‘ILEFT school at 16 without an exam or a qualification to my name. I wasn’t the academic type. I had played football at Durham County level and I hoped that might lead to something, but I had no real direction in life.

“The fundamentals in my family were that once you left school you had better get yourself a job because you were expected to contribute to the household like everybody else. So, I went around knocking on doors at all of the engineering companies in Darlington.

“I turned up at (steeplejack firm) Harrison Brothers and asked for a job. The managing director said, ‘well, you look fit and healthy, we’ll take your details,’ and he asked me for the card with my national insurance number on. I had memorised mine so I read it out to him off the top of my head. Straight away he said, ‘You’ll do.’ That was my interview.

I started with them the following Monday.

“I gradually progressed through the company. Being a young guy I loved the access work – clambering up ladders and hanging from ropes, all of that type of stuff. We moved into doing some of the finer work, such as refurbishing old buildings, which over the years was something I became more interested in.

“About 15 years ago I felt I had got to a point in life where I wasn’t getting any further forward. There wasn’t much of an opportunity to move into the managerial side of the company. So, I quit the job, sold my MG motor car, bought myself a little van and hawked myself around.

“Within three years I was employing about eight staff from an industrial unit at Albert Hill, in Darlington. We are now 30-strong and do work nationwide. It’s a proper family firm. We have my brother, Grahame, as a director and his son, Luke, who’s an awardwinning steeplejack, is one of our foremen.

“Our staff have done jobs for councils, English Heritage, the National Trust and Network Rail. We’ve worked on Westminster Abbey, the Royal Courts of Justice, Lambeth Palace and Buckingham Palace, as well as loads of landmarks here in the North-East.

“The core of what we do is still high-level maintenance and restoration but we’ve also morphed into being a FM (facilities management) company.

“The guys that we’ve got are so multi-talented, we can go along and bid for a much wider range of specialist work than firms much bigger than us. Right now we are down on St Paul’s Cathedral, doing all of their roof areas as part of an FM job for Mitie.

“As I’ve gone through my career, I have become adept at all sorts of things, such as using CAD (computer-aided design) and writing reports, whereas at school I didn’t have a clue. There are a lot of people in this world who are academically bright but they hide behind their qualifications and claim they can do things when really they can’t.

“My idea of bright is somebody who can understand basic logic rather than cluttering it with all sorts of rubbish.

I don’t claim to be anything I’m not.

“Don’t get me wrong, I am all for people being more technically competent. We have ongoing training for our staff and four of them are on external courses right now. But all of my people know the fundamentals of what they are doing. When they talk to somebody, they do it with authority.

“The past few years have been tough for all businesses.

We had to go national to make sure we didn’t lay people off.

We now have staff from the North-East on jobs for us all over the country. All of them were taken on because they had a willingness to learn.

“I was driving through town the other day and I saw 15 young lads sitting on fences, just hanging around.

“My view is that if you want to get on, you need to get off your bum. There is no point saying ‘oh my life is terrible’ and doing nothing about it.

We all know it’s hard, but life is about overcoming obstacles.

It’s better to face them head on.

“I turn 50 in November, but I feel like I’m only just getting started.”