34 - Joseph Charles Asher, SEF, Shipbuilding Conference, BSRA

Summary

I came into the industry when I was seventeen in 1935, and spent two years with the Shipbuilding Employers Federation, whilst contemporaneously studying for an evening degree at the London School of Economics. I found the procedures for dealing with everything by consulting precedent at the SEF not to my liking. I still think they were wrong. Then I had a lucky break and went to the Shipbuilding Conference with Alexander Belch, who became Deputy Chairman. In 1939, I was made personal assistant to the Chairman, Sir Amos Ayre. During the war he was Director of Merchant Shipbuilding and Repairs, and I stayed with him throughout, until in 1944, the industry decided that it should have a central co-operative research facility, so it formed the BSRA, and I was appointed Secretary in December 1944. In 1955, I was appointed Administrative Director, and just after nationalisation I retired at the age of sixty-one in 1978. So, effectively, I was at the head of BSRA for thirty-four years.

One of the first things I learned when going in, in 1935, considering we were building a very large proportion of the world's shipbuilding output, was the extent to which the shipbuilding industry was a reflection of the behaviour of the UK as a whole. The product operated in a completely international market. There were no subsidies, and no concealed benefits. As far back as 1938, Sir Amos Ayre was talking about Japan as a long-term threat. I believe if you look at the history of Japan over the last 150 years, you have a country that set out on the military road to some form of world, or certainly, Pacific domination, to put it on a par with the white European nations. When it lost the war, it decided to pursue the same objectives through the economic route. They have achieved this with remarkable success. If people compare shipbuilding in the UK unfavourably with Japan, I would tell them not to forget television sets, radios, motor bikes and cars. It is the UK not being competitive, not simply the shipbuilding industry.

Dealing specifically with BSRA, I give credit there to the shipbuilding industry, because I think BSRA was a major success story. It was the first such research association formed by any shipbuilding nation.