I finished an engineering degree and joined the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors in September 1939, and commenced another degree course as Constructor Lieutenant. I qualified as a Naval Architect and spent ten years with the Navy. I then joined a firm of management consultants for four years, before being headhunted by a friend to join Fairfield as a Shipyard Manager in May 1954. I stayed with Fairfield for twelve years, before I went to Harland and Wolff. I left Harland and Wolff to become Director General of the British Chemical Industries Association, and after three years there I was headhunted by Basil Mavroleon for what I understood to be the job of Managing Director of Austin and Pickersgill, but during my first interview I was offered the job of Chairman and Managing Director. I was there for over ten years, from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1988. By this time I was sixty-six, and I decided that I had had enough of the management of British Shipbuilders, for whom I had neither time nor much respect. I was very happy to agree with Graham Day that I should retire.

One of the strengths from my point of view at Fairfield and Harland's was the fact that the top people, by which I am referring to the Chief Executive and Chairman in each case, were very flexible in attitude, and gave me a free hand to do what I wanted to do, firstly in rebuilding both shipyards, and secondly, managing them. That did not apply so much from the start, but in A…P, because I was the boss there, I did have a very free hand from Basil Mavroleon, who was Chairman of London and Overseas Freighters who owned the yard at that time. He never interfered, although no one could have been more interested in shipbuilding than he was. The steelwork facilities at Fairfield and Harland's when I first went there were pretty much a load of scrap. Fairfield had not had anything to speak of it done to it since before the war.