by Gordon Pitts
It was another job for Graham Day, the CP troubleshooter who in 1971 was charged with getting the company’s ships built and out of the shipyard. The constant delays were costing his employer precious time and money. Day had an idea. He had observed that the pickets took the night off. He also knew there were two high tides in a twenty-four-hour span, one in the day and one at night. He instructed the Cammell Laird team to seize the nighttime window. In his view, “doing nothing is not a goddamn option.” So, at the peak of the night tide, the gate to the wet basin quietly opened, and the nearly finished ship was towed out into the Mersey and the Irish Sea beyond. It ended up in a shipyard in Cork, in southern Ireland, for the final bits of work. The strikers arrived the next morning to see the wet basin empty and all their leverage gone out the door.
The mastermind of the nighttime caper was not on site to see the fruition of his work. Day had left for Canada the night before, and was sitting in Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, changing planes for Canada. He picked up an English newspaper to read about the release of the container vessel. The strike had run out of steam. The other two CP ships would get back on the construction track. “So, bugger the strike,” he would gleefully recall a decade later. He didn’t care about the wounded sensibilities of union or management. It was just another job for Canadian Pacific’s ace troubleshooter. He always had a reputation for toughness and patience, and for seeing things that others couldn’t. From that time on, plenty of people were watching worldwide. He became more than a crisis manager for CP—he became a hard-nosed operator who could get things done on the international stage.
The incident underlined the eternal advantage of the outsider: someone who was not part of the ingrained culture. In this case, it was a young Nova Scotian unencumbered by class attitudes or the management-labour stalemate that paralyzed British industry in the post– Second World War era. He was not impressed by the tendency in a strike situation to hunker down and slip into familiar patterns. Union and management would settle into a comfortable routine—and too bad for customers who were left waiting and absorbing huge costs. But this swashbuckling colonial could see a way out. The term “thinking outside the box” had not yet been elevated into the management lexicon. But Day was clearly operating outside the whole damn container.
By this time, he was tightly enmeshed in the long, once glorious but now tragic, tale of Cammell Laird. The previous summer, he had been part of a rescue effort to keep the shipyard alive. He knew the financial picture was still bleak, but he had come to appreciate this was an old and storied institution, a fixture on Merseyside since 1828, when Scottish steelmaker William Laird opened a shipyard across from Liverpool in the community of Birkenhead. In 1903, in one of many rescue efforts for the often cash-starved business, the Laird company found a merger partner in a Sheffield steelmaker named Johnson Cammell—hence the name Cammell Laird. Graham Day would become a major part of the story—he just didn’t know it at the time he rescued the CP container ship in 1971. At that point, the future of the shipbuilding industry was not high on his priorities; he just wanted to get home. It was the latest CP crisis, and “whatever the international problem was, it was mine.” His career had become the textbook case on how to be entrepreneurial within a large corporate superstructure. He officially worked in the legal department, but in reality he worked for whoever needed his services. His knowledge of the wider CP made him valuable, but also a bit vulnerable to empire builders who wanted to rein in his freelancing.
By that time, Ann had moved the family back to Montreal, where Graham would be “assistant general solicitor”—number three in the company’s legal department. They thought this would be where he would retire, while serving as home base for interesting assignments across the company—and, perhaps, ultimately to rise to the top. There was one man who did not see it that way, however: Ian Sinclair, the bear-man who now dominated CP.
A brilliant corporate tactician, Sinclair’s ego had eventually veered out of control as he amassed more authority. After Crump’s retirement and Emerson’s death, Ian Sinclair ruled with an iron fist, and he was not about to surrender an inch of authority. Day always felt Sinclair’s great flaw was that he hung on to power far beyond when he had ceased to be an effective leader. In the 1970s, Sinclair was arguably the most fascinating and powerful executive in Canadian business, reflecting the overwhelming status of CP, but also deriving from the other boards on which he sat. At one point, twenty-two Canadian companies, including some of the country’s foundation businesses—such as Royal Bank, Sun Life, and Seagram—claimed Sinclair as a director. He was the face of corporate power in Canada. Even if he could pay attention to all the issues on every board, which was impossible, he was at the centre of an interlocking power structure that made a sham of corporate democracy. “Sinclair rules every damn board he sits on,” said a colleague on four of his boards, as quoted by Cruise and Griffiths in Lords of the Line. The challenge was that he actually knew more than anyone else: “It can be quite scary when you try to oppose someone with that much power and that kind of mind,” the director said.
While Sinclair’s influence extended to the highest levels of the Canadian economy, he continued to micro-manage deep into the complex company he ran. The managerial ethos of the Sinclair years was top-down interference. It got so bad that Bert Vandenberg, the respected finance vice-president, came in to see Day and informed him that he had just gone to Sinclair’s office to resign. He was tired of being second-guessed, and if Day had any sense, he would follow him out the door.
Day was also disturbed by the increasing lack of focus in the company. As a transportation giant, it was very good at that business, but he felt it was on a track of reckless diversification outside its core competence. Here was one of the largest transportation businesses in the world buying pieces such as Syracuse China, a maker of fine dishes, and other businesses it knew nothing about. “Cobbler, stick to your last!” was the thinking of the old shoe salesman from Halifax.
Finally, Sinclair’s lust for total control focused on Day. Soon after returning to Montreal from the Merseyside caper, the lawyer was walking down the hall of CP headquarters when he ran into the burly CEO. The message conveyed by Sinclair went something like this: “I’m fed up with you trying to organize yourself into another job. I will decide what your career is going to be. You’ll stay wherever I want you to stay.” Day’s reply was that he had not approached people for assignments; they would just approach him. He referred Sinclair to Wright, his boss in the legal department. Then he went back to his office, his blood boiling.
Two days later he got a call from London. It was from John Gardiner, the young executive he had encountered during the Cammell Laird rescue. Gardiner had settled in as CEO of the Laird Group, the shipyard’s parent. The UK government, now in the hands of the Ted Heath Conservatives, still owned 50 percent, but Gardiner and his team called the shots. Gardiner informed him that a first-class British Airways ticket was waiting for him in an office in downtown Montreal. The purpose: Gardiner and company wanted Day to come over to run the Cammell Laird shipyard. Fresh from his conversation with Sinclair, Day was receptive. Once again, he burst into Peter Mills’s office: “Peter, are you and Lynn interested in moving to England?” Mills thought they might be. Day flew over that weekend to meet Gardiner and his people.
Of course, he had a conversation with Ann. They had been married thirteen years and had moved cities three times, not including the two homes in Toronto. She had handled everything connected with the moves. The children were still young—Deborah, the eldest, was eleven—and they needed close attention. Graham had been away constantly, and felt Montreal would be their long-term home. But Ann also knew he needed a challenge in his work. If they were to have any kind of family life, they just had to get on with it.
“I think it was pretty tough slogging for Mom in the early years because he is a guy who gets obsessed,” says their son Michael. “He has a massive
personal battery and a capacity to work a hundred-hour week, and he did. Of course, there is a toll on the wife and family and she kind of stuck through that.” Michael points out that his father has a temper; he can be impatient, stressed, and frustrated at times. “She just has this ability to go ‘Yeah, okay,’ and ride through it,” Michael says. “That’s actually the story of Ann and Graham. It was her endurance and resilience.”
Day was solving a big headache for the UK government and John Gardiner. They had struck out in attempts to find anyone seriously competent to assume the thankless task of shepherding Cammell Laird. Gardiner had remembered his conversations with Day and the Canadian’s eagerness to step beyond itinerant assignments and staff roles to be an actual manager of operations. Might that apply to running a near-bankrupt shipyard, a company a fraction of CP’s size, in a declining port city in the old industrial northwest of England?
Day, though, was a Maritimer, and shipbuilding was part of his cultural DNA. Liverpool loomed large in the story of his region. Nine million people had left the Merseyside docks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bound for the New World, many destined for Canada, and a good number of the ships on which they emigrated had docked at Halifax’s Pier 21. In the nineteenth century, an enterprising Haligonian named Samuel Cunard had launched the first regular steamship services between Liverpool and North America. The fabled Cunard Line revolutionized transatlantic travel—and a number of those Cunard ships had been built at the Laird yards.
Long before Graham Day’s era, Cammell Laird was turning out big ships—1,300 over 180 years—from paddle wheelers for the Mississippi to aircraft carriers in the Second World War. During the American Civil War, despite Britain’s official anti-slavery stance, there was considerable sympathy for the Confederacy in Liverpool, which benefited hugely from the cotton trade. The Lairds were very tight with Confederate agents in Britain, and their shipyard secretly built the CSS Alabama, the feared Confederate raider, masquerading it as a merchant ship before it was floated out to sea and outfitted for arms. The Alabama sank sixty-eight Union ships around the world before being sunk itself by a Union warship off Cherbourg. And then there was the Ma Robert, the doughty little steamer piloted by African explorer Dr. David Livingstone. And, as Day was pondering his decision, the shipyard was in the final stages of building HMS Conqueror, a nuclear-powered submarine that, a decade later, would sink the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands War with the loss of 323 Argentine lives.
Yet the shipyard had always floated precariously between prosperity and penury. It was busiest during the wars, when the production push was strongest and government money flowed into military production. During the Second World War, the yard spat out a warship every twenty days. Cammell Laird was viewed as one of the cast of characters that beat Hitler, and when the economic tide turned in the 1960s and 1970s, it was hard to make changes in an icon.
Although warship building had periods of robust health, merchant shipbuilding mirrored the economic cycles and industrial dislocation. By the time of Graham Day’s coup, the shipyard was on its knees, levelled by the industrial strife of postwar Britain, the sour mood of commercial decline and its constant companion, class warfare. Management and unions were locked in an eternal struggle for power in the yard. Communist agitators ran rampant, instigating work stoppages over issues big and small. There were constant turf wars over things such as who had the right to drill holes in sheet metal, and production was unreliable.
On top of that, the shipyard was the victim of industrial policies that saw ship construction deployed around the world as an economic tool. It had always been thus, going back to the late 1700s, when the British shipbuilding industry shifted from Britain to Canada in the quest for lower costs and proximity to the pine forests that were the major building material. In the era of wooden ships, a tiny Nova Scotia village such as Hantsport could become a major shipbuilding centre: the local Churchill Company constructed eighty or more ships in the early 1800s. One hundred and fifty years later, the materials were different, but the industry was still on the move. Enormous sums were pouring into capital investment in Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, whose shipbuilding sectors were subsidized. “It was always an engine of development,” says Roger Vaughan, a British naval architect who has worked around the world. And Britain was the loser in these global shifts.
Indeed, Britain in the 1960s and 1970s was moving from the old industrial country of coal mines, ships, and cranes to a swinging centre of music, the arts, and tourism, and London had become a financial services giant. Nothing symbolized the change better than four mop-topped lads who formed a rock group called the Beatles, right across the Mersey from Cammell Laird. They played in the Cavern Club on Liverpool’s Mathew Street, in a building, like most on the street, that had once been a warehouse brimming with produce delivered by ships built at Cammell Laird. But even in Liverpool, few were talented or lucky enough to be a Beatle, or even a Pacemaker or a Searcher, and there were many who no longer could find work in the decaying industrial fabric. In singing, swinging Liverpool, an industrial underclass was being bypassed. So that made Cammell Laird’s precarious manufacturing jobs even more valuable.
That was the scene as Graham Day flew to London on a weekend in 1971. John Gardiner picked him up at the airport, and whisked him off to see the Laird Group chairman at his golf club. They dealt with the details. Gardiner reminded him he had no job security except that the government wanted the shipyard to exist, given the otherwise dismal industrial scene in Merseyside. But why Graham Day? It was the UK government’s desperation, of course, but also recognition of the Canadian’s talent and ambition. Gardiner remembers saying his main strength was that Day lacked a regional British accent. Gardiner observed that, in all countries, including Canada, people identify strangers, and their positions in life, by their accents. Day’s freedom from categorization would be an asset.
Day realized he owed Gardiner a lot—later, he would understand how much. “John gave me, an untried manager, an opportunity which transformed my career and which changed dramatically my life from 1971 onward.”
For Day, there was one more stop. He had a meeting with the minister of state for industry, Nicholas Ridley, the younger son of a duke and member of a titled family that owned vast expanses of the county of Northumberland. Ridley was a talented watercolourist and fervent free marketer, with the classically careless grooming habits of a wealthy nobleman. Often caricatured in the satirical press for his chain smoking, on that day he was wearing a purple shirt with a white collar, and the ashes from his cigarette kept spilling onto the shirt. Ridley asked Day if he was prepared to take the job. Day said he was, but he had that same question gnawing at him: why me? Ridley had to be frank: “If you come and make a hash of it, it is easier to shoot the colonial than to shoot the natives.”
It was not a lavish endorsement, but Day thought, “I have found an honest man.”
Chapter 7
Miracle on the Mersey
Consider how far Graham Day had come when he landed on the Mersey in 1971. At age thirty-eight, he was only seven years away from a small-town law practice, enriched by the musical distractions of Singalong Jubilee. He had left behind a brilliant but stalled career at CP. Now he was running an entire company, and in a foreign country. Cammell Laird might have been a faded icon, but it was still a business with ten thousand employees—although down from more than fifteen thousand at its peak. It sprawled over many acres along the Mersey, and it was part of an industry Day had come to know and like.
He joined the grand tradition of “the Canadian in Britain.” Then, as now, most globally ambitious Canadian managers ended up in the United States, drawn by the big money, but there has always been a group that gravitated to Britain. They tend to do well there because they provide an amalgam of skills: can-do management, North American style, but with an understanding and appreciation of British no
rms. For them, a career in Britain is the ultimate in having made it. There is something that inspires them in venerable British institutions, no matter how far past their prime, be it the Royal Mail, the Times, or a ragged shipyard in Liverpool.
Media barons Aitken, Thomson, and Black used newspapers as a lever into British politics and society. Newspapers offered a way to move British public opinion, to become a player in influencing the Mother of Parliaments. In particular, Max Aitken, the New Brunswick preacher’s son who became Lord Beaverbrook, was ferociously driven to exceed expectations. A successful tycoon in Canada, he moved to Britain, got into politics, and became a sponsor of Andrew Bonar Law, the New Brunswick–born politician who was briefly British prime minister. After building a newspaper empire, Beaverbrook was minister of aircraft production for his friend Winston Churchill in the Second World War. Controversy followed him like a plague, and he resigned under a cloud. Beaverbrook, though, personified Britain’s magnetic pull for Maritimers. Growing up physically closer to Britain than were other Canadians, for centuries they were also part of the trade of rum, fish, and industrial goods that flowed among the triangle of Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean. It was a more natural transition for a Maritimer than for someone from Toronto or Winnipeg to move to Britain.
Michael Donovan, a Halifax media entrepreneur who has taken up residence in London to pursue business opportunities, finds it a relatively seamless transition. “The British truly have no negative views about Canadians,” not like they do about so many other nationals. They might on occasion portray Canadians as boring, but rarely are Canadians marked as people to avoid.