Sir Graham Day, who has died aged 92, was a tough Nova Scotian with a strong sense of public duty who struggled to “save the saveable” from the wreck of two of the UK’s lame duck industries, shipbuilding and motor manufacture. Described by Margaret Thatcher as a “superb chairman”, he took the helm at five major British companies, including British Shipbuilders and British Leyland, before returning to business and academia in his native Canada.
In 1970, as an international troubleshooter for the transportation company Canadian Pacific, he found himself supervising the delayed completion of two ships at the strike-torn Cammell Laird shipyard on Merseyside. Day noticed that the pickets went home at night, so he hired tugs and had the ships towed away for completion in Ireland.
The Laird group was so impressed that it offered Day the chief executive’s job. In four years, he transformed the yard; and in 1975 the Labour government appointed him chief executive-elect for the soon to be nationalised shipbuilding industry. But Day found no business plan apart from nationalisation, felt his advice went unheeded, and when the bill was delayed for a year, he returned to Canada to lecture in business studies and join Dome Petroleum.
Seven years and two unsuccessful chairmen later, Day, with his trademark mutton-chop whiskers now grown into a full Mephistophelian beard, was summoned back by the Thatcher government to be chairman and chief executive of British Shipbuilders. It was tough. Even the tight-lipped Day conceded: “I had to do a lot of things that should have been done before.”
An overdue “survival plan”, tying pay increases to productivity, was predictable, but his solution to the seemingly inevitable closure of the Scott Lithgow company on the Clyde, after its repeated failure to complete an oil rig, was a surprise. Refusing to accept closure, he sought and found a commercial buyer in the Trafalgar House conglomerate.
His method was characteristically resourceful. He criss-crossed Asia seeking orders, commissioning videos of satisfied customers praising yards, while grinding down on costs and numbers. But it was uphill work against a shipbuilding recession and a government intent on privatising. Day was criticised for acquiescing, against his own judgment, in the privatisation not only of the profitable warship yards but of the mixed yards, which also built merchant ships.
A man of clearcut, almost puritan, beliefs and frequent aphorisms – “I never lie and I never bluff” – he explained that he treated the government as shareholder. He could make a case, but once the decision was taken, he could either accede or leave – with his mouth shut. This time he stayed.
Day’s appeal to both public and private industry lay in a clarity and certainty of mind that could line up the options without emotion and self-regard. Though aware of his worth – at British Shipbuilders he was the highest paid nationalised industry chairman – he lacked self-importance and in private was frank and generous. He was remarkably free of the political baggage of his fellow nationalised industry chairmen, right or left. When he described himself as “a hired hand”, it was only partly a joke.
His methods appealed to Thatcher. In turn, Day described her as the best boss he had ever had. “Once you agree with her, she is totally supportive,” he said. Even so, it was a surprise when he was asked to take over the perpetually ailing British Leyland in 1986, after US bids to break it up had been rejected.
He agreed clear objectives with Thatcher – stop haemorrhaging money, become profitable, return the company to the private sector. When I asked him soon afterwards if there was a role for a British motor company, he replied with typical frankness: “I don’t know. We have to demonstrate that we can perform better, and then the answer moves to maybe. If we can consolidate that, then maybe moves to yes.”
Astonished by the bureaucracy, he cut paperwork and 10% of white-collar staff. He played tough – sacking top managers whom he saw as disloyal ,and dealing with British Leyland’s notoriously leaky culture by making it clear that those responsible would be sacked. But he also tried to build morale, with less of a command and control culture, encouraging younger managers to speak up, discussing clear objectives and dispatching a top manager around the company’s embittered suppliers to talk of partnership. He encouraged team-working on the shopfloor.
As a salesman, he was staggered to find little marketing and product research. Changing the group’s name in 1986 to Rover, with its quality association, he targeted a range of new models. Noting the popularity of the Mini when he visited Paris, he revoked the plan to end production and successfully rejuvenated it, while huge resources were put into the new Rover 200 series to establish a reputation for quality and good value, even if it trimmed margins.
Sales improved, but he still closed plants and sold the entire trucks division to the Dutch company DAF. Helped by a debt write-off, Rover had returned to precarious profitability by 1988, when, again to general surprise, Day achieved his third target, when British Aerospace agreed to buy Rover and take it private again.
Mission in some sense accomplished. But though more of Shipbuilders and Rover eventually survived than might have, Day was essentially appointed too late in both cases and was able to pluck only limited triumphs out of inevitable disaster.
Subsequently, invitations from private industry came thick and fast. Day sat on the British Aerospace board, taking over briefly (1991-92) when it ousted the chairman, Sir Roland Smith. He also succeeded at PowerGen (1990-93) when the chairman left suddenly before flotation. But it was his own considered choice to become chairman of Cadbury Schweppes (1989-93), where Quaker values chimed with his own and where he confessed his liking for Bournville – its plainest chocolate. “This is a planned move for the balance of my working life. I have been throwing snowballs long enough.” Day was knighted in 1989, and in 2014 was made an officer of the Order of Canada.
He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the son of Edythe (nee Baker) and Frank Day, who ran a gift shop. Frank, a former clerk in the city of London, had emigrated from Leytonstone, then in Essex – and Day was inclined to say, when taking another difficult UK assignment, that his father would have liked him to do so. After Queen Elizabeth high school in Halifax, he financed his law degree at the local Dalhousie University by working as a shoe salesman, and as a singer and producer on local television, where he claimed to have discovered the country and pop singer Anne Murray. He continued to broadcast during eight years of private law practice, before joining Canadian Pacific as a corporate lawyer in 1964.
Decisive as always, he had pencilled retirement into his diary for his 60th birthday in 1993. He and his wife, Ann, returned that year to Canada, where he continued in his legal practice and taught at Dalhousie, of which he became chancellor. Among other business interests, he was a director of the Bank of Nova Scotia until 2004.
He married Ann Leighton in 1958, and she survives him, along with their daughters, Deborah and Donna, and a son, Michael.
• Judson Graham Day, businessman, born 3 May 1933; died 31 July 2025
