by Gordon Pitts
Graham Day was not boring. He could scarcely conceal his desire to run a company, to take what he had learned as a globe-trotting crisis manager and apply it to a real business. But now he had taken on a crisis of mammoth proportions: a money-losing business in a sunset industry. You have to be crazy, some said. Certainly, his father thought so. Frank Day was always the barometer of his son’s career moves. He believed that working for a railway meant, in hard times, your salary might get reduced, but you won’t be laid off. “He thought I was absolutely bonkers leaving CP to run this shipyard,” the son recalls. But Frank must have harboured some pride that, five decades after he had left England, his own son was going back to run a British company—not a household name, not a Royal Mail, but an institution of some weight in northwest England. The household names would come later.
As for Ann’s father, Jake Creighton, he had his typical mordantly caustic comment on his son-in-law’s wandering ways. “Can’t keep a job,” he would say, just shaking his head.
Jake was a constant sparring partner for young Graham Day. Creighton was the operator of a third-generation food brokerage business in Dartmouth. He was a larger-than-life figure, opinionated and combative, somewhat like his son-in-law. The competition was certainly a spur for Day. “For Jake, it was all about being the alpha male,” Michael Day says, smiling. “It wasn’t whether Dad was successful or not. Jake would grudgingly say, ‘yeah, well, whatever, et cetera,’ but Jake was the head of that side of the family, and Graham should get back in line.”
Graham and Ann reaffirmed their pact: they would take the plunge, but they would come back to Nova Scotia. That was always the assumption in all their travels. As Graham told the Times of London in a later interview, he made sure he had a fallback position: “I’m not saying money doesn’t interest me but it sure doesn’t come first, or second or third or fourth. I work on a screw-you level. As long as I have enough resources to say ‘Screw you’ to anyone, that’s fine.” During the Merseyside period, the Days would build a cottage on North Canoe Lake in Nova Scotia, a handy emergency dwelling if they needed one. However, he had a sublime sense that everything would turn out. He once told a reporter, “I go through life with the sense that I’m fireproof.” He knew he could always earn a living, even if it meant selling shoes.
Ann now realizes it was a risky move, but she became so immersed in the relocation that she scarcely had time to be afraid. There had been several moves already, and she and Graham had succumbed to a bit of superstition. They decided not to hang all the pictures in a new home, because whenever they hung the last one, they moved. So they always kept one picture behind her desk in the living room. “Where are you going to put that one?” people would ask. The Days replied, “We’re not going to put it anywhere.”
The other scary part was Graham Day’s personal challenge. He had never run anything significant in his life, and he had never managed large numbers of people. He had managed projects, often negotiating an acquisition or divestment, or cleaning up a mess. “If the wheel fell off, I was the guy. If a ship went down, if an aircraft crashed, if there was a train wreck.” He had dealt with artists, many of them with fragile egos. And at Canadian Pacific, he had conducted trade union negotiations. But that did not prepare him for Cammell Laird’s remnants of old class and racial prejudices. That first morning, he went to work early at the Birkenhead yard. He had borrowed a big Austin car from the shipyard with the idea of being there at 7:15 to get a head start. As he drove, he could see the yard but couldn’t find the entrance in the maze of unfamiliar roads. He spotted a pedestrian with a knapsack over his shoulder. Day rolled down the window, and said in his best approximation of a Birkenhead accent, “If you are going to Cammell ‘Lerds,’ get in and show me how to drive there.” The man, a black employee of Cammell Laird, knew how to get there. Day let him off at the main gate, and then the word went around the shipyard. This new managing director was different, and not in a good way. Some of the talk was in the nature of, “He stops and gets a black bugger and drives him into the shipyard.” Day had shed his first harsh light on the fear of change that was part of the culture.
His predecessor’s secretary had been fired for removing items from the office safe, so one of his first acts was to retain the previous assistant, who was still working elsewhere in the office. Barbara Blackah became a loyal, dependable guide to Cammell Laird and its ways.
With the words of Les Smith ringing in his ears, he knew he had to walk the property. He immediately requested a hard hat and boiler suit. That in itself was revolutionary—his predecessor had never worn the clothing of the workplace. Suitably attired, Day started his walkabout. He immediately climbed on board a bulk carrier being fitted out. He approached the veteran worker who was fitting a sidelight on the ship.
Day said good morning. Not a flicker. The new managing director raised his voice, “Good morning!” The answer came back, “Are you talking to me?” Day pointed out there were only the two of them. The man said, “Oh, I know who you are. I’ve been here man and boy for twenty-eight years, and you are the first gaffer [boss] who ever spoke to me.”
Suddenly, Graham Day had become the undercover boss, and he didn’t like it at all. It went against his concepts of openness. “I thought, no wonder the yard has problems.” The image of that worker stayed with him. “For decades, this man’s labour was taken, paid for, but he was not part of the enterprise at all. He was not valued.”
Thus began the transformation of Cammell Laird from a tired industrial relic to a modern organization. It was full immersion—a restoration of the physical plant, new technology, a change in management style, the introduction of training. Some senior managers had to go and new blood had to be injected. At the level of the industrial workers, there was no change to the numbers, but they had to become more productive.
So many issues were coming at him at once that “you had to rank the issues; otherwise you would get too dispersed.” All the time, cultural change was a big part of it, as he tried to move from one based on status and religion to one of merit and democracy. You could modernize the shipyard, and he did, but you had to modernize human relations.
Day could count on valuable support. Peter and Lynn Mills came with the Days to Birkenhead, and Mills’s sweeper role became more integral. Mills was Day’s eyes and ears in the company, and what Mills saw was challenging: the plant was decrepit, the technology far behind best practice. “They were overmanned, they were essentially leaderless, and they were bankrupt,” Mills observed. “They were insolvent again, and we were not sure they knew it. Graham’s and my little joke was that we had inherited a one-star shipyard with five-star dining rooms.” In fact, there were five levels of dining areas, depending on your rank. In the top two dining rooms, at lunchtime there was booze. So that had to change. In the Day era, “there was one dining room and you carried your tray,” Mills said.
It was so bad that, as soon as Day and Mills arrived, it became apparent from the company’s finances that it technically had lost its right to trade. The two Canadians rushed down to London to explain this to the government, which came up with standby support of £2 million. As it turned out, the funding never had to be tapped.
The other strong supporting character was Ann herself. She became a valuable part of the corporate team. Secretly, the Days laughed that Cammell Laird had thought it acquired just a managing director, but in fact it got a “two-fer”: two for the price of one. She had a role—the Wife of the Boss—and it was very public. Cammell Laird had a sports club where people played darts and cards. The company owned the land and the building. Ann got a call and was asked if she would come and award prizes for competitions. She did, and it became a regular thing. “It took a while for both of us to realize what a departure this was,” Day says.
There was a night shift, with a lot of jobs in steel-forming for people who were not part of the standard assembly sequence. When the Days were out for
a night in Liverpool, they would drive back under the Mersey to Birkenhead and drop into the steel shops. “We’d go and talk to the guys on the night shift. It was just the humanization of the relationships.”
All the time, they tried to avoid being slotted into categories. Everything about Merseyside was about slotting people—Irish or Scottish or Welsh, working class or middle class, Catholic or Protestant, white or black. Day had an advantage in that he couldn’t be easily pinned down. In a place where religion mattered, his religious affiliation remained a mystery (it was Anglican). “They knew I was a lawyer, what the hell does that mean? They couldn’t fit me socially. And they couldn’t pin me down geographically.” As John Gardiner had told him, his best advantage was his lack of an identifiable accent.
Ann remembers their being tested on local football teams: which side were you on, Everton or Liverpool? Supposedly, Everton was the team of the region’s Catholic population; if you backed Liverpool, you were more likely to be Protestant. In fact, the religious lines of football had already become blurred, but for some hardheads this was another slotting opportunity. The Days never fell for it. Their answer was they were not football followers. Being Canadians, they could be excused.
With the unions he encountered, Day reached back to his poker-playing days to retrieve what became his pledge: I will not lie, I will not bluff. And that served him well. There were strikes, but nothing serious, and the unions largely bought into his vision because he delivered tangible improvements that made their members’ lives better. It was not all positive. Union leaders said in media interviews that Day was essentially a lawyer who brought a cold legalistic perspective to the job. But there was grudging respect, says Peter Mills, partly because “the senior management leadership of the company was like night and day, pardon the pun, with what they were used to.” Mills says, “We were there, we were visible, we were working hard. They recognized that the physical plant was dilapidated and obsolete and in some places falling down. When we were able to get them the latest technology, a much better plant, and greater efficiencies, it wasn’t all roses. But all those ingredients together were enough of an enticement to gain some goodwill, which then led slowly to some improvements. And I think there was also a realization that they were lucky the yard was still going.”
Jim Thomas, a trade unionist who got to know Day in this period, was quoted years later in Financial Director, a British publication, as saying one thing that helped Day was his co-operative, rather than confrontational, approach. Day recognized that unions had a purpose, and industrial relations generally improved under his oversight. “He’s a bit of a sod,” Thomas told the magazine, “but I like dealing with him because he’s straightforward and I know if I get a deal it will stick. You have to impress the hell out of him with logic, but he certainly listens to ideas.”
Indeed, in approaching government for funding, Day held some important aces. Cammell Laird was a key part of British warship production, and it had thousands of industrial jobs in a region undergoing massive deindustrialization. On most operational issues, he was given pretty free rein to do what he wanted, working with agreement from the board. It helped that, in year two, the yard was back in the black. With improved cash flow and government support, Day and his team were able to rebuild the yard. Day says, “When I arrived, the plant and equipment were, at best, circa World War Two, with some elements from the 1920s.” The answer was to bring in a crack team of consultants to lead the redesign and rebuilding of William Laird’s old shipyard.
Roger Vaughan was a young Lancashire man with a PhD in naval architecture, who, in his twenties, had co-founded a shipyard consulting firm that developed a worldwide reputation. He had studied shipbuilding in several countries, including Norway and Sweden, and brought an international perspective to the Mersey site. His company, A&P Appledore, had secured a major contract with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that helped elevate that country into the top ranks of global shipbuilders. He met Graham Day, and was impressed to find a man with an expertise and passion for professional management.
“British industry in those days was quite appallingly managed,” says Vaughan, now retired and living in rural northern England after a career as architect, executive, business school head, and, at one point, shipyard co-owner. In building ships, teams were managed around a project. There might have been a managing director who had come up from the ranks, but rarely was there anyone qualified to run a complex business. “Graham was like a breath of fresh air,” Vaughan says. Another innovation was bringing in a key lieutenant, Peter Mills, as an administrative director who could manage the critical staff side of the company.
One of the first things Day did was have the office block refurbished and painted in bright colours. Then symbolism merged with substance when Vaughan and his team redesigned the shipyard, which would include a massive covered production hall designed according to Swedish techniques. It was one of Vaughan’s great achievements in a career littered with breakthroughs. It meant the owners had to commit £36 million, but it was the critical part of the turnaround in productivity. Vaughan says the Appledore firm had a bit of an international name, but the team was still considered a bunch of young pups. “Graham looked at a group of guys in their mid-twenties and gave us a huge contract. You give people their head and they get on with it. We couldn’t believe our luck.”
But all this new technology would be in vain if the workers lacked the requisite skills, and Day found there were great gaps in the British education system. As the company hired “school leavers” out of secondary school, they needed remedial training in the fundamentals, let alone new skills. Cammell Laird got into the training business, running an eight-room school where the basics were taught to skills-starved workers. The school had work areas where practical, hands-on training took place.
For Ann Day, the five years in Birkenhead were challenging, but they had a big advantage: her husband could come home most nights. The children found it hard at first, but eventually they settled in. It was stability after a time of upheaval—Deborah had been to six schools, but now settled in for four years in one place.
Still, there was some adjustment. Michael Day was a day student at the local Birkenhead School, and he stood out. First it was the accent, and then it was the fact that his father was running Cammell Laird. A large number of students were from families that were employed by or lived off some relationship with the shipyard. That made him a target, and he got into a fight the first week of school. One teacher would continually put young Michael on the spot by reminding him of who his father was right in front of the class. “He would say, ‘Oh, I read about your father today. Don’t think that that makes you important.’ So I was very aware of it.” At one point, one of the Day girls came home and said she was told by a fellow student that she would have to give up one of her new friends because the girl’s father worked for Graham. Ann’s response: Do you really need the person who said that as a friend?
There were also occasional flashes of a fading class system in words that might have come from the dowager duchess on Downton Abbey. In London one night, the Days were guests at the opera, part of an outing that provided dinner as part of the package. One woman heard Ann’s name and said, “With or without the e?” Ann said “without,” and the woman sniffed,“Below stairs.” The whole place went quiet. “They couldn’t believe she said that,” Ann laughs today. “She had put me in my place. It had never occurred to me to think about the e or not. It is my name. But as colonials, there was not a lot expected of you. They were surprised we could eat with a knife and fork.”
Ann found plenty of ways to keep busy. While Graham had the use of a big car and driver, she spent £800 on a Mini estate wagon of Dijon mustard colour with fake wooden sides. It could pull a sailboat out to the artificial lake on the Wirral Peninsula, which encompasses Birkenhead and its hinterland. And Graham continued to indulge his love of VW Beetles, notwithstanding
the availability of the company car.
In time, Day came to appreciate the sense of continuity at Cammell Laird. Families had worked there for generations, and a job was a teen-to-death proposition. In the office building, elderly ladies cleaned the offices on a split shift, coming in after 5:00 p.m. and then early in the morning. And their forewoman, Nellie Smith, was a well-known figure in the company.
Smith and her fellow cleaners were very concerned about losing their jobs because of new working-age limits introduced by the government. The human resources records were in terrible shape, and Day made use of that fact. The head of human resources found a dog-eared little card that indicated Smith’s advancing age. “So I got the ink eradicator, and changed her birthday on the card, and said to her, ‘Nellie, as long as I’m here, you’re here.’” And he did that for the other women.
Nellie Smith would become an important figure in Day’s grand project. At one point, a shipowner from Newcastle was having three bulk carriers built, and he needed someone to christen one of them. It is a very serious matter, this christening of ships, with the ritualistic flowers, the smashing of the champagne bottle, and the celebratory lunch. The christener has to be an important woman, often the wife of the shipowner, a dignitary, or, for major naval vessels, the queen herself. The customer asked Day to find a senior woman in the shipyard to do it. So it was Nellie Smith who launched the ship, as a signal to the workers that they were valued in this business, too. Day suspects that “a number of them were saying, ‘Oh, they won’t do all this for Nellie.’” But Cammell Laird gave Nellie Smith the ceremony, and the lunch that followed. Years later, the BBC asked Smith what she thought of Graham Day. “Smashing,” she said, beaming.
Other aspects of human resources were more painful. Day had a very talented number two manager whose shipbuilding prowess nicely balanced Day’s business acumen. But he was drinking heavily, and this was having a marked effect on the performance of the entire shipyard. Day tried to get the man to seek help, but to no avail. Day had a very supportive non-executive chairman, Sir David Barrett, a man in his late sixties who had run a big engineering business and who would come in two mornings a week, stay for lunch, and talk things over with Day. This particular morning, Day told Sir David that he had no choice but to let his number two go. Barrett just said, “Oh, Graham, what took you so long?” It stunned Day, who asked why Barrett hadn’t advised him earlier to dismiss the man. The answer came back, “What would you have learned?” Barrett went on to say, “You are the chief executive officer. I’m the non-executive chairman.” It was a lesson in corporate governance. Managers manage; directors are there to support that endeavour.