LORD Weir was close to tears yesterday as he addressed his last annual meeting as chairman of Glasgow-based engineer Weir Group.
The ardent anti-devolutionist stumbled over his words as he told shareholders: ''When I retire, it will be over 125 years since Weir was founded by my great-grand-
father (James) and his brother, so, for the first time, there will be nobody from the family working in the firm.''
He asked his successor, chief executive Sir Ron Garrick, to ''keep the company independent, as a country like Scotland needs great Scottish firms like Weir, and to keep up the effort to make it the best engineering company in the land''.
Lord Weir lamented the demise or sale of other major engineering companies in the West of Scotland and highlighted the way in which Weir Group had, partly as a result of the decline of Clyde shipbuilding, grown from a marine engineering focused business when he joined full time 41 years ago into an internationally diversified group.
Sometime adversary Willie Maley, shop steward at subsidiary Weir Pumps at group headquarters in Cathcart, also paid tribute to Lord Weir.
Old school chum Duncan MacLeod, a former non-executive director of Weir Group, proposed the vote of thanks to Lord Weir and recalled him being forced to vacate the chairman's seat for two years when the company was ''teetering on the verge of collapse'' in 1981. Company doctor Sir Francis Tombs stepped in.
MacLeod said: ''You and your co-directors believed that the necessary corrective action had been taken, but the money men, who were by then in control of events, remained unconvinced and the price of their continued support was your being stood down as chairman.''
He added: ''I know that stepping down at that time was a bitter pill for you to swallow, but your spirit was unbroken. The medicine worked, as you believed it would, and your well-deserved return to the chair in 1983 was greeted with acclaim by all your friends.'' He also recalled Lord Weir's first taste of the company in 1950, as an apprentice in the repairs department.
''I remember you telling me with pride how your grandfather's butler used to lay out your boiler-suit each day when he brought your morning cup of tea.''
Referring to the serious injuries sustained by Lord Weir in a car crash three-and-a-half years ago, MacLeod said this had been a ''calamity that would have put paid to the career of lesser men''.
Neither Lord Weir nor Sir Ron would not be drawn on whether Sir Ron's successor might come from within the group or whether an external candidate would have to come from the engineering industry.
A shortlist of candidates includes one from within the group and a number of external contenders.
The internal candidate is understood to be either finance director Ian Boyd, 53, business development director David Dunbar, 56, or human resources director Kevin Gamble, 50.
Gamble, the youngest of the three, could well be the internal candidate on the shortlist.
Lord Weir, 64, who will leave the company later this year, will remain non-executive chairman of electrical engineering group BICC and continue as a non-executive director of St James' Place Capital and Canadian Pacific.
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