Stephen's was a family business. I was the seventh generation of Stephen's. In spite of my father urging otherwise, I became a shipbuilder, and having been in the navy and at university, I went to Alexander Stephen's for a spell. Then I worked at Burntisland and at William Hamilton in Port Glasgow before coming back to Stephen's in a junior managerial position. I went on to deal with the sales and marketing side, and was very briefly managing director in 1967- 1968 before the merger with UCS. After that, my position with Stephen's was as a non executive, and although we were not in shipbuilding, we did run our engine works and ship repair sides for another eight years.

As far as the strengths of the industry in general, I am not sure that there were very many, except that there was a great rapport between the shipbuilders and the ship owners. With hindsight, we obviously got ourselves into a hole and we could not dig ourselves out of it. The weaknesses went right back to Victorian times when a labour structure was set up, which did not really allow for any form of modernisation or alteration. When technical developments arose, the system was such that the industry could not modernise.

Demarcation was always there. It was always a problem fitting in between one tradesman and another. A demarcation problem would come to a head for perhaps some disconnected reason. If there was some unrest somewhere, all any department needed to do was fix their eyes on demarcation, and say that this chap next to us is doing our job, we want more of it. It was always available as a battleground. It was only occasionally that it was taken up. Normally, there was a lot of sensible demarcation. Trade union officials were politicians. Though elected by their members they had to deliver the goods. They had to make sure that their members did as well as other people. Their job was not to start with the interests of the industry.

I think our most devastating experience was in the early 1950s when we were probably leading Britain and most of the world in pre-fabrication. We realised that it was stupid to split the work between shipwrights and boilermakers. My uncle John pioneered the combined team.