Raised the profile of Britain’s naval and maritime traditions
ANTHONY HARVEY, who has died aged 79, was an energetic naval lobbyist who reinvigorated the Maritime Foundation and established an annual award to honour the Daily and Sunday Telegraph naval correspondent Desmond Wettern (1934-91), last of the specialist naval reporters in Fleet Street.
In 1977 Harvey was the youngest director to be appointed to the board of British Shipbuilders (BS) under its chairman Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin. BS was the vehicle for nationalising major British shipbuilding and marine engineering companies.
At its peak BS comprised 32 shipyards, six marine engine works and six general engineering plants, almost all of Britain’s merchant and naval shipbuilding, and its large diesel engine factories. Only Harland & Wolff in Northern Ireland was deemed to be a special case and remained out of its control.
Over the next decade Harvey was appalled as BS set about reducing overcapacity by closing shipyards, and beginning the process of rationalising and privatising its remaining assets. This hollowing out of what had once been a world-leading industry made him determined to do all he could to turn the tide of indifference, as he saw it, to Britain’s proud history as a maritime nation.
David Anthony Pearce Harvey, usually known as Tony, was born on April 21 1943 in Beckenham, Kent, the son of a senior engineer in the Molins company which specialised in cigarette rolling and packaging machinery. After Harrow he trained as an accountant, and enjoyed an early career in shipbroking before joining BS.
On leaving BS in 1989, Harvey became financial director of a fish farm company at Kishorn in the Scottish Highlands, where he pioneered a new system of growing mussels on ropes. When that venture ran its course, his career as a maritime lobbyist began.
In 1993 he became secretary of the Navy League of Great Britain, with a brief to modernise the organisation and to develop its educational and research arms.
In 1994, when the Royal Naval Auxiliary Service was scrapped, Harvey, with the help of Sir Robin Gillett, set up the Maritime Volunteer Service, saving some 54 out of nearly 100 harbour launches for the charity. Three years later the MVS was formally recognised by the Royal Navy, and it continues to provide opportunities for youngsters to experience life at sea and develop personal skills linked to responsibility and achievement.
In 1994 Harvey established the Melik Society, with the aim of preserving Lord Kitchener’s river gunboat Melik and The Bordein, the oldest surviving paddle steamer on the Nile, advancing awareness of Anglosudanese history in the period 1883-89.
In 1995, under the aegis of the British Maritime Charitable Foundation, Harvey inaugurated the Desmond Wettern Award for maritime journalism, to encourage journalists who bring the importance of the sea and seafaring before the public.
Under Harvey’s leadership the single awards grew to many, covering books, films and television, as well as websites honouring the writers who have done most each year to achieve the foundation’s aims. The foundation also publishes Maritime, an annual review of issues such as piracy, the environment, shipping developments and marine leisure activities.
Harvey helped to promote the memorial book held at the church of All Hallows by the Tower which records the names of those who have lost their lives at sea and have no known grave, including hundreds of seafarers lost at sea in peace and war.
Dynamic and convivial, Tony Harvey married Vanessa Scott-noble, from a Hawick family, in 1972. They settled in the Wye Valley, where he ran a sheep farm and bred rare Eriskay ponies. His wife survives him with their daughter and two sons.
Anthony Harvey, born April 21 1943, died October 28 2022