swiftly came the skipper’s sly reply. “Two ropes – one at each end.”