Martyn Plummer
Martyn was born in Thornton-upon-Tees in Teeside on 18 July 1937.
Whilst giving a lecture at Newcastle University he was approached by someone who said they wanted a metallurgist to work in Malta on the dry docks on behalf of Swan Hunter. Martyn applied for the job and had a first interview in Wallsend and was flown out to Malta for second interview. He got the job as senior metallurgist for dry docks on secondment from Swan Hunter in 1966.
Martyn returned to Britain and joined Swan Hunter in 1971. His job was to formalise a group laboratory so that all the yards owned by Swan Hunter worked towards the same processes and procedures, in particular health and safety standards for those working with gas, asbestos and loud noise.
Martyn worked at Swan Hunter as general manager of health and safety until 1989 when he was made redundant.
Martyn was interviewed by Alex Magin on 22 March 2007. The interview took place at Segedunum Roman Fort, Baths and Museum and lasted for 28 minutes.
Martyn Plummer's Memories
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Transcript
So I understand you left in 1966?
And I came back to the United Kingdom in 1971 to work for Swan Hunters.
What were you doing when you came back to Swan Hunter?
Well, what happened was there were a lot of problems with Swan Hunters because they had a very large organisation, from the Tees, the Tyne, to Scotland, to Humberside and they wanted to formalise a group services laboratory to service the whole group because too many companies were having their own different standards. So I came back to set up a group services laboratory on their behalf in 1971. I was based at Wallsend slipway. It’s prime objective was to lean towards a lot of safety work which had to be done at that time. The Health and Safety at Work Act was coming into being in 1974 but there was obviously a lot of work to be done on asbestos, and noise and gas testing on ships and all that sort of thing. Primarily, a lot of the work was gas testing on ships originally, then there was all the work to deal with asbestos and noise at that time. In 1973 they were starting to build the VISTA FJORD which was a passenger liner which had a lot of asbestos on board.