John Baxter: “Engineering has given me a phenomenal career”
Life as an engineer has never been dull for John Baxter. His sparkling career includes a stint serving on a Polaris submarine before switching to the power industry to run several nuclear plants across the country. Now he holds the pre-eminent role of group head of engineering at BP. It’s been a rewarding journey to the top of the profession. And he hopes there are more interesting challenges to come.
“Engineering has given me a phenomenal career,” he says. “I’ve always enjoyed what I’ve done. Now at BP, there is a great deal happening in terms of reshaping the company and rebuilding teams. A lot has been achieved, but there is always fine-tuning to be done.”
A lot of factors came together to encourage Baxter to pursue a career in engineering. His father was a motor mechanic and garage manager, who had two apprentices who showed an aptitude for racing. Those youngsters were Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark, both of whom went on to become hugely successful Formula 1 drivers. So Baxter grew up around motor-racing. “My father had an old Healey and used to race against Stewart and Clark on track days at places like Silverstone. Even at four years old, I would go along. And gradually I got interested in what was under the bonnet.”
At the same time, his scout leader was encouraging him to think about engineering. Baxter himself wanted to do an apprenticeship and work on the big tankers he had seen as a boy on the Clyde. But his scout leader, who was also a lecturer at Strathclyde University, could see that Baxter was better suited to an academic route. “He had been such a fantastic role model that I listened to his advice.”
That decision to go to Strathclyde University to study mechanical engineering proved to be key in Baxter’s life. He had a natural aptitude for both practical and theory-based learning, and was one of just four out of 100 students on his course who never had to do a re-sit. That gave him plenty of free time during the summer, which would be spent sailing on the Clyde and along the west coast of Scotland. He was also happy sitting and watching the huge ships sliding in and out of the dockyards on the Clyde. Those ships helped to make his mind up. “I wanted to join the Royal Navy. I wanted to go to sea,” he says.
The route into the Navy came through a university cadetship that meant Baxter earnt while he learnt at Strathclyde. He then completed the Navy’s standard training to become a naval officer, learning key skills such as how to pilot a ship, before opting to become a submariner. Eventually he passed as a qualified nuclear operator, and was awarded his first posting onboard a Polaris nuclear ballistic missile submarine, spending anything up to 100 days at a time under water.
Life at sea presented a steep learning curve. “It was a challenging role – hard, focused work. But there were great mentors in the form of the artificers on the ship. They gave me a grounding in the basics of the engineering. They taught me to follow my nose. I learnt if something doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t.”
Baxter was one of four qualified nuclear operators on the submarine who were charged with the responsibility of watch-keeping for the nuclear plant. There was also a whole series of other ancillary systems that required care and maintenance, including systems that would deliver the provision of fresh water, equipment for diving and surfacing, and the hydraulics for the periscopes. It was a hands-on role, and one that required him to have an intimate knowledge of the vessel. Acquiring such knowledge meant some rather intriguing training routines.
“It was a great training ground,” he recalls. “I had to know what each and every pipe was for, and for the key ones I needed to be able to get to them and close them off with a blindfold on. It was drilled into us and became an automatic procedure. If something went wrong, you almost didn’t have to think about it. The advantage of that step-by-step training was when everything was falling around you, you didn’t panic.”
And on two occasions, this training proved invaluable. “There were two instances on the submarine when I thought I might die. One was a fire onboard off the north coast of Norway, and the other was an incident that happened with one of the systems, which if corrective action hadn’t been taken would have caused the submarine to founder. The incidents taught me a great deal about people, and how they respond to things. And they proved the value of teamwork. It helped mould the views that I still hold today.”
Baxter served 10 years in the Royal Navy, including a stint as part of a wider safety team changing submarine reactor cores at the Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth. This was more of an industrial than a military setting, he says, and it encouraged him to consider roles outside the armed forces.
An opportunity eventually came up with the Atomic Energy Authority to become an operational engineer on one of the reactors at the Harwell site in Oxfordshire. He was soon promoted, and was ultimately responsible for all reactors on the site.
Life onboard submarines had given Baxter the perfect experience for roles in the nuclear industry. He understood that utmost attention was required at all times, being aware of the potential severity of any incident. He knew that if anything did go wrong, there could be significant consequences.
“Accidents in the nuclear sector are unlikely, but they can occur. Fukushima was low-probability but it happened,” he says.
“I learnt quickly from my boss at Harwell. He used to say that if anything went wrong we might have to close major roads, evacuate the 6,000 people who lived in Didcot and close the main line from London to Bristol. And he used to say, with a smile, ‘when I’m standing in court defending what we did, you will be standing beside me’. He was saying that as a professional you have to be able to justify why you made certain decisions. I found it a good lesson throughout my career.”
He quickly rose up the ranks, culminating in promotion to the position of engineering director at the Atomic Energy Authority. This role was wide-ranging: it could involve overseeing the installation of a new instrumentation system for one of the operating plants, or construction of new stores for radioactive waste. Baxter says he loved this role because it was effectively like running an engineering business.
“We had around 400 employees and we were carrying out quite a few commercial contracts – such as modifying a special type of silicon to change its electronic properties for large power diodes.”
During that period, a decision was made to establish the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston as a government-owned and contractor-operated organisation. Baxter oversaw this transition, representing the Atomic Energy Authority in its discussions with Hunting, Brown and Root over the formation of the £2 billion, seven-year partnership arrangement.
He subsequently became a non-executive board member of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, before being offered the chance to run the Dounreay nuclear facility in northern Scotland.
The Dounreay opportunity was to test all of Baxter’s skills, both as an engineer and as a manager of other people. The site had initially been built by the Atomic Energy Authority in the 1950s, primarily to pursue the UK government policy of developing fast breeder reactor (FBR) technology. In the run-up to Baxter’s appointment, a controversial decision had been taken by the Conservative government to shut down the operational nature of the site, switching it to a decommissioning project.
Baxter knew managing this transition was going to be difficult – but it proved harder than even he had imagined. “The site had its heart taken out of it and I was asked if I was willing to go and run it for a period. I wanted to do it. But it was the most difficult job I have ever done.”
Dounreay employed a couple of thousand people, many of whom had knowledge of the deep science and research that underpinned the FBR work. Almost overnight, the emphasis was changed to care and maintenance and, ultimately, decommissioning. This shift inevitably required a huge amount of reshaping within the organisation, with many long-standing employees losing their jobs as outside contractors were brought in for new tasks. Baxter remembers it as a testing time.
“It was a good experience, in the sense that I learnt a lot, but tough. The key thing was I always did my best. My objective was to take the site to where we could start to dismantle it safely.”
Does he think he did a good job at Dounreay? “Others should judge that,” he says. “When I left, someone said to me ‘it wasn’t you we hated, John, it was the job you were brought in to do’.”
Baxter was happy to go back south after three years at Dounreay. He returned to operational roles, running various nuclear sites including Winfrith in Dorset. But in the late 1990s, nuclear power had fallen out of favour, and he had grown tired of reducing numbers and shutting plants down. So when the role of chief engineer at the energy company Powergen became available, he jumped at the chance to enter the private sector. “Some people thought I was mad to step away from the security of a protective pseudo civil-service employment contract in my late 40s. My view was no risk, no reward.”
Again, though, the timing of the switch wasn’t ideal. It was 1998, and the electricity markets were being opened up to true competition. That, and the supposed millennium bug, meant Baxter spent a lot of time consumed by IT issues. The bug, in particular, was proving to be a particularly taxing issue.
“IT consultants were telling us we should spend hundreds of millions of pounds. But as a good engineer, I decided to follow my nose, using skills I had previously learnt, to consider the level of risk we were exposed to. In the end, we probably spent tens of millions.
“As New Year struck, I watched New Zealand, Australia and many less well prepared countries than us come through, and I knew that I could go out and have a good time,” he says.
“We had a Burns Night as a ‘thank you’ in January and there was someone from every Powergen department who had been on watch that night.”
Despite the IT complexities, he remembers the Powergen role fondly, being given responsibility to buy and sell several different assets to help develop what was a burgeoning business. Eventually the company was bought by the German utility E.On, leading to a stint for him living and working in Dusseldorf, reviewing E.On’s engineering operation, before his thoughts started to turn towards retirement.
“The plan was to slow down and enjoy life. But as I started to do that, headhunters got in touch and asked if I was interested in the chief engineer’s job at BP. I initially thought not, but then I went and looked at what was involved and thought ‘wow’.”
The role of group engineering director at BP means Baxter is responsible for integrity management, major risk assessment and engineering standards. He is also head of profession for engineering within the organisation. That means that he sets the high-level engineering requirements for the company, takes an overview of some of the major technical risks it has, and is the engineering authority for the BP Group.
Legal considerations make it impossible for him to speak about events at Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico. But he is willing to describe the ethos he follows in his current role.
“I always say that I am a professional engineer first and a BP employee second. I’m paid to apply judgement. Engineering is not always black or white, there are shades of grey where we have to be thoughtful as to how we operate. I want people across the company to question things. We want to engender that culture across the organisation.”
Looking forward, the BP role will occupy most of Baxter’s time. He says that efforts are still ongoing to ensure that the best structures and teams are in place to meet future demands. It’s a demanding task that sees Baxter travel the world to get the job done.
But he has many outside interests, some of which are related to the engineering profession. He is past president of the IMechE and is about to become master engineer at the Worshipful Company of Engineers. He is also president of the welding research organisation TWI, and vice-president of the disaster relief charity RedR. He is proud of all these affiliations. “Engineering has been good to me – it has enabled me to live comfortably. I want to do what I can to give something back.”
When he does eventually retire, there will be no shortage of challenges to be undertaken. “My wife and I love the outdoors and we have just walked part of the Everest trail. I’d also like to see Antarctica. I had a bad skiing accident in 1997 which almost killed me, and I learnt a valuable lesson. If there is something in your mind that you want to do, do it.”