Sir William Lithgow, Bt
Scion of a Glasgow shipbuilding empire who later diversified
SIR WILLIAM LITHGOW, 2nd Bt, who has died aged 87, inherited the world’s largest privately owned shipbuilding enterprise while still a schoolboy. Though the Clyde yards founded by his grandfather were eventually nationalised, he continued to lead a family business with diverse marine and agricultural interests.
He was the only grandson of William Todd Lithgow (1854-1908), a ship’s draughtsman who became a partner and chief designer in the Port Glasgow shipyard of Russell & Co, which began building iron-hulled sailing ships in the 1870s. Using standardised designs and components, the business prospered in the era of steam under the first William’s sons, James and Henry.
By now called Lithgows, it grew after the First World War into a conglomerate of coal, steel, shipbuilding and ship-owning. According to one historian, there was little of consequence in the Scottish industrial scene “that did not in significant measure owe something to the contribution, the drive, the energy, and the leadership of the Lithgows of Port Glasgow”.
William James Lithgow was born on May 10 1934, the only son of Colonel Sir James Lithgow, who was created a baronet in 1925 and was sometimes referred to as Scotland’s “industrial king”, and Gwendolyn, née Harrison, daughter of a Clyde shipowner.
William was educated at Winchester where he was a sixth-former at the time of his father’s death in 1952, prompting a Scottish Sunday
Post headline: “Schoolboy inherits industrial empire”. Gwendolyn held the reins of Lithgows while William qualified as an engineer, joining the board in 1956 and succeeding his mother as chairman in 1959.
In the 1960s, the maritime world demanded ever larger tankers and container vessels, while British shipbuilders were overtaken by cheaper Asian competitors and crippled by union militancy. Following a government inquiry, Lithgows merged with the neighbouring Scotts yard in 1967 to form Scott-lithgow, of which Sir William was vice-chairman.
Despairing of consistent support from Westminster, he declared: “While Japan’s shipbuilding industry has been nurtured as matter of the highest national priority… ours has been left to survive a bizarre mixture of laissez-faire and political pep pills.”
Market conditions became even more difficult after the 1973 oil shock, and in 1977 Scott-lithgow was nationalised by the Labour government to become part of the ailing giant that was British Shipbuilders. William Lithgow fought a losing battle for better compensation for shareholders across the industry, including a £600 million claim laid before the European Court of Human Rights.
What had begun as “a squalid argument about money,” he declared, “had become one about fundamental property rights which are part of the basis of the free world.”
He expanded the residual family business with interests in salmon farming, fishing-boat building and agriculture, the latter focused on his estate at Ormsary, near Lochgilphead. He sounded off in the Scottish press on issues such as the inadequacy of ferry services to the Western Isles and the poor state of repair of the “Rest and Be Thankful” route to Argyll.
His appointments included long service on the board of the Bank of Scotland and membership of the Clyde Port Authority and National Ports Council. He joined the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland (Royal Company of Archers) in 1964 and was a deputy lieutenant of Renfrewshire, where he inherited his parents’ mansion at Langbank, close to the shipyards.
Lithgow married first, in 1964, Valerie Scott, who died of a viral infection later that year. He married secondly, in 1967, Mary Claire Hill, who survives him with their two sons and a daughter. The elder son James, now chairman of Lithgows, succeeds in the baronetcy.