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Historian Alan Wilson - (1932-2023) (aged 90 years)
Alan Wilson went to university under pressure from his
parents and largely because his older brother was there. His own ideas were to
leave school at sixteen and attend a Technical College as he far preferred the
idea of life in industry or commerce, and he was never comfortable with
academia.
In those days one could do a Pass Degree in two subjects if not
selected for an Honours course, so he took a Pass degree in three subjects.
Economics, History, and English and was glad to get it over and done with and do
his two years National Service in the army.
The problem was largely that large
numbers of ex-service persons were still leaving the 5 million strong wartime
army and the several million of the Navy and Air Force and large numbers were
claiming that they would have gone to University but for the war. They were all
sorts of ex-Captains, Lieutenants, and so on up to thirty years old and eighteen
year olds were lost in the dominance of this group.
He did not really decide what he wanted to do with his life until in
his late twenties when he discovered the systems of Pre-determined Time and
Motion techniques and organized Methods techniques that were becoming the
industrial vogue. Suffice it to say that he rapidly achieved a management
position running a Planning Methods and Time & Motion study department for
twelve factories in a steel re-rolling and manufacturing group. He moved on to
another large company with six major factories before being head-hunted by a
large international consultancy.
The projects were virtually all located in Shipyards and boiler-making
plants. It was actually best to know very little about ship design, as the
problems in the United Kingdom were massively organizational. Everything depends
upon organizing the flow of materials and the provision of the necessary tools
and services in the right order and in the right place at the right time. This
had to be done for 10,600 men in a Belfast shipyard, for 3,400 in a Glasgow yard
and so on. Thousands of men in a large number of different trades, with millions
of man hours, dozens of departments, hundreds of machines, and all dependant
upon Work Orders, Job Numbering, and services – especially cranes and
fork-trucks.
Alan Wilson had found his little bit of work heaven. He worked at Three
Sunderland yards under an American Alec Boyt who had been employed at Pearl
Harbour working to refit USA battleships after the Japanese attack in December
1941. This man was a mine of information and Alan was needed to do Planning and
Analysis and to try to help to negotiate the consultancy team through the
chaotic and dangerous minefields of British Trade Unions.
Someone should write a
book about the comic opera mixture of disaster and hilarity of these
situations.
After this he was sent to Belfast where a new Danish Managing Director had
been appointed at a very high salary and he had chosen to bring in the Swedish
branch of this USA International Consultancy. Well, this hugely offended the
British Branch of the organization, and Alan Wilson found himself in the middle
of trench warfare between the Management and the Unions and the Swedish and
British Consultancies. It was another Alice in Blunderland situation. So with
ninety four staff working for him and located in the old Works offices on the
south east side of the new dock he followed a directive on methods planning laid
down by the Swedes. The problem was that the Managing Director and the Swedes
were proposing to introduce new methods after they finished building the next
three 325,000 ton super-tankers. So nothing would be changed for around two and
a half to three years.
It took Alan and Joe Dykes a Shipyard manager about one hour to draw upon a
simple bar chart based on Weekly running costs of the yard and the known total
predicted income that would accrues from ships built in the next 2.5 to 3 years.
It meant that despite a huge government cash grant that was given to upgrade the
yards and meet costs, the shipyards would be bankrupt for around £18,000,000 in
that time. The plan-whatever it was- would not work and the yards with its
10,600 employees was going to go bust. The detail of what transpired in the
chaotic new management structure was actually more than dramatic.
Against a background of the IRA letting off bombs in Belfast, and No-Go areas
being set up and with road-blocks and masked men all over the place it was quite
something. The routine devolved into meetings between the Management and the
Swedish consultants, who would generally arrive on Wednesday in time for lunch
and disappear on Thursday after a free lunch.
Alan was routinely told "your
presence will not be required" and then he sat by the telephone with Joe Dykes
waiting for the urgent call for him to come and referee the simmering conflict
between the two parties. Looking back, it was a situation that no novelist would
dare to write, you couldn't invent it.
Alan was Welsh and not English and therefore
not offensive to the warring Irish and his father was a Catholic and his mother
a Baptist, and so he offended no one in Northern Ireland.
Anyway the crunch came when one day three "bright young men" arrived from
London and that afternoon they finally arrived at Alan's office. They had a huge
bundle of papers that constituted the Government's gift of many £ millions to
the Shipyard in order to carry out the Plan. Alan patiently advised them that he
had never ever actually seen the Plan and so he was unable to say that it would
work. In fact he and Amos Sutcliffe the Shipyard Manager were both of the
opinion that from the little they knew it would result in an £18 million deficit
in around 18 months.
It seemed that neither the very highly paid Danish Shipyard managing director
Mr Hoppe, nor Leonard Gustavson the Swedish Managing consultant wanted to
actually sign their own plan. Hoppe had finally told them to get Alan Wilson to
sign it. Alan decided that as he had never seen the "Plan" and rumour had
it that there was no plan he simply decided not to sign it as the management was
Danish with Hoppe and his three aides, and the Consultancy was Swedish. Hoppe
was enraged and he told Alan Wilson to leave the yard by 5 pm and Alan said
"Thanks very much", and went home.
Eighteen months later Alan arrived at the
Robb-Caledon yard in Dundee and was told that Amos Sutcliffe who had left
Belfast and was now General Manager at Dundee wanted to see him urgently. He
found the usually quiet and soberly conscientious Amos in high spirits, bubbling
over and ordering tea and cakes to be brought in. "Have you heard the news?" he
asked and Alan said "No", wondering. Well right on time and target Harland &
Wolff in Belfast had gone bust for nearly £18 million. That was a heck of a lot
of money in the early 1970's.
Now after thankfully leaving Belfast, Alan was told by Joe Lands that the
Swedes had another great job for him at Govan in Glasgow. This was like being
invited to ones own business funeral, as the Govan Shipyard was the largest of
the four Upper Clyde yards and it had teetered into near bankruptcy five times
already. Finally the workforce had ejected the management from the shipyard and
barricaded the gates. The workers then proceeded to work without any management
and office staff. The whole action amounted to insurrection and the Prime
Minister Edward Heath who had openly stated no further government cash would be
given to industrial "lame ducks", was in a mess. He did not send in the army to
quell insurrection, but he did do a somersault on the No More Lame Ducks.
After previous fiascos a non-British consultant was wanted, and so the "Swede" chosen
for the job that no one else wanted was Alan Wilson. Glasgow was another
"divided city" with the Protestant Rangers Football Club and the Catholic
(Irish) Celtic Football Club.
The situation was hilarious as Alan arrived on time on Tuesday morning and
drove his old Jaguar car in through the deserted gates and entry yard. He found
his way into the deserted main office block alongside the main road, and
reasoning that the main corridor would be "the golden mile" where the directors
had their offices he finally found an office with a secretary in it and she led
him to the Managing Director. The story from there on is amazing but the two
Swedes due to arrive diplomatically failed to come and came the next day when
Alan had cleared matters for entry.
The conduct of this strange affair saw the Swedes fleeing for home when the
Management rejected their "plan" and refused to co-operate. The upshot was that
Alan Wilson remained and together with the Management he constructed an entirely
new prospective plan. It is a long story but all ended well at that time. Alan
Wilson was in seventh heaven with a whole shipyard to play around with and after
five weeks the Swedes who were supposedly doing the job began fortnightly or
weekly flying visits, in one lunchtime and away the next.
Everything worked out
and it would take a long and interesting book to describe the hilarious mayhem
of British industrial life.
Govan got the money from the government and the emergency plan developed by
Alan Wilson was put into action. As usual whenever a Project succeeded a whole
army of hitherto unknown
carpet-baggers appeared as if from nowhere, all eager to grab their unearned
share of the glory and financial spoils.
From Govan Alan joined Terry Granell to see what might be done at the
terminally ill Robb-Caledon shipyards at Leith and Dundee. It was there that he
learned the sad but somehow pleasing and entirely predictable news of the
collapse of the Belfast yards
After Govan Alan went out to Italy where he was appointed to Masterplan the
work organization of the new to be built shipyard at Riva Trigoso to build the
Lupo Class Destroyers.
This project was an outstanding success, and the weird
goings on between Swedish journeys to the USA, to Britain, to Italy, and Russia
began to disturb Alan Wilson. Sweden was not a member of Nato and had remained
neutral in both World Wars whilst supplying Nazi Germany with masses of iron
ore, and now they were involved in a new Nato country warship yard and also
having access to UK and USA shipyards, whilst negotiating with the Russians.
As part of the major reconstruction of the Italian shipbuilding industry
Japanese consultants were active in some yards and so were the Swedish branch of
the USA company. Alan Wilson found himself on his way to Ancona where the
Italians had requested for him to be sent to do the same type of work as had
been immensely successful at Riva Trigoso. Alan Wilson always felt that work was
best done by a committee of three with two of the three permanently absent.
At Ancona there was another vast playground of around 6,500 men for him to deal
with, and so another master planning project was developed. Panamax 70,000 ton
ships, millions of man hours, thousands of jobs, dozens of different trades,
hundreds of machines, masses of consumables and equipment, dozens of
departments. Everything needed to be methodically marshalled into a system that
brought everything to the right place at the right time with the right materials
and men and so on. The Project was deemed to be another outstanding success.
Anyway after further work in Robb-Caledon and at Riva Trigoso Alan Wilson had
had enough of the whole business. British consultants and management were still
suffering from the aftermath of the lunatic "low wage economy" devised by a post
war Labour Government and the Brain Drain out of Britain was still on.
At one
angry meeting where the British in the company demanded parity with the American
and European consultants employed, it was stated that British people did not
require the same pay as Europeans and Americans because they did not live to the
same high standards.
Brian Todd of Manchester was rightly furious when he
demanded to know how the hell we could live to the same high standards if we
were lower paid. By British standards the rewards and fat expenses were good,
but who wants to do the same job - and often do it far better - as an American or
Swede or other European colleague, who is getting three times the money, and
most often was not as capable?
The detail can be told in a book one day but suffice it to say that the
moment came when Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett got together to "Masterplan" the
research into Ancient British History using industrial techniques that would
leave the average academic standing like a one legged man in a sprint race.
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