My ambition was to become a member of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors. I began an apprenticeship at Chatham Dockyard where I won a series of Admiralty prizes and at the end of four years I was given a Naval Constructors Cadetship and went of to the Royal Naval Engineering College. I then moved onto Greenwich, and then Bristol and left the Naval College there in 1942 and joined the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors and got involved in submarine designs, and later got the job of designing Britain's first nuclear submarine. In the end, I rose to head the Royal Corps as Director General Ships. I did this for six years until in 1979 I was asked by the Labour Government to join the Board of British Shipbuilders, and did so in April as Board Member for Warshipbuilding. After the General Election of that year we then had a very hostile period with Conservative Ministers whose sole aim was, in fact, the dismemberment of the industry. We prepared to sell off the warship sector. In 1984 I went down to Bath and set up Warship Design Services, which then became a part of Vickers. I then did a lot of marketing and advisory work for Vickers, retiring in 1991.

On nationalisation we found some extraordinary things. We found that when we tried to develop common salary scales across the industry that the warship yards were paying less, by and large, to their men than the merchant yards. We had one merchant yard which on closer inspection was found to be paying a productivity bonus of £5 per week to every employee from May to November 1979, and it did not have a single ship in the yard. The Managing Director of that yard left a week before we sacked him. What I missed when I joined the British Shipbuilders Board was intellectual dialogue. I found there was very little of that as people were overwhelmed by the day-to-day problems. By 1979 the unions had been brought substantially on board. This was largely due to the Confederation's Alex Ferry who was a tremendous chap. John Chalmers was also a reasonable man. The labour relations situation had improved markedly and at all levels there was consultation. There was a general desire to make the thing succeed.