Ross-shire marine engineer awarded MBE in Queen's Birthday Honours 'only doing my job' – while saving RNLI millions of pounds
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A Ross-shire marine engineer has been made an MBE for his long and valuable service to the RNLI, from operational duties to work that has saved the lifesaving charity millions of pounds.
Angus Watson (61) from Dingwall started as a volunteer crewman with both Invergordon and North Kessock stations, and retired last year as the RNLI's director of engineering and supply at their Poole HQ.
His citation says the award is for services to marine safety and charity.
Mr Watson, who with wife Helen has moved back to the Dingwall area, was the Kessock station's first senior helmsman back when it was a summer only station working from the old ferry slipway. At that time he worked as engineering manager of JP Knight (Caledonian) Ltd who ran tugs out of Invergordon.
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The MBE was not the only big event in the past few days for Mr and Mrs Watson who became grandparents after son Paul (23) and partner Tiegan, who live in Dorset, had a baby boy.
Mr Watson put in nearly 30 years of service to RNLI both as volunteer and staff, and he has led and delivered change and improvement, and pioneered important technical developments that will enable lifesaving for years to come.
For more than four years he was lifeboat surveyor for Ireland, then in 2000 he was appointed as Inland Waters project manager tasked to assess inland casualty risk within the UK and Ireland. As a result the RNLI moved to providing life saving cover in some inland waters as well as at sea.
As head of Construction and Refit, he provided strategic leadership for the maintenance and delivery of all lifesaving assets and infrastructure projects involving 440 lifeboats and about1,000 properties, making many improvements which led to greater efficiency and reliability.
The RNLI said Mr Watson's most notable achievement was to bring production of all-weather lifeboats in-house to RNLI. As a result since 2016, 27 Shannon Class lifeboats have been produced in-house, saving £10 million on the cost of the previously externally sourced vessels.
Mr Watson said: "The MBE is a real honour and quite unexpected because ultimately I was only doing my job and working with a brilliant team who were able to make things possible.
"The saving of so much money by producing the Shannon in-house is particularly pleasing as it is great to save money that can be used for our core purpose, buying new and better equipment and saving more lives."
More major savings are to result from his latter role as director of engineering and supply, since he and his team have shown that the hulls of the veteran Severn Class lifeboats can be upgraded to give them 25 more years at sea.
