BAE shipbuilders and the Royal Navy's new ships

[Ivan Cloherty]

As regards colour schemes Ivan, you"d be surprised as I was, how much emphasis the trick cyclists put on this. JS

Not only on cabins John, we built customised and supplied salvage grabs, but our standard yellow wasn't good enough for them, they wanted another shade, they spent nearly as much time choosing that colour as they did the technical specifications, may have been influenced by one of the wives on a jolly. It may seem a small point but it all costs time and money, buying in special paints, cleaning down paint equipment and wasted labour, just a minor point but showed no commercial acumen on their part

[j.sabourn]

When you work for a government department one loses sight of the cost of things as someone else is paying, the MOD were paying and the general attitude among the MN crew was that it was taxpayers money anyway, the wrong attitude I know. That is one reason however why the job was so good. Any ships equipment one didn't have to argue with the shipowner, I would imagine one of the biggest costings would have been the mile of 35mm wire on each Bruce anchor. They could of in an emergency been laid from the Bridge, but as you couldn't see how they were spooling on was best to be driven by an AB. Each winch had its own spooling gear, but as anyone knows when you get to the end of a wrap have to be careful of riding turns, an AB could stop the winch and go back a few fathoms if he thought this was going to happen and re-align the spooling gear, thus saving thousands of pounds on a damaged wire. There were other things that we saved money on, but was always there it would be replaced without argument. That was one of the big differences between the RN and MN was that we were brought up to look after the shipowners business, whereas the navy weren't taught the costings, if they were, they didn't worry too much about it. JS