I was invited to join Smith's Dock as Secretary in 1956; and in 1960,1 became the company's first Finance Director. We had two yards, one entirely for repair work, and the other also for repair and new building work. We also owned the Grangemouth Dockyard on the East coast of Scotland. When Smith's merged with Swan Hunter, [1966] and later became the Swan Hunter Group of shipyards, I became Finance Director of the entire concern and remained there up to nationalisation

Smith's up to the mid-1960s were a happy company. They still had Sir Eustace Smith as the chairman, and although his family were not by then big shareholders, they had the best qualities of a happily managed family firm. They also had the advantages of a public company. We made very good profits at that time, two to three million pounds in most years. This was the period 1956 to 1964. When we merged with Swan Hunter, the strengths were that we were building, on average, twenty-four ships a year of different types. So we had access to the market for all types of ships. There was not anything, other than submarines, that we did not build. We got involved at Smith's in building oil rigs, but lost money on it. At Swan Hunter we consistently made profits when we came into the very big tankers. We had a lot of trouble with the Government, and the only people who built ships of that size, 250,000 deadweight tons, were the Japanese. We had an awful argument with Tony Benn. He said that if we did not build one of these ships then he would cut off the finance which was available through the 1972 Finance Act. This was in 1974, when he was Secretary of State for Industry. By that time, we had constructed a berth to build a 250,000 ton ship. So we were capable of building the ships. In fact, we did build quite a few of that size. The first one was in 1969 and was named, Esso Northumbria.

This was the argument with Government. We had followed the Japanese with regard to prices, but the Government were not prepared to finance the ship owner beyond the prices being paid by the Japanese. The Japanese lost a lot of money during that period.