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22 - M.F. Pyman, Mercantile Dry Dock Co. Ltd., Jarrow
- from The Tyne
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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- Crossing the Bar
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- 11 May 2018
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- 01 January 2013, pp 87-90
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I was lucky enough to leave school in the middle of the war when the authorities wanted technical people. I was good at maths, so I was sent off to Cambridge to do an engineering degree with war service to follow. I chose the Navy, and became a Midshipman, and left as a sub Lieutenant in 1947. Instead of going back to Cambridge to complete my degree, I went back to school at the St. Peter's Engine Works of Hawthorn Leslie for a couple of years as an apprentice. I also spent a bit of time at Doxford, and at sea and came back to the Tyne with the Mercantile Dry Dock Company at Jarrow around 1953, became Managing Director, and stayed there until nationalisation.
The Mercantile was a fairly small yard in the 1950s, but after we built it up we ended up with four docks. The job was purely ship repairing. We were taken over once or twice prior to nationalisation. We went in with North East Coast Ship Repairers, and then that, in turn, was taken over by Court Line. When Court Line collapsed, we were taken over by the Government by Tony Benn who was Minister for Industry at that time. When nationalisation came we were in with British Shipbuilders, although not all the repairers were.
The strength of Mercantile, and ship repairing on the North East Coast generally, was the traditional expertise of the men. We had a huge pool of skilled labour at the time, every sort of sub-contractor you could think of could be called in at short notice, and we had very experienced middle management. We were also better placed than other districts on the working practices side of things. Also, in the 1950s we were well placed geographically with timber [Baltic trade] and coal supplies. This changed dramatically in the 1960s when we started to really struggle with the timber finished and the coal virtually finished. We had just built a new dry dock, so we were really struggling under financial constraints thereafter.
The weakness after 1960 was this same geographical position. With virtually every ship we got we had to attract them to the Tyne, so our prices had to be that much lower.
29 - John Leathard, Richard Dunston, Hessle
- from The Humber
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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- 01 January 2013, pp 125-128
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I started as an apprentice in the Neptune Yard of Swan Hunter in 1944, and began a course of study in naval architecture, graduating with an honours degree in 1947, and then got the 1851 Scholarship from the Institute of Naval Architects to do a research course for a further two years, which I did mostly at the National Physical Laboratory, Ship Division. On finishing there, I went back into the industry for a while with Thornycroft, but then left to work with the Northern Aluminium Company for three years, before moving to consulting naval architecture work with Bernard Collett and Partners. I stayed there for six years, before going to Richard Dunston on the Humber in 1961 as their Naval Architect. I progressed to Technical Director and General Manager to Managing Director leaving them in 1971 to join A…P Appledore International as a Project Director to start with, before becoming a Director.
Richard Dunston was a company, which had to build its reputation on a fairly restricted numbers of types of ships. For instance, I think it was the leading tug builder in the country. It was also quite a large builder of fishing vessels, and other work vessels like dredgers and small coasters. I think it had fallen behind, to some extent, on its design approach. I noticed that when I got there in 1961, that I felt that there were a lot of things that I could do to improve their designs. We tried to introduce them and after a while had an effective design office.
If we look at one of the failures of the company, and of the industry as a whole, the relationship between design and production was not looked at as effectively as it should have been. Design tended to be an end within itself. You did look at simple things, but this was done without any specific detailed approach, you just did it as an ad hoc arrangement. Nowadays there is a much greater understanding of the relationship between the two. If you start from scratch you should never put your pencil to paper before thinking of the effect of that on the design of the ship, but also on the construction of the ship. The two things must be considered together.
32 - Eric Mackie, Harland and Wolff Ship Repairers, British Shipbuilders Plc
- from Belfast
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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- Crossing the Bar
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- 01 January 2013, pp 138-143
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I served my time in a textile engineering company, Mackie of Belfast, and accumulated the qualifications necessary for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. I then went to sea, and ended up as a Second Engineer. To have been Chief would have meant waiting to fill dead men's shoes. I then came to Harland's as an assistant manager in the ship repair company. I was then appointed as Deputy General Manager, and then General Manager in charge of the Southampton facility, where I remained for two and a half years. I then returned to Harland's in Belfast to take charge of their entire ship repair operation on four separate sites. We employed over 20,000 people in ship repair. On the arrival of the Dane, Ivor Hoppe, I took over ship production, but kept the responsibility for ship repair, closing down the three mainland yards in London, Liverpool, and Southampton in order to concentrate our business, with Government support, in Belfast. After three or four years, I went to South Africa and managed a subsidiary of a large mining company for six or seven years, before being headhunted by British Shipbuilders to head their ship repair companies. I was then asked to go to Govan Shipbuilders who were making tremendous losses, and stayed there until the company was privatised and subsequently spent a further three years with the new owners, Kvaerner.
In Harland's there was a great deal of technical strength and practical management, but we were hardly strong on management skills. Management were always at the will of the owners of a shipyard. Senior management would overrule junior management on the threat of strikes in order to get the work out. They would allow money to be paid, or the conditions to be altered to suit the workforce without trying to control it. On the other hand, it was a terrible thing to see men standing outside the gate waiting for two or three weeks work, before being put out on the street again to join the hordes waiting for work. This had happened for generation after generation, and as a result there was that much distrust between management and workers. They believed that they were merely a tool for the job and would be discarded afterwards.
26 - Bill Richardson, Vickers Armstrong, Swan Hunter, British Shipbuilders Pic
- from Barrow-in-Furness
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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I was educated at Ocean Road Boys School, followed by Junior Technical and Barrow Technical Colleges, where, during my apprenticeship, I obtained a Higher National Certificate in Naval Architecture with distinction and a Higher National Certificate in Mechanical Engineering, also with distinction. I began my apprenticeship in the 1930s at Vickers as a shipwright in the Mould Loft, before moving to the Ship Drawing Office where I qualified as a Ship Draughtsman. I then spent five years during the war with the Admiralty in London, during which I served overseas in Australia and the Far East. By 1946, I returned to Vickers at Barrow, and was appointed assistant manager in 1952, deputy shipyard manager in 1961, and shipyard manager in 1963. The following year I was appointed Director and General Manager, and relinquished the post for a similar one at Vickers Armstrong's Naval Yard at Newcastle to correct a particularly adverse trend there in relation to profitability and delivery. In 1967, I was seconded by Vickers to become Deputy Chairman of Swan Hunter, during the formative period of grouping on the Tyne, leaving in 1969 to become Managing Director of Vickers Shipbuilding. In 1975 I was appointed Deputy Chairman, and a year later, Chairman. On nationalisation, I was appointed to the Board of British Shipbuilders, and in 1978 I became Chairman of Barclay Curie Ltd., and Chairman of Vosper Thornycroft UK Ltd. From 1979 to 1982, I was Chairman of Vosper Thornycroft Ship Repairers Ltd. On reaching the normal retirement age of 65 in 1981, I was appointed Deputy Chairman of British Shipbuilders and Executive Vice Chairman of British Shipbuilders Warship Division for a period of two years. I was also reappointed Chairman of Vickers, Barclay Curie and Vosper Thornycroft, and additionally, Brooke Marine before retiring in August 1983.
The major strength of Vickers at Barrow was that it was the only company, which had shown anything like the willingness to devote all its resources to the building of nuclear and Polaris submarines. I think the weaknesses of the firm were strong unthinking trade union leaders, and at the workshop level, almost unquestioning obedience of the workforce to union dictates.
Upper Clyde
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34 - Joseph Charles Asher, SEF, Shipbuilding Conference, BSRA
- from British Shipbuilding Industry Officials
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I came into the industry when I was seventeen in 1935, and spent two years with the Shipbuilding Employers Federation, whilst contemporaneously studying for an evening degree at the London School of Economics. I found the procedures for dealing with everything by consulting precedent at the SEF not to my liking. I still think they were wrong. Then I had a lucky break and went to the Shipbuilding Conference with Alexander Belch, who became Deputy Chairman. In 1939, I was made personal assistant to the Chairman, Sir Amos Ayre. During the war he was Director of Merchant Shipbuilding and Repairs, and I stayed with him throughout, until in 1944, the industry decided that it should have a central co-operative research facility, so it formed the BSRA, and I was appointed Secretary in December 1944. In 1955, I was appointed Administrative Director, and just after nationalisation I retired at the age of sixty-one in 1978. So, effectively, I was at the head of BSRA for thirty-four years.
One of the first things I learned when going in, in 1935, considering we were building a very large proportion of the world's shipbuilding output, was the extent to which the shipbuilding industry was a reflection of the behaviour of the UK as a whole. The product operated in a completely international market. There were no subsidies, and no concealed benefits. As far back as 1938, Sir Amos Ayre was talking about Japan as a long-term threat. I believe if you look at the history of Japan over the last 150 years, you have a country that set out on the military road to some form of world, or certainly, Pacific domination, to put it on a par with the white European nations. When it lost the war, it decided to pursue the same objectives through the economic route. They have achieved this with remarkable success. If people compare shipbuilding in the UK unfavourably with Japan, I would tell them not to forget television sets, radios, motor bikes and cars. It is the UK not being competitive, not simply the shipbuilding industry.
Dealing specifically with BSRA, I give credit there to the shipbuilding industry, because I think BSRA was a major success story. It was the first such research association formed by any shipbuilding nation.
28 - Peter Usher, Vosper Thornycroft
- from The South Coast
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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I began my career at Chatham Dockyard as a shipwright apprentice. I graduated to become a member of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, and had five years of training. I then joined the Ministry of Defence at Bath as an assistant constructor in 1951. In 1966 I saw an advertisement for a technical director at Vosper Thornycroft, was successful in my application, and subsequently held that post for eight years. I then moved into production for eight years and took over as Managing Director working under a Chairman appointed by British Shipbuilders from 1981 until the firm was privatised in 1985. I led the management buyout bid for Vosper Thornycroft, and in 1985 we succeeded and bought the company. I was the Chief Executive when we floated the company on the Stock Exchange, and became Chairman in 1990, a post I still hold today.
Vosper Thornycroft was created by a merger in 1966 of Vosper Limited, a Portsmouth-based company, and Thornycroft, a Southampton based company. I joined them as the two companies merged. The major strength that we had then and still have is a foothold into the export market for warships, which was very new in those days. We achieved good orders throughout the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. We were growing at something like a rate of twenty percent per annum, and when nationalisation came in 1977, not surprisingly it was strongly resisted by the major shareholders led by Sir David Brown. Our case was that we had a good order book, a good cash position, and we could see, therefore, no advantage in being nationalised. No one at the company felt that we had a weakness, but I suppose relative size was one. We were making about £3m to £4m profit. We were not a huge company, but we felt that we were big enough to survive on our own. It could be said, however, that our weakness was that we were overtrading. We had a very large order book, and were insufficiently capitalised. Vosper Thornycroft was different because we were orientated to the export market selling small fast patrol boats etc. In the late 1960s we invested, and in 1970 put up a covered berth, which is one of the best in the country today.
38 - Alex Ferry, AEU, Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions
- from The Trade Unions
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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I became steadily involved with shipbuilding at the time of the UCS Work-in, and from that time onwards remained heavily involved; and in 1978, I became General Secretary of the Confederation [known as the Confed]. I was right in at the beginning of all the work which started with the nationalisation of the industry.
The weakness of the industry was complacency on everyone's part. The managements failed to invest, and there was a lack of forward thinking on their part. Frankly, the trade unions lived a misconception, because we told ourselves that we were part of an efficient, highly productive workforce, when in essence our productivity was rock bottom. Our working practices were outdated, for understandable reasons, maybe, but they were still outdated. Our work rate was absolutely chaotic. The trade union structure in the industry gave rise to all sorts of demarcation problems and industrial disputes. We were not very clever. We were complacent all round. It was the structure, history, and traditions. If you went into ship repair, it was ten times worse. Ship repair was a casualised industry for a long time. It was not until about 1969, that we established a payment for the workforce when there was no work available. That was established at the Elderslie Dry Dock. In ship repair, the ships were queuing up to come in, the management were doing deals with the captains, and vice versa, and our members knew what was happening and put the screw on the management. You could get treble time in wages for doing certain jobs. I have to say that ship repair was almost corrupt in every sense. There was never a policy for shipbuilding. If you take nationalisation in 1977 then you can say there was a policy, a direction. There was a hope.
There never has been under any government an integrated maritime policy. That is why we have seen our shipbuilding and shipping interest decline. We have had no maritime strategy at all. If a country has a government who projects a philosophy and a policy of partnership such as in Japan, where the government, industry and the banks collaborate in order to create industries, and build a very strong domestic market in order to leapfrog into the world market with a competitive edge, that is not unfair.
Barrow-in-Furness
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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58 - Graham Day, Chairman, 1983-1986
- from Interviews British Shipbuilders Plc
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My background was as a Barrister trained in Canada, specifically in the marine context. After eight years at the Bar, I went to work for Canadian Pacific, for whom in the international commercial arena I bought ships. At the time we were setting up an offshore bulk shipping operation, I ordered three relatively small container vessels from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead in 1968. On April Fools Day in 1970 we were told that the yard was about to collapse, because they were literally running out of money. I spent the next three or four months in Britain working with the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation to keep the shipyard alive so that I could get my three container ships, which we did. The following year I was asked to come and run Cammell Laird because the management really had not made much change. I later became Chief Executive Designate in the Organising Committee of British Shipbuilders, but resigned because of the lack of strategy, and then came back in as Chairman in succession to Robert Atkinson.
I came out of a quite carefully structured business in Canadian Pacific. In going into Cammell Laird, information, of almost any type, was virtually non existent. I went in August 1971, and they were on the eighth budget for that year. There was no grip on the business, no strategy. The next year we started to make money, and all of the time that I was there we made money. We had a product strategy which we were fortunately able to deliver. We instituted a corporate planning process. When I went into the organising committee for British Shipbuilders with much trepidation, after the Second Reading of the Bill before Parliament, I wrote around to each of the companies in the industry and asked for their current corporate plans. I received one; the plan which I had drafted for my successor at Cammell Laird.
It is wrong to say that there was a lack of investment, because money actually had been invested in the industry. The question is rather that the investment was not concentrated; it was sort of shared out. It was not investing behind excellence or emerging excellence. At Cammell Laird there was a group of middle managers, which by any reasonable standards were excellent.
Select Bibliography
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18 - Peter Milne, Swan Hunter, British Shipbuilders Plc
- from The Tyne
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I left school at sixteen and gained a student apprenticeship in an engine building firm within the Swan Hunter group of companies. I ended up in the Technical Department, went to sea for a while, and came back to the Technical Department at Wallsend. Post the grouping on the Tyne under the aegis of Swan Hunter [1968] I was eventually moved into general management and naval architecture, and from there progressed to deputy managing director and then, three years before nationalisation, to managing director. In 1977, I was seconded to British Shipbuilders Headquarters, becoming a Board Member in 1981, first for engineering and later for the composite merchant shipbuilding division. Later on I was Board Member for ship and engine building, which covered all that remained in operational terms after the warship yards had been privatised. Ultimately I left in 1990, having completed almost thirty-nine years in shipbuilding.
The strength of Swan Hunter was volume of output and technical capability. We ran six shipyards, and we built a wide variety of ships, and remained profitable up to nationalisation. In common with a lot of other shipbuilders we did not realise that we were going to have to get smaller. Shipbuilding has tended to follow low labour costs, because it is labour intensive, and the cheaper you can build the more work you will get. We did not perceive quickly enough that foreign competition was going to have an impact on us. It never needed to be as bad as it became. It became a political problem. The survival of shipbuilding capacity became a question of political will. So we had countries like Italy, Spain, and West Germany who believed that shipbuilding was an important part of their maritime infrastructure, and who have kept fairly substantial shipbuilding capacity. Unfortunately, we took a contrary view, and we have not got a great deal left.
The weaknesses that we had are that generally we did not have enough talented people in management. Rather belatedly, firms started to train and recruit managers who were graduates, and who were well qualified, but the talent was thinly spread. The other area that we were weak was at the supervisory level. People had been promoted from being very good tradesmen, but were not very good foremen.
8 - Professor John Rorke, Alexander Stephen, Denny Brothers, Brown Brothers
- from Upper Clyde
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At the age of 15, I sat tests which Denny's held for their engineering apprentices and was accepted. I studied at night school at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, and then full time, gaining a Bachelor of Science degree from London University. I then stayed on as a lecturer at the Royal Technical College until 1950, when I joined Alexander Stephen as Technical Assistant to the Engineering Director. There, I later developed a unit, which became known as a Resonance Charger. It is still manufactured in Newcastle by a subsidiary of Vickers. This seemed to me to be an ideal subject for a PhD so I wrote it up, and completed it in 1957, by which time I had already been invited to rejoin my original company, Denny, as Technical Manager. In time, I became the Engineering Director of the company, and held that post when the firm went into liquidation in 1963. I then came to Edinburgh as the Technical Director of Brown Brothers. There followed a period as Sales Director, and in 1972-1973, I became Managing Director, and eventually, Chairman of the company.
When I think of Denny's the strengths were in their ability to design and to innovate. They were the first commercial operation to build a ship model basin, the Denny Tank in Dumbarton. In this, they were the first company to recognise the scientific side of shipbuilding. From that day onwards the design office in the shipyard was called the Scientific Office. I believe that remained the strength of the company right up to liquidation in 1963. The weaknesses only really became apparent towards the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was then that the Japanese influence was taking hold, and it was becoming more and more difficult to win contracts. Denny's had, from memory, quite profitable years in 1961 and 1962, but from then on the work just dried up. There were one or two reasons for that. Denny's had traditionally built a number of the cross-channel ferries. I think that there were three of these orders going at the time that we failed to win. Almost certainly, they would have resulted in losses when built by the firms that won the orders.
6 - Bob Easton, Yarrow Shipbuilders
- from Upper Clyde
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I served an apprenticeship as a marine engineer with Fairfield, and in 1951 I joined Yarrow in a junior managerial position. In 1965, I was appointed a director of Yarrow Shipbuilders which was set up at the time of UCS. When Yarrow was extricated from UCS I was deputy to the managing director, Ernie Norton, before later becoming managing director in my own right.
The major strength of Yarrow's was that it concentrated on specialised fields of construction. When I arrived at Yarrow's one of our strengths was the construction of small river craft for estuarine waters and inland lakes. Specialisation had permeated all through the scene, and we were known specifically as destroyer builders-from there we eventually moved to frigates. Yarrow's to me were always a group of highly motivated professionals. It was always a question of looking at other things we could tackle, never being afraid to try new avenues, or walk into the unknown. There was that certain spirit of get up and go. That; coupled with the fact that we had a merchant and a warship side to our business. Years before, in the days of Sir Harold Yarrow [Sir Eric Yarrow's father], we had entered the land boiler business; that was where you had the not all the eggs in one basket syndrome-the shipbuilding could be down, and power stations be up, and vice versa. In the late 1960s and 1970s however, there developed a surfeit of boiler plants.
We lost something when we reluctantly left the land boiler market. Then again, in the 1960s we had found ourselves with an overseas naval market where we were very successful in winning new orders, and at one time we were building ships for eleven different nations-two thirds of our output being for the overseas market. The customers appreciated that when Yarrow's quoted a price and a delivery date you got the ship at the price agreed and on the delivery date agreed-and the quality was excellent.
In the period between 1969 and 1972, Sir Eric Yarrow, Norton and I took the company from near bankruptcy to a position of strength and back to profitability. In the course of that we borrowed £4.5 million from the Ministry of Defence to keep us in business.
31 - T. John Parker, Harland and Wolff, Austin and Pickersgill, British Shipbuilders Plc
- from Belfast
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I came to Harland and Wolff in 1958, and studied naval architecture at the College of Technology, and partly, at Queen's University, Belfast. On qualifying, I came to work full time in Harland's ship design team, and was there for a number of years before I branched out around 1968, into management. I was subsequently involved in the application of computers in production. We were one of the first companies to adopt the Norwegian Autokon system, which involved the numerical control of cutting machines. At that time we were also constructing the giant building dock, and introducing modern shipbuilding methods. The panel line was to follow, and it was a quite an exciting time of radical change in terms of equipment and methods. I then moved out of production management and into technical management, where I became manager of the production drawing offices around 1971. Then I moved into sales and marketing, and was there during the tenure of the Danish Managing Director, Ivor Hoppe [ex-Managing Director of Odense Shipyard, Denmark] for about three years, before moving in 1973 to be Managing Director of Austin and Pickersgill. I was there until I got ‘hijacked’ in 1977 on nationalisation to British Shipbuilders. I was seconded three days a week by A…P, and remained with British Shipbuilders attaining the post of Deputy Chief Executive, until in 1982, I was invited back to Belfast by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Jim Prior, to tackle the very difficult situation at Harland and Wolff, who were running out of work, and have been in Belfast ever since.
I think that the whole industry suffered from the cost plus mentality of the previous forty or fifty years. The management of the industry were not sufficiently internationally minded. They did not see, or take an interest in, what was happening globally in the 1950s and the 1960s. The threat of Japanese domination was not being taken into account in the 1960s, and that was a period that was the decisive turning point. The product and production development processes going on in the industry lacked attention. Britain led the world in hydrodynamics and in the more esoteric aspects of naval architecture, but I believe it was a preoccupation with that aspect, and not with the production or market sciences, which was a real problem.
14 - Anthony Hepper, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders
- from Upper Clyde
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I was a director of Thomas Tilling, and was on secondment as an Industrial Advisor to the Department of Economic Affairs in the Wilson Labour Government. During this period I was asked to join the Shipbuilding Industry Board, which had been formed as a result of the Geddes Report to restructure the British shipbuilding industry through grants and loans to encourage grouping of yards. There were three members, the chairman, William Swallow from Vauxhall Motors, Joe Gormley from the National Union of Mineworkers, and me. I was assigned to the Clyde by the SIB and in particular to see whether I could form the five shipyards on the Upper Clyde into one group. This was the formation of UCS out of Fairfield, John Brown, Connell, Stephen and Yarrow. When the company was formed the problem arose as to who would be chairman? There were no other candidates so I took the job on the basis that there would be a Managing Director with shipbuilding experience appointed. Unfortunately, we were unable to find such a person, but we did find Ken Douglas eventually. He came from Austin and Pickersgill on the river Wear, and was basically a shipbuilder, which I was not.
I was at UCS for the whole of its life from 1968 to 1971, a total of three and a half years. I was the only chairman of UCS, and my involvement in the shipbuilding industry ceased the day that I left UCS. As soon as I became Chairman, the SIB said that I had to leave them. At the same time Thomas Tilling, who were paying me, took me off their payroll.
On the SIB, the Geddes Report was the bible; after all, we were formed to implement Geddes recommendations. At the time I accepted it as being a well researched Report. In the final analysis I realised that it was not researched in the depth it should have been, and in fact that the problems with the shipbuilding industry were far deeper seated that the Geddes Report ever revealed. Had I known that, I do not think I would have become involved. Geddes did not get to the heart of the problem.
15 - Harry Osborne, Civil Engineer
- from Upper Clyde
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I was brought up next to the shipyards in Old Kilpatrick, and went to Clydebank High School, and was present at the launch of the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. I went into civil engineering, and then went into a civil marine works, and at various times got involved with shipyard work. I worked on modernisation projects at Fairfield, John Brown, Scott Lithgow and Harland and Wolff at Belfast. However, it was mainly Scottish yards that I worked with.
There was some good management, for example, Ross Belch [Lithgows] and Derek Kimber [Fairfield]. However, there was a problem with the unions. At the time of UCS I was involved with some work at the John Brown yard at Clydebank. The impression I got was that in some ways management had lost control. There were more people walking around the yard than there were working, and the management were not doing anything about it. So the union problem was the main weakness, and had been present for a long time in the shipbuilding industry.
Although some companies such as Harland and Wolff and Scott Lithgow went in for super tanker construction, I think the British shipbuilding industry would have been better to concentrate on building more specialised vessels. The small-scale of individual firms was considered wrong, but small firms are not necessarily bad, and in any case, they can grow into bigger firms. Because they are small does not mean that they are inefficient. Lack of investment was possibly the case in many of the yards, but not in all of them.
On industrial relations I witnessed a lot of problems. At the back of Lithgows canteen, you would find a couple of hundred men being harangued by a shop steward. There was a certain amount of stirring up at times, which did not help matters generally. This was probably exemplified by the sit-in [UCS work-in] of the Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie [Communist trade unionists] period. What was required was leadership and discipline. On UCS, what they did was essentially split the Clyde in two. To class John Brown and Fairfield together under the same management was wrong, because they were two entirely different yards that would have been better left on their own.
10 - Jolyon Slogett, Denny Brothers, Houlder Bros., British Shipbuilders Plc
- from Upper Clyde
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- Crossing the Bar
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 11 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2013, pp 40-43
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I started as an apprentice ship draughtsman at Denny, and was released each winter to go to Glasgow University to the sandwich course in engineering, specialising in naval architecture. I graduated in April 1955, and completed my apprenticeship in October 1956. I then worked in the design office for six months before undertaking National Service in the Navy. I returned to Denny and worked a further fifteen months there until I joined a British shipping company of medium size, operating about thirty ships, Houlder Brothers in London, as an assistant naval architect. In 1965, I became Naval Architect, and in 1968, manager of new projects. Two years later I became personal assistant to the Chairman, and in 1972 joined the Board as Director of Finance and Development, and retained that position until 1978, when I left to join British Shipbuilders on a three-year contract working on offshore enquiries. I left in 1981 to do consultancy work, mostly in the offshore industry and in 1986 became Secretary of the Institute of Marine Engineers.
Denny's were still a family business when I joined them, and it was a small friendly yard. The benefit of working there, from my point of view, was that they built a wide variety of ship types. They did not build very large ships because they had a size restriction due to the River Leven. I remember at that time, that Edward Denny, when he was Chairman, complained bitterly about the time lost through demarcation problems caused by the various unions. In those days this was probably the biggest single problem the management had to face. Denny believed that thirty percent of time wasted was due to restrictive practices. When, at Denny's they started a Planning Department, this produced a number of ribald comments, particularly from the senior foremen in the yard.
Demarcation was obviously a very difficult problem. Men still remembered the 1930s when they had been on the Dole [state unemployment andsocial security benefits] for long periods. In the 1960s men were still reporting to the yard on a Monday morning [casualization of employment], and the yard would take on the number of joiners, carpenters or welders it wanted, and the rest were turned away.
12 - Graham Strachan, Alexander Stephen, John Brown and Scott Lithgow
- from Upper Clyde
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- Crossing the Bar
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 11 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2013, pp 47-51
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I started an engineering apprenticeship the day after I left school in 1950 at Stephen's of Linthouse. After two years, I went to Glasgow University for my first year in engineering. I then went to Cambridge and completed a five-year apprenticeship, combined with a university degree course in 1955. After National Service in the Royal Navy, I obtained a job in the design office of John Brown's at Clydebank. In 1963, I was appointed Technical Director, and shortly afterwards I became Engineering Director at the age of thirty-one. I remained there until 1966, when, following the recommendations of the Geddes Report, engineering was separated from shipbuilding. I initially became Director and General Manager, and latterly Managing Director of John Brown Engineering. I left in 1984 to take up a position with Trafalgar House, when they acquired the Scott Lithgow yard.
When I came back from my National Service in 1957, I remember that the order books at John Brown stretched well into the early 1960s. John Brown at any one time could be building a large passenger ship, a couple of tankers, a couple of bulk carriers and so on. They had an incredible mix of products. That was seen as strength by some and a weakness by others, because one could say that had they concentrated on one type of vessel they could have done a lot better, rather than dispersing their activities and resources over a range of products. One of the weaknesses arising from this was that everything was made to the highest quality demanded by the one type, whether that was a passenger ship or a naval ship. So a bulk carrier was constructed with too high a finish than was absolutely necessary. The problem was that the owners expected a very high standard of finish from a yard like John Brown, whereas they would have accepted a lower standard from the Lower Clyde, which only made this type of ship, and did not build passenger ships. [Historically, the Lower Clyde yards did build passenger ships, and the districtdid not concentrate on one type of ship]. It was impossible for the workforce to work on dual standard of quality. They tended to work to the highest, and the ship owner insisted on the John Brown standard.
55 - Richard Dykes, Director of Industrial Relations, 1977-1980
- from Interviews British Shipbuilders Plc
- Edited by Anthony Slaven, Hugh Murphy, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- Crossing the Bar
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
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- 11 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2013, pp 214-216
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My first entry into the industry was in 1977. Up until then I had been a career civil servant at the Department of Employment, but was seconded to industrial relations at British Shipbuilders. I jumped at the chance to gain some industrial experience. Presently, my job was really the Director of Industrial Relations in charge of industrial relations policy with responsibility for negotiations, pay, conditions and later, redundancy policy. I was still technically on the books of the Department of Employment, but my salary was paid by British Shipbuilders.
From my end of it we were dealing in a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth way with the implications of the Incomes Policy of the Government. What we saw in the industry was this extraordinary set of 168 negotiating groups. Overlaid on top of this was Stage Three of the Incomes Policy, which set a ten percent limit on pay rises which could be got around through productivity schemes. I found myself dealing with the chief executives and industrial relations directors of the yards who were trying to explain to us the legitimacy of some pretty bogus productivity schemes to get round the incomes policy. We had to take all these deals to the Department of Trade and Industry. It was my first direct dealings of industrial relations, and I was astonished and horrified at the distance, running through the industry, between the management and unions. We counted some twenty-four unions in the Confederation that we had to deal with. Many of them were pretty politically motivated.
What we were trying to do was to devise a strategy, which gave us the best chance of settling the industry down, of getting more peace than strife, of trying to establish a framework of order on the industrial relations scene which would give us a better chance of improving productivity, and therefore of keeping our market share. We recognised that we were going to be driven to reducing manning, whether for efficiency reason or because the work just was not there, and so we had to devise a redundancy package that would enable us to slim the industry down without outright warfare. I think, in some ways, we were extraordinary successful in that this whole process could have gone badly wrong. We had a centralised wage negotiating structure within eighteen months.