Nova Scotian lawyer Sir Graham Day became Margaret Thatcher’s favourite fixer

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More than two decades ago, when Lydia Bugden was a rising young lawyer in a Halifax legal firm, an older colleague offered a suggestion: It was time for her to meet Sir Graham Day.

Ms. Bugden was initially puzzled by this proposal. Inside her law firm, Stewart McKelvey, Sir Graham was this towering figure with a huge reputation – legendary corporate director, trusted adviser to Atlantic Canada’s business dynasties, and most famously, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite fixer, who in the 1980s engineered the privatization of British industrial megaliths in the shipbuilding and auto industries.

Sir Graham Day was a very big deal, while Lydia Bugden was not. Still, she made the pilgrimage to the bucolic Annapolis Valley town of Hantsport where Sir Graham and his wife, Lady Ann, had settled after the tumultuous Thatcher years, while he kept a hand in as a grey eminence at Stewart McKelvey.

She learned that Sir Graham already knew a lot about her and had plans for her. He would become her career sponsor, a deeply involved relationship that went beyond the occasional advice of the typical mentor, she says, reflecting on the life of Sir Graham, who died on July 31 at the age of 92.

Ms. Bugden became part of a talented cadre, often young women, who over the years experienced the Day effect – the helpful phone calls, the contacts, the opportunities. He was someone with no personal self-interest, she recalls, except he just wanted to launch careers.

“And he followed you for the rest of time – you weren’t ditched so that he could move on to the next person,” says Ms. Bugden who this month celebrated her 10th anniversary as CEO of Stewart McKelvey, one of the powerhouse legal shops in Atlantic Canada.

To Ms. Bugden’s thinking, this was his way of paying it forward. As a young lawyer, he had profited from the attention of a senior partner in one of Stewart McKelvey’s predecessor firms. He wanted to know that when he and his contemporaries left the scene, there would be new generations of trusted advisers to carry on serving the businesses and people of the Atlantic region.

Graham Day had left Nova Scotia as a young man, made his mark in Central Canada and crossed the Atlantic to become a power in British public life, as a Canadian in London, following in the paths of lords Thomson and Beaverbrook, and paving the way for the likes of Mark Carney. But his plan was always to come home and serve his beloved Nova Scotia.

In advancing young people, Sir Graham was mindful of his own unpromising beginnings. He was born Judson Graham Day on May 3, 1933, in Halifax. The son of an English-immigrant furniture salesman and a mother from an old Haligonian family, he was a much-loved only child. But as he advanced in school, young Graham became an angry young man. In high school, the gangly rebellious teenager joined a gang of malcontents, truants and classroom exiles who played cards in the boys’ lavatory.

Although he scraped into Dalhousie University law school, he was still drifting until an intervention by one of his professors. Mr. Day was failing Graham Murray’s property law course and, when he complained, the professor “went on to verbally kick my ass,” he would recall. A light went on: Mr. Day realized he was wasting his talents. He graduated from Dal Law near the top of his class.

Even in the bad times, he found comfort in his baritone voice, which allowed him to indulge his talent and love for opera. He was good enough to be approached by the Gilbert & Sullivan touring company in London. He was for a brief time, a member of the chorus, and then musical director, of the legendary CBC television show Singalong Jubilee, where he crossed paths with rising stars such as Anne Murray and Catherine McKinnon.

Mr. Day was practising law in Windsor in the Annapolis Valley when his ability to make fast and far-reaching decisions became evident. He was part of a group of young people out on a toot one day, crammed into his Volkswagen Beetle. He noticed one of his passengers, Ann Creighton, a bright, congenial 19-year-old from Dartmouth. Smitten, the 24-year-old Mr. Day asked her out to lunch. Within days, he proposed. She would be a perfect companion for his adventures on the world stage.

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Then came the paying-forward moment. While Mr. Day was practising small-town law in Windsor, the worthies in the Halifax legal establishment had other plans for him. Senior Halifax lawyer Gordon Cowan informed him there was an opening in the legal department of giant Canadian Pacific, then Canada’s largest industrial concern. Soon, Graham and Ann were on their way to Montreal.

He would emerge as an international troubleshooter for CP, solving problems around the world. On assignment in Britain, he dove into an incident that demonstrated the tough-mindedness that would mark his career. A shipyard in Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool, was building three CP container ships, with one very close to completion. But a strike had shut down the yard leaving the boat in limbo.

The young Canadian noticed that, in the evening, the union pickets all went home. So in dead of night, at high tide, he arranged for the nearly finished ship to be eased out of its berth and towed to Cork, Ireland, for completion. The strike was broken and Mr. Day went home to Canada as a bit of a folk hero – at least on the management side of Britain’s bitter labour divide.

It was not long before he got a phone call from Britain – an invitation to become managing director of that very same shipyard, Cammell Laird, where he had pulled off the high-tide caper. It was now a fading relic of a past era when British-made ships ruled the waves. But at 38, seven years after doing wills and real estate transactions in the Annapolis Valley, he got to run an enterprise with 10,000 employees.

It was the first of his salvage jobs, whereby Mr. Day was mandated to spruce up old artifacts of Britain’s past industrial glory. He had to be tough in cutting costs, often jobs, while keeping morale up. The joke went round: “Is it true that Graham Day was kicked out of the Mafia for excessive cruelty?” But he insisted he never eliminated a job that could be salvaged. The union feeling was that he was a cold-hearted numbers guy, but some labour leaders appreciated the competence after years of mediocre management. His motto was always: “I will not lie. I will not bluff.”

Peter Mills, a recruit from Dalhousie Law who followed Mr. Day from CP to his British jobs, says his boss was charismatic, charming, witty but also “an intimidating bastard when he needed to be.” He paid a personal price, Mr. Mills says – he hated to do the brutal restructuring even though he was good at it. Frustrated by stuffy hierarchies, he found rough diamonds buried in organizations, empowered them and they were intensely loyal.

He was a natural candidate for a bigger job when the Labour government of James Callaghan prepared in the mid-1970s to nationalize the entire British shipbuilding industry. Mr. Day would have served as CEO of the new British Shipbuilders, but nationalization stalled amid political chaos. Later, the industry would be nationalized, but Graham Day was back in Canada, busy in academe and shipbuilding jobs.

In late 1982, the call came from London again. The Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher had swept into power intent on revolutionizing the British economy, and privatizing big swaths of state-owned industry. The Thatcherites had a candidate in mind to manage the divestiture of British Shipbuilders – that same Graham Day. He agreed to it, going from would-be nationalizer to privatizer.

The British industrial and political establishment was initially suspicious of this upstart colonial but he won over many of the skeptics. Most of all, he won over Mrs. Thatcher. He adored the Iron Lady, and the feeling was mutual. They saw each other as truth-tellers who did not shrink from hard realities. But it was his ability to deliver results that truly endeared him to the prime minister, “who always valued people who brought solutions rather than problems,” says Dame Colette Bowe, then a public servant working on the privatization file.

Once the Shipbuilders selloff was well advanced, Mrs. Thatcher picked him to run the privatization of automaker British Leyland, another faded icon but with the revered brands Land Rover, Range Rover and the Mini. He would discard the truck-making unit, buff up the brands and deliver the core business, Rover Group, into the hands of an acceptable suitor.

He took on the partial selloff of the British power industry, as well as serving a stint as chair of venerable Cadbury Schweppes. But after 10 hectic years, it was time to return to Nova Scotia and to Hantsport where he and Lady Ann had built a charming Cape Cod-style home. She had managed the many moves, the many homes, the busy lives of three children. He had promised her they would come home.

He slipped into the role of director of Canadian companies. The most prominent was Bank of Nova Scotia, where he was lead director during a transformative period. He was the battle-worn adviser to some of Atlantic Canada’s prominent business families: Bragg, Sobey, Oland, Jodrey and others.

One of the business leaders he advised, John Bragg, saw him as a rare type who, while in command of the big business picture, would also take a deep interest in the advancement of individual people in the organization.

On his knighthood, Sir Graham was fiercely proud to be a final exemplar of that rare breed – the knighted Canadian citizen – before that tradition ended. Mr. Bragg observes he was among the last of those Canadians who felt a primal attachment to “Mother England.”

Sir Graham built a career by being politically savvy, but there was one moment when political mastery eluded him. He joined the board of Ontario Hydro just as the province’s Conservative government was planning to split the vast utility into generation and transmission arms, and sell them off to private interests.

He became chair of Hydro One, the transmission entity, where he championed the bright young manager Eleanor Clitheroe as CEO. But Ms. Clitheroe’s compensation became a scandal. Under a new Tory premier, privatization was shelved for the moment and cabinet ministers publicly shamed the Hydro One board. Sir Graham and his board resigned.

Back in Nova Scotia, he continued to advise business families, support the careers of emerging leaders, and be a presence in Hantsport’s community life. There would be trips to Toronto and to Dunedin, Fla., to follow his Toronto Blue Jays through their ups and downs. He was, to the end, loyal.

On his death, Sir Graham leaves Lady Ann; their children, Deborah, Michael and Donna; and three grandsons.

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