Civil Servant

Civil Servant

Born April 3, 1930; Died September 24, 2014

Andrew Gordon Manzie, who has died aged 84, was a teenage clerical officer whose strong sense of public service and subsequent wide-ranging knowledge of industry took him to the top of his career.

Unusually for a high-ranking civil servant, he had started at the very bottom, acquired a degree on the way up and rising through the ranks to become a second permanent secretary - a man admired by staff as a genuinely able manager, and respected by ministers for his political judgment and nous.

He spent much of his career at the Departments of Trade and Industry, and worked under ministers including Tony Benn, Keith Joseph and Patrick Jenkin.

But one of his favourite roles was back in Scotland in the 1970s where, as under-secretary for industrial development at the Scottish Office he worked to preserve industrial jobs north of the border and attract new ones.

He liaised with Secretaries of State Willie Ross, Bruce Millan and George Younger, defending the interests of Scotland in Whitehall and travelling overseas to win work - once giving an interview to an American radio station from the Algonquin Hotel in New York about the value of investing in Scotland.

In the 1980s he was drafted in to clean up the Government's Property Services Agency, an organisation then riddled with corruption, before going on in retirement to use his skills in the private sector, winning significant contracts for British firms at home and abroad.

Sir Gordon, a railway clerk's son, grew up in a council house in Edinburgh's Stenhouse but spent one of the most enjoyable years of his life in Collace in Perthshire where he was a nine-year-old evacuee during the Second World War. He went to the local school and lived the country life with a family of nine cousins, keeping in touch with them until he died.

Back in Edinburgh at Stenhouse Primary he became joint dux and won bursaries to both the Royal High School and George Heriot's. He chose the former and later served as president of the Royal High School Club in London.

When he was 17 he picked up some leaflets about jobs as a clerical officer in the civil service, did well in the civil service exam and joined the Scottish Home and Health Department in 1947, initially working in the central registry. He was later posted to the Ministry of Supply where he arrived in 1951 after being called up for his national service two years earlier. While going to university when he left school had never been a subject for discussion, he realised that in order to progress in the civil service he would require a degree.

He studied part-time for his A-levels before embarking on a BSc course in the evenings at the London School of Economics. There his tutors included Ralph Miliband, father of Labour leader Ed Miliband. Sir Gordon would later be intensely proud to serve the institution as a governor and become honorary fellow of the LSE.

He graduated in 1960 and quickly rose to private secretary to the ­permanent secretary at the Ministry of Aviation. One of the highlights of his career was serving, in 1967, as secretary to the Edwards committee of inquiry into Civil Air Transport, a complex task that took him all over the world. Several posts followed in the departments of Trade and Industry until his move to the Scottish Office, in 1975, where he spent more than four years.

In the early 1980s with the DTI he led successful negotiations on behalf of GEC and Babcock Power for the £500 million Castle Peak B power station in Hong Kong and negotiated the inter-governmental agreement between the British Government and the People's Republic of China on the Daya Bay nuclear power plant that paved the way for GEC to compete for the turbine contract.

He was made second permanent secretary and chief executive of the Property Service Agency (PSA) which controlled and managed all government property, civil and military, in 1984. The agency was in crisis and he worked closely with Scotland Yard's fraud squad towards the prosecution of numerous corrupt staff and to reinstate the organisation's integrity.

During his tenure the PSA also tackled a huge range of major projects including building an airport in the Falkland Islands and the Queen ­Elizabeth II conference Centre in Westminster.

He was awarded a knighthood in 1987 and, after retiring in 1990, became chairman of Anglo Japanese Construction Ltd, successfully leading negotiations to win the contract for building the Tsing Ma Bridge, the larger of the two bridges joining Hong Kong to the new airport.

He was chairman and director of a number of companies in the Trafalgar House group, later bought by Kvaerner, winning the contract for the superstructure for the Jiangyin suspension bridge over the River Yangtse in China, one of the world's longest bridges, for the Cleveland Bridge subsidiary.

He was also a director of Altnacraig and Altnamara Shipping companies and Motherwell Bridge Holdings and sat on the LEK Partnership advisory board.

At home in Bishop's Stortford, where he had lived for more than 50 years, he was president of the Caledonian Society and remained loyal to his roots as a passionate Scot, Heart of Midlothian supporter and lover of Burns.

Predeceased by his wife Rosalind, whom he married in 1955, he is survived by their children Stella and Ian and grandchildren Ellen and Aodh.