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.