22 - M.F. Pyman, Mercantile Dry Dock Co. Ltd., Jarrow

Summary

I was lucky enough to leave school in the middle of the war when the authorities wanted technical people. I was good at maths, so I was sent off to Cambridge to do an engineering degree with war service to follow. I chose the Navy, and became a Midshipman, and left as a sub Lieutenant in 1947. Instead of going back to Cambridge to complete my degree, I went back to school at the St. Peter's Engine Works of Hawthorn Leslie for a couple of years as an apprentice. I also spent a bit of time at Doxford, and at sea and came back to the Tyne with the Mercantile Dry Dock Company at Jarrow around 1953, became Managing Director, and stayed there until nationalisation.

The Mercantile was a fairly small yard in the 1950s, but after we built it up we ended up with four docks. The job was purely ship repairing. We were taken over once or twice prior to nationalisation. We went in with North East Coast Ship Repairers, and then that, in turn, was taken over by Court Line. When Court Line collapsed, we were taken over by the Government by Tony Benn who was Minister for Industry at that time. When nationalisation came we were in with British Shipbuilders, although not all the repairers were.

The strength of Mercantile, and ship repairing on the North East Coast generally, was the traditional expertise of the men. We had a huge pool of skilled labour at the time, every sort of sub-contractor you could think of could be called in at short notice, and we had very experienced middle management. We were also better placed than other districts on the working practices side of things. Also, in the 1950s we were well placed geographically with timber [Baltic trade] and coal supplies. This changed dramatically in the 1960s when we started to really struggle with the timber finished and the coal virtually finished. We had just built a new dry dock, so we were really struggling under financial constraints thereafter.

The weakness after 1960 was this same geographical position. With virtually every ship we got we had to attract them to the Tyne, so our prices had to be that much lower.