At the age of 15, I sat tests which Denny's held for their engineering apprentices and was accepted. I studied at night school at the Royal Technical College in Glasgow, and then full time, gaining a Bachelor of Science degree from London University. I then stayed on as a lecturer at the Royal Technical College until 1950, when I joined Alexander Stephen as Technical Assistant to the Engineering Director. There, I later developed a unit, which became known as a Resonance Charger. It is still manufactured in Newcastle by a subsidiary of Vickers. This seemed to me to be an ideal subject for a PhD so I wrote it up, and completed it in 1957, by which time I had already been invited to rejoin my original company, Denny, as Technical Manager. In time, I became the Engineering Director of the company, and held that post when the firm went into liquidation in 1963. I then came to Edinburgh as the Technical Director of Brown Brothers. There followed a period as Sales Director, and in 1972-1973, I became Managing Director, and eventually, Chairman of the company.

When I think of Denny's the strengths were in their ability to design and to innovate. They were the first commercial operation to build a ship model basin, the Denny Tank in Dumbarton. In this, they were the first company to recognise the scientific side of shipbuilding. From that day onwards the design office in the shipyard was called the Scientific Office. I believe that remained the strength of the company right up to liquidation in 1963. The weaknesses only really became apparent towards the end of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was then that the Japanese influence was taking hold, and it was becoming more and more difficult to win contracts. Denny's had, from memory, quite profitable years in 1961 and 1962, but from then on the work just dried up. There were one or two reasons for that. Denny's had traditionally built a number of the cross-channel ferries. I think that there were three of these orders going at the time that we failed to win. Almost certainly, they would have resulted in losses when built by the firms that won the orders.