6 - Bob Easton, Yarrow Shipbuilders

Summary

I served an apprenticeship as a marine engineer with Fairfield, and in 1951 I joined Yarrow in a junior managerial position. In 1965, I was appointed a director of Yarrow Shipbuilders which was set up at the time of UCS. When Yarrow was extricated from UCS I was deputy to the managing director, Ernie Norton, before later becoming managing director in my own right.

The major strength of Yarrow's was that it concentrated on specialised fields of construction. When I arrived at Yarrow's one of our strengths was the construction of small river craft for estuarine waters and inland lakes. Specialisation had permeated all through the scene, and we were known specifically as destroyer builders-from there we eventually moved to frigates. Yarrow's to me were always a group of highly motivated professionals. It was always a question of looking at other things we could tackle, never being afraid to try new avenues, or walk into the unknown. There was that certain spirit of get up and go. That; coupled with the fact that we had a merchant and a warship side to our business. Years before, in the days of Sir Harold Yarrow [Sir Eric Yarrow's father], we had entered the land boiler business; that was where you had the not all the eggs in one basket syndrome-the shipbuilding could be down, and power stations be up, and vice versa. In the late 1960s and 1970s however, there developed a surfeit of boiler plants.

We lost something when we reluctantly left the land boiler market. Then again, in the 1960s we had found ourselves with an overseas naval market where we were very successful in winning new orders, and at one time we were building ships for eleven different nations-two thirds of our output being for the overseas market. The customers appreciated that when Yarrow's quoted a price and a delivery date you got the ship at the price agreed and on the delivery date agreed-and the quality was excellent.

In the period between 1969 and 1972, Sir Eric Yarrow, Norton and I took the company from near bankruptcy to a position of strength and back to profitability. In the course of that we borrowed £4.5 million from the Ministry of Defence to keep us in business.