Person DS/UK/251 Hunter; Sir; (Ernest) John (1912-1983) Hunter (Ernest) John Sir 1912-1983

Hunter, Sir (Ernest) John (1912–1983), shipbuilder, was born on 3 November 1912 at 19 Haldane Terrace, Newcastle upon Tyne, the second son of George Ernest Hunter (1875–1954), engineer and director of Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson, and his wife, Elsie Emma May, née Edwards (1881–1957). Hunter was the grandson of Sir George Burton Hunter (1845–1937), founder of Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson in Wallsend on Tyneside, one of the largest shipbuilders in the north-east, which launched the famous Cunard liner Mauretania in 1906. Educated at Oundle School, Hunter did one year's apprenticeship in the company from 1930 to 1931, before spending a year at St John's College, Cambridge, followed by three years at Durham University from 1932 to 1935, graduating BSc. Returning to Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson in 1935, Hunter worked for two years as a draughtsman. On 20 November 1937 he married Joanne Winifred (b. 1915/16), daughter of Cornelius Garbutt Wilkinson, a shipbroker; they had one son. Following their divorce, on 19 March 1949 he married Sybil, daughter of Charles William Gordon, a London stockbroker, and divorced wife of Camille Enright Malfroy; they also had one son. Hunter moved to Scotland to work as assistant manager of the Clyde shipbuilders Barclay, Curle & Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson, and remained there until 1939. During the Second World War he was based at the company's dry docks on Tyneside, becoming assistant manager of the dry docks in 1941, and general manager in 1943, responsible for the wartime repairs. In ‘Shipgrafting—some wartime repairs’, published in the Transactions of the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders (1947), he described some of the innovations in the dry docks during the war, including the grafting of new forward halves on to surviving end halves, as with MV Pontfield, whose after half survived an enemy attack in September 1941, and with a new front half built and grafted on at the yard was ready for active service again in June 1942. Hunter became a director of the company in 1945. There was plenty of demand for new ships after the war, and the order-books were full in the 1940s and 1950s with new ships and conversions from wartime to peacetime use. With twelve berths, Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson dominated shipbuilding on the Tyne. Twelve ships were launched in 1947, including an aircraft-carrier, an oil tanker, and passenger and cargo ships. After a brief lull between 1948 and 1949, the upward trend continued during most of the 1950s, and the company won the contract for a passenger liner for the Norwegian America Line. Launched in 1956, the MV Bergensfjord became the flagship of the line. Hunter was responsible for the planning and construction of a large new dry dock, opened in 1957. When Hunter became chairman and managing director in 1957, output was at its peak, but there was a downward trend in annual tonnage after 1957, and the tonnage launched between 1957 and 1965 was only one third of the company's maximum capacity. With the help of a government loan, Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson won the contract for two cargo vessels for Ghana, launched in 1964, but it was getting harder to find customers, and a design for a nuclear-powered ship never became a commercial possibility. The company developed its ship-repairing activities abroad, including the conversion of the Malta dry docks and the naval dockyards in Singapore, and built ship-repairing yards in South Africa and Trinidad. Following the publication of the Geddes report (1966) on the future of the shipbuilding industry, Swan, Hunter, and Wigham Richardson merged with Smith's Docks Company, with yards on the Tees and the Tyne, to form the Swan Hunter Group, and in 1967 three other shipbuilders, Vickers Armstrong, Hawthorn-Leslie, and John Readhead, agreed to amalgamate their Tyneside yards with Swan Hunter, under Hunter's chairmanship, also taking over the Furness repair yards on the Tees. Swan Hunter Shipbuilders, as it was called from 1969, became the largest shipbuilding group in Britain, with a workforce of more than 20,000 in 1968, and after four bad years it began to make a profit in 1971. In 1972 Hunter stepped down as managing director, but remained as executive chairman. The revival in the fortunes of the group was short-lived, and an attempt to get orders from the navy in 1973 failed when the government decided not to build warships on the Tyne. A crisis in world shipbuilding followed the increase in the price of oil in 1974 and the collapse of the market for oil tankers, and when the government nationalized the shipbuilding industry in 1977 Swan Hunter Shipbuilders became a member company of British Shipbuilders. Hunter formed an industrial holding group, Swan Hunter Shiprepairers Tyne, with interests in shipbuilding in Britain and abroad, which he chaired until his retirement in 1979. Hunter played an important part in public life. He was chairman of the Tyne Shipbuilders' Association from 1956 to 1957, the North East Coast Ship Repairers' Association from 1957 to 1958, and the Dry Dock Owners and Repairers' Central Council from 1961 to 1962. As chairman of the British Employers' Federation from 1962 to 1964 he took part in talks with the Federation of British Industry which led to the formation of the Confederation of British Industry in 1965. He was a member of the National Economic Development Council from 1962 to 1964, and served for three years on the board of British Railways. He was also the first chairman of the Central Training Council, from 1964 to 1968, and a member of the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, serving on the council, and as president from 1958 to 1960, and he was president of the Shipbuilders and Repairers National Association from 1968. His business interests included directorships of the Wallsend Slipway and Engineering Company and the Glasgow Iron and Diesel Company, and he was chairman of M. W. Swinburne & Sons, brassfounders, and the Hopemount Shipping Company. Hunter was appointed CBE in 1960 and was knighted in 1964. He received the degree of DSc from the University of Newcastle in 1968 and was given the freedom of the borough of Wallsend in 1972. He died on 19 December 1983 at his home, Beech Close Farm, Newton, Stocksfield, Northumberland, and was buried at St Andrew's Church, Corbridge, on 23 December. Swan Hunter returned to private ownership in 1986. Anne Pimlott Baker Sources J. F. Clarke, Building ships on the north east coast, 2: c.1914–1980 (1997) · J. F. Clarke, ‘Hunter, Sir Ernest John’, DBB · The Times (21 Dec 1983) · J. F. Clarke, A century of service to engineering and shipbuilding: a centenary history of the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, 1884–1984 (1984) · WWW · L. A. Ritchie, ed., The shipbuilding industry: a guide to historical records (1992) · b. cert. · m. cert. · d. cert. Likenesses W. Bird, photograph, 1964, NPG [see illus.] · photograph, repro. in Clarke, ‘Hunter, Sir Ernest John’, 3, 394 · photograph, repro. in D. Dougan, The history of north east shipbuilding (1967), facing p. 193 Wealth at death £158,725: probate, 21 June 1984, CGPLA Eng. & Wales © Oxford University Press 2004–5 All rights reserved: see legal notice Anne Pimlott Baker, ‘Hunter, Sir (Ernest) John (1912–1983)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/48711, accessed 25 Aug 2006] Sir (Ernest) John Hunter (1912–1983): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/48711 Shipbuilder Anne Pimlott Baker, ‘Hunter, Sir (Ernest) John (1912–1983)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/48711, accessed 25 Aug 2006] International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families - ISAAR(CPF) 2nd edition - ICA 2004 ISBN 2-9521932-2-3 National Council on Archives, Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997 Yes Lrees 25/08/2006 Lrees 25/08/2006 e4058840-b689-48c8-a944-28d96a857f74