Since 1959, the Colquhoun Lecturer in Business History at Glasgow University, initially Peter Payne and subsequently Tony Slaven, had been searching for, and saving from destruction the records of Scottish industry, including the commercial and technical records of shipbuilding firms. This enterprise accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s as the decline of traditional heavy industries gained momentum. Consequently, we had a rich and varied collection of shipbuilding company records but little information on the men who owned, managed and operated the firms. The establishment and funding of the Centre for Business History in Scotland in 1988, and my appointment as Director and Professor of Business History, created the framework and resources to undertake the research focussing on the recollections of major players in the history and development of British shipbuilding since the Second World War.

Ironically, it was the winding up of the nationalized British Shipbuilders Plc that opened up access to individuals involved in all the shipbuilding districts and those who had been instrumental in the creation and management of that state corporation. Dr. (now Professor) Ian Buxton (Denny Brothers, Dumbarton and later University of Newcastle) had been collaborating with Tony Slaven and Fred Walker (Denny Brothers, Fairfield, Govan, Connell, Scotstoun, Hall Russell, Aberdeen, and National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) in an attempt to collect information on the history of British shipbuilding, and he persuaded British Shipbuilders Plc to provide seed funding that enabled two initiatives to get underway. Ian Buxton's project was to produce a database of all British-built ships since the nineteenth century, while mine was to record the recollections and opinions of men involved in all aspects of the industry since 1945. Professor Buxton's “British Shipbuilding Database” is now complete and is a uniquely detailed record of 80,000 British-built ships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is now available for consultation in the Marine Technology Special Collection in Newcastle University's School of Marine Science and Technology and was formally opened on 23 May 2012.

The oral history project was designed and based in the Centre for Business History in Scotland. In the final days of British Shipbuilders we were acutely aware that if we did not move swiftly to capture a libretto from those still involved and those who had retired, the life-long experiences of these men would be lost forever.