As a young engineer just out of university in the mid-1950s, Noel Davies was part of the team that was developing propulsion for Britain’s first nuclear- powered submarines at Barrow-in-Furness.
The delivery of the first British-made nuclear power plant to the Royal Navy in 1964, by which time he was 28 and the project’s chief engineer, was, he said, “the proudest moment of my life”.
A quarter of a century later, he returned to Barrow to run the Trident programme as chief executive of a new company, Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering (VSEL). He was in charge of a highly important defence project: overseeing the completion of the four Trident nuclear-armed ballistic submarines that comprised Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
Very soon the “peace dividend”, a result of the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, began to make itself felt. Massive defence cuts in the post- Trident era threatened the livelihood of Barrow, which was solely a warship maker. With no new ship orders visible on the horizon after the end of the Trident project, Davies found himself overseeing large cuts in the workforce — from 14,000 to 9,000 in the first three years. A key defence post that had been a source of immense pride to him on his return to the newly privatised Barrow yard in 1989 had suddenly become “the toughest job in town”. As the government pondered solutions to the future of Britain’s most important submarine maker, Davies grappled with the social and human cost in a community where virtually every job depended on the shipyard.
Charles Noel Davies was born in 1933 in Shropshire and educated at Ellesmere College. He was the first of his family not to go into agriculture. Leaving school at 16 he became an apprentice with Austin Motors at Longbridge, but gave it up after winning a scholarship to Imperial College London, where he took a degree in mechanical engineering.
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Vickers was assembling a team to build Britain’s first “home-grown” nuclear-powered submarine. At 22 Davies gained a place on it as a test engineer. Within six years he was chief engineer of the project at Dounreay in northern Scotland. “It was my launching pad in life,” he said, “to be given responsibility far beyond my age.” In the meantime he had married Sheila, a teacher. They had three children: Roger, a bomb disposal expert who served in Northern Ireland; Guy, a farmer, who now lives in South Africa; and Suzie, a film production designer. When wheelchair-bound with Parkinson’s disease in his last year, Davies took great delight in knowing that Suzie had been nominated for an Oscar for production design on the film Mr Turner.
A smooth passage to the top at Vickers seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Yet in 1977 Vickers was nationalised and Davies went to London to head the company’s engineering arm. He ascribed many of Barrow’s woes in the following years to state ownership under British Shipbuilders. “It became a one-product company,” he said.
He left to run 600 Group, a machine tools and materials handling group based in Staines, Middlesex. Then, in 1989, shipbuilding at Barrow was re-privatised as an employee-led company, VSEL. “Out of the blue I was asked to go back to Barrow,” he recalled. “I was attracted by the place. You could call it a fatal attraction. There were the people, the Cumbrian countryside and the excitement of what Barrow was making.”
The thrill never left him, but his remaining time at Barrow was always tempered by the necessities of scaling down the workforce. In 1995 VSEL was sold to GEC and Davies left to become chairman of Ricardo, a global engineering and technology consultancy. He was knighted in 1996. VSEL eventually became part of BAE Systems.
An engineer to his fingertips, Davies always loved the challenge of fixing old machines. On the streets of Barrow many a shipyard worker had been known to come across a figure crouched by the roadside, determinedly tinkering with a broken down motorbike, only to realise that he was looking at his company’s boss.
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Sir Noel Davies, engineer and industrialist, was born on December 2, 1933. He died on February 10, 2015, aged 81