Recording his experiences of the Second World War in Glasgow in 1992, wartime shipyard apprentice Jim Fyfe made the following remarks:

The British National Services Act, passed on 2 September 1939 and making men in the country aged between eighteen and forty-one liable for conscription into the armed forces, and the National Service (Number Two) Act in December 1941, which extended the limits of conscription to include men aged between forty-one and fifty-one, have been widely discussed by historians of the Second World War. It is less often recognised, however, that while there were 4.5 million servicemen at the height of mobilisation in 1944, there were also 10.3 million men in civil employment, many of them not under eighteen or over fifty-one. The experiences of men such as Jim Fyfe, who were within the call-up age boundaries and in good health, yet were undertaking ‘work of national importance’ in reserved occupations and not serving in the armed forces, were therefore more widespread than is commonly acknowledged. Some of these men worked willingly on the home front while others, like Fyfe, did so with less enthusiasm. Most would not have described themselves as ‘a genius or anything’, but rather as ordinary individuals.

This book explores the subjectivities, and in particular the masculinities, of these ordinary men in Clydeside. Masculinity is a relatively new area of historical research, emerging in America in the late 1970s.