Alexander Morrison

IT was in 1948, in the small burgh of Tain in the Highlands, that Alex Morrison founded a joinery business which he lived to see mark its 50th anniversary this year as a quoted company with a leading reputation in the construction and development sectors.

Alexander Ferrier Sharp Morrison was born at Tarbet Farm near Tain in 1919, one of four sons and one daughter of Murdo and Margaret Morrison. In the years prior to World War II, he completed

his apprenticeships as a carpenter with a local firm and joined the Territorial Army in which he rapidly excelled in competitive rifle shooting. An all-round athlete, he also competed successfully in running, cycling, and heavy events around Highland gatherings of the day. The earliest, winter months of the war saw Alex in advance training in northern France with his Seaforth battalion. This was drastically interrupted by a life-threatening appendectomy in a French hospital near to the battalion's encampment. After a brief period of convalescence in Scotland, he was on the frontline with the British Expeditionary Force, fighting with the Fourth Seaforths as they desperately covered the retreat to Dunkirk from the Maginot Line. He was thus part of the 51st Highland Division eventually overwhelmed by superior German forces at St Valery. There followed for Alex five long years as a POW in Germany's

Stalag 8B, with periods of forced labour in the mines of occupied Poland. Escaping with several comrades in the closing weeks of the war, dangerous days of lying low and travelling by night saw him win through to safety in the advancing Allied lines.

Although Alex spoke only rarely and with characteristic modesty of these difficult years, his exceptionally positive outlook was reflected in his emphasis on the value of

further educational opportunities organised by the prisoners themselves, and of the thought he was able to give to what future to shape on his return to his Highland home. In short, he determined to found his own business.

Resuming life in Tain, he married Connie Fraser in 1947, and their sons Fraser and Gordon were born in 1948 and 1951 respectively. It was also in 1948 that he started his business in Tain - these being the modest, but purposeful origins of a company which, through the next 25 years, he built into the North of Scotland's most significant construction company.

Long hours, brave decisions, and who he was always quick to describe as an enormously supportive wife and very helpful local banking saw a business with a first year's turnover of #2500 take on more and more significant building contracts, radiating outwards from Tain as the post-war building boom gathered momentum. New school buildings, local authority housing schemes, warehousing at the Glenmorangie, Balblair and Invergordon distilleries - all were part of the growing business of what was by now Alexander Morrison (Builders) Limited.

Alex was also prescient enough to acquire early control of his essential raw materials, opening up important quarrying interests around his Easter Ross base.

By the early to mid-1970s, when his sons, Fraser and

Gordon, were returning to join the business as civil engineering graduates, Morrison was attracting outside interest. In 1974, CAST (later Selection Trust) acquired 80% of the company.

Thus financed, the group moved into civil engineering with the 1976 acquisition of Highland-based Alexander Sutherland.

Succeeded by his son Fraser as managing director in 1976, Alex's semi-retirement as non-executive chairman was marked by the satisfaction of seeing Morrison grown by Fraser, his brother Gordon, and other long-serving directors into the leading Scottish construction group which they bought back from Charter Consolidated in 1989, acquiring at the same time the English construction businesses of Shand and Biggs Wall.

This enlarged, UK-wide construction and development group was successfully floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1995 and, with its reputation for quality and innovation, has gone on to a turnover approaching #400m with an exceptionally strong profit margin for the sector.

Alex retired as non-executive chairman in 1984, but continued to take a lively interest in the rising success of a business in which he remained honorary life president. He retained many friendships among colleagues from the earliest years, and their mutual respect and loyalty was legendary in a company which still has a handful of employees and numbers of active pensioners from among that band.

Essentially a family man, Alex Morrison lived quietly in retirement in Tain in the same house he had built back in the mid-1950s. His lively interest in his five grandchildren, all of them now young adults, kept him very much in touch with the changed world of the 1990s. In 1995, he was honoured with a Doctorate of Stirling University. Alex's last months of illness and repeated surgery were borne with characteristic optimism and fortitude. He is survived by his wife Connie, with whom he celebrated a golden wedding anniversary in 1997, by his sons Fraser and Gordon, his grandchildren and one brother Murdo.