Tribute to Bob Murdoch RIP

Peter Rutherford

29/05/2025

What to say about a guy like Bob?

Well, he was a close friend, mentor and workmate for over 50 years – most of which was spent in CA Parsons, although in different departments.

As well as being a very honest, hardworking and diligent guy, Bob respected other people’s weaknesses and opinions but he never failed to confront directly the extreme right.

He was a giant among trade union organisers, locally in both CA Parsons and Newcastle Trades Council. Nationally he was a well-known anti racist campaigner.

Fortunately he had a strong wife in Sheena and a formidable family behind him.

When, as a designer, he joined Parsons in January 1971, from Bristol where he worked in Concorde, I’m not sure he knew what he was getting into.  The previous year, 1970, the technical staff had just had a successful long dispute where the management were trying to break the union and their 100% membership position.  Members were sacked but then reinstated.

In 1972, the Commission on Industrial Relations visited Parsons; and despite their receiving no cooperation from the union TASS, their report completely vindicated and upheld the TASS position.

Bob then became office committee representative for Mechanical Design and eventually joined the negotiating committee team. The leading lights had been Terry Rogers, Harry Blair and Ken Ternent.  Bob then figured alongside them.

Later on, those three were victimised in a series of redundancies. Sadly, all three have since passed away. Bob and I were left to pick up the pieces.

In his earlier days at Parsons, senior management wanted to being in a new grading scheme.  Bob was instrumental in overturning their version and almost single-handedly completely revamped it to be much fairer and transparent.

In 1977, Parsons, which had already joined with Reyrolles, merged with Clark Chapman to form NEI – Northern Engineering Industries.

On 6 May 1977, US president Jimmy Carter along with prime minister Jim Callaghan visited Newcastle Civic Centre.

Prior to this Lord Weinstock, a vicious predator at GEC, was attempting a hostile takeover of Parsons with the intention of closing it as the only competitor for home orders.

While Parsons senior management were taking on water ready to surrender, Bob helped to rally members and over five thousand marched from Parsons to lobby PM Callaghan to place an order for the power station Drax B. We were desperate for work.

As well as President Carter’s much quoted ‘howay the lads’, the prime minister also said ‘If I had a power station in my pocket, I would give it to you.’  Lo and behold, three months later in July Tony Benn, the secretary of state for energy, announced that the 660 MW Drax B order was placed at Parsons.

Parsons has survived to this day, but at a reduced numbers and basically a service company.  After the decimation of manufacturing in favour of the finance sector during the Thatcher years, Britain has now, no capability to build power stations.

Bob played a vital role in the following:-

A pay claim in January 1979.  After industrial action we ended up with arbitration at ACAS in September.  Documentation was provided to the three arbitrators and we managed to persuade ACAS that the chairman should be one of the ex-presidents of our union. We obtained an unprecedent rise of 18%.

1982: Another salary and conditions dispute. 600 of the 800 TASS members were sacked for working to contract. Members continued to come to work. If there was no pay then it developed into a sit-in. We barricaded the pay department as we were owed money. The police were called but we persuaded them that we had a reasonable case, and we eventually settled on a decent deal.

1984: The board of directors brought in as chief executive a Mr Kraus, who was known as the ‘hatchet man’ to carry out a redundancy programme at Christmas time. It was resisted and calendars were full of ‘So many chopping days until Krausmas’.  We ended up with only voluntary redundancies but lost so many active members over the ensuing years.

1989-1991: The Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, the CSEU, had a campaign called the ‘Drive for 35’, to reduce the working week. They called the shop floor manual workers out on indefinite strike.  Although not part of the CSEU action, Bob and I arranged weekly collections amongst our members for the dispute.

The dispute achieved a reduction from 40hours to 37 hours per week.

During the 1980s, there were no home orders placed by Britain’s Government – a decade of famine for power station manufacturing, part of Government rationalisation.  Prior to that, redundancies were successfully resisted strongly by the technical staff.  However, during that decade, we lost many leading activists, but we still maintained our organisation, protecting what we could for wages and conditions.

Then in 1989 Rolls-Royce took over. We later discovered an ulterior motive. At the time Rolls-Royce were experiencing a dearth of aeroplane engine orders, cash flow problems and paying for redundancies.  We believe that they merged the two pension schemes with the intention of getting their hands on the NEI pension surpluses to pay for Rolls-Royce redundancies. Within seven years Rolls-Royce recovered and announced ‘sale or closure’ of Parsons.

In 1997, Siemens Energy had problems of under-capacity to complete turbine generator orders and took over Parsons for the purpose of fulfilling their order book. Unfortunately, it was too late for Bob, who was victimised and made redundant in April 1996, aged just fifty-six.

I only survived because I was the only technical engineer left who was able to service the largest gantry mill in Europe.  Bob spent some time for free at the Newcastle Unemployed Centre. Then he got a job at Euroseas in Blyth in 1997 for three years, then Hedley Purvis in Morpeth until he was made redundant in May 2003. He retired in 2005.

The negotiating committee had been wrecked, and Bob was sorely missed, but I and two others kept the organisation going. We still had office committee member elections and general meetings until I retired in 2010.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Bob’s various achievements and contributions to the trade union and socialist movements.

As well as his commitments at Parsons, Bob was always active in the local union branch, servicing members in the region.  He was branch secretary and still functioning until a few weeks before his death.

He was since the early seventies a delegate to Newcastle Trades Council, taking an active part in creating the first unemployed centre in Britain, and various campaigns to prevent discrimination against persecuted minorities.

Bob will be sorely missed by many, but he left a legacy of marrying trade union activism with socialism and how to behave as a decent human being.

I would like to thank Sheena and the family for giving me the honour of presenting this tribute.

I’ll finish off with a few quotes from the Parsons members who are still alive and remember Bob – not activists but ordinary members.

‘Very sad indeed, I remember Bob from when I first started at Parsons – a principled man always advocating workers’ rights and fair pay’.

‘He was always fighting for his fellow man.’

‘He did a lot for trade unionism and was a man of principle. A rare thing these days.’

Many thanks – a forever friend.