Just don’t mention retirement

“Our service contracts with Brunvoll AS and Steerprop for example involve a high degree of trust. Manufacturers need to be able to rely on you, and they need to have the confidence in you to professionally represent them. But it works. We’ve been running the Brunvoll contract for almost two decades now,” he says, adding that it has helped to have a relationship that has lifted the company out of the UK’s declining shipbuilding and repair industry and into such places as Poland, Trinidad, Korea, China, Brazil and the USA.

There’s another side to the company ‘relationships’, as Mr Wilson bought the first pillar of the business with his three sons, following an attempt at retirement. “When you add it all together, I’ve spent 56 years either onboard ship or in the ship repair business,” he explains. This ran from joining the Merchant Navy at 20 following a marine engineering apprenticeship. A whole shiprepair management career followed with RB Harrisons, North East Coast Shiprepairers, Tyne Shiprepair Group and finally A&P Tyne. However, retirement in 1992 only lasted six months because, as he says: “I missed the people and I missed the hassle.”

After a spell of consultancy work, he and his sons acquired the old Tyne Slipway and Engineering Company in 1993: “I found myself involved in ship repair again, right back where I started at RB Harrisons, repairing the smaller end of the market.”

He add that the business is “picking up speed nicely”. 1998 saw the company take on the lease of Robsons Slipway and in 2002 it acquired the lease for the Wear Dry Dock in Sunderland. During 2005 the business expanded to Gosport on the south coast of England, servicing UK MOD contracts with additional work for Gibraltar.

On a personal level, he’s satisfied. “I have the best of both worlds now, he says. “We have a pretty solid company capability which is being run professionally by the sons and we are currently in discussions on expansion proposals in that area.”

He also has some projects that are of special interest to him, like the present refit of the TV Tristram; “Back in 1986 I was the director responsible for the repair of the ship in the Tyne Shiprepair Wallsend yard after the ship had suffered substantial shell and superstructure damage during the Falklands war. It was a truly huge job then which meant lengthening the vessel and converting the superstructure from aluminium to steel. Now the ship has come back to us for major refurbishing in Portland harbour as a non-operational training ship. Everything seems to have gone around full cycle.”