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.