Henry's Songbook

    Farewell my companions, my friends and my workmates
    Farewell to the payday, the pints and the crack
    We gave them our best years now they've paid us back
    By making us yesterday's men
    Sure as hell
    By making us yesterday's men

'Twas Joey the weasel that gave us the wire
They were closing the factory down
Though we didn't believe him and called him a liar
The redundancy letters came round
And we read them in silence, I choked back a tear
It was hard to believe after twenty-odd years

We said our goodbyes by the factory gates
One cold Friday evening last year
And I saw it all there in the eyes of my mates
The anger, the sorrow, the fear
Like our fathers before us we worked there with pride
Now I fought back the bitterness burning inside

Now Jimmy, said she, Give the kids a few bob
After all, it is Friday night
How could I tell her that I hadn't a job
And from now things were going to be tight
Well I remember it cut like a knife
I was never a day on the dole in my life

The machines now are idle and the workbenches bare
There's dust on the factory floor
They've boarded the windows and they've chained up the gates
And they've padlocked the factory door
And I'm on the scrap-heap, and I'm thirty-nine
Just one of the hundreds, cut down in my prime

(as sung by Cilla Fisher & Artie Trezise)

[1983:] Cilla and I like Scotland very much, it's a nice place to live, but there are a lot of things wrong with it. The one thing I think is terrible is the unemployment. A lot of people are being made unemployed, and nothing seems to be done very much about trying to find new jobs for these people. I heard this song the day that they announced that one of the distilleries near us was closing - it must be getting bad if whisky places are closing! And this factory is in an area where there is already 30 per cent unemployment, so the people there don't really have a chance of finding another job. And hearing this song on the same day as that news came out was - quite an experience. It's a great song, by a man called Phil Coulter, 'Yesterday's Men', and I think it's exactly how some of these people must feel when they're made redundant and laid off. (Intro Artie Trezise, live recording)