THE funeral of renowned maritime engineer Malcolm Cross, who worked on the early Trident programme for Vickers Armstrong in Barrow and who was later a leading figure in establishing the first Furness Enterprise Agency and the Barrow Dock Museum, has been held in the town.

Mr Cross died at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis on Christmas Day aged 90 and his funeral was held at St Paul's Church last Thursday, followed by cremation.

Members of Dalton Town Band performed during the service which representatives of BAE systems, the Dock Museum, the Civic Society, the Cambridge Society, the Romney Society and the Friends of Dalton Castle attended.

Ernest Frank Malcolm Cross was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, on April 23, 1925.

He read for the Mechanical Engineering Tripos at Sidney Sussex College and, although his father was keen for him to be a diplomat, he was taken on as a graduate apprentice at Vickers Armstrong, Barrow, in 1947.

He was soon working in the marine estimating and drawing offices on a wide range of vessels. At a higher level, in the late '70s, he was tasked with costing the first Trident submarine.

In 1959, Sir Leonard Redshaw chose him for the Dreadnought programme, and he became one of the engineers who brought Redshaw’s ideas to reality, spending time from 1959-60 at Electric Boat in Connecticut, USA, where he lived near Mystic Seaport. Mr Cross became one of two senior test engineers on Dreadnought, launched on Trafalgar Day 1960 by the Queen. He was officer of the watch when the reactors were first turned on and was present in the ward room of Dreadnought when, in 1963, she was handed over to the Royal Navy on the bottom of the Irish Sea. The subsequent Polaris programme saw him again in the States, to learn about missiles; then he became installation manager on Resolution, launched in 1966 by the Queen Mother.

This meteoric progression of jobs, could have led to anything in engineering but he liked Furness and chose to stay in Barrow on a range of new projects, as the head of Marine Project Design, recruiting and training able young engineers.

Following the reclamation of the Devonshire Dock, he was appointed chairman of the Furness Maritime Trust in 1986, and was the major mover in the establishment of the Dock Museum. He engaged a fundraiser, oversaw the build, appointed the first manager and, perhaps inspired by his time at Mystic Seaport, purchased the schooner, Emily Barrett; the yacht, White Rose; the Morecambe Bay prawner, Nance and negotiated related donations. He retired from Vickers in 1990, after 42 years.

Despite his privileged background, Mr Cross saw the importance of contributing to the local community. In the 1950s, he was a founder of the Elizabethans, a drama group in which he honed his chairman’s skills. In the '60s, with Bernard Rhodes, who later crossed the Atlantic in a small trimaran, he co-founded the South Windermere Sailing Club. In the '70s, he was a marriage guidance counsellor and in the '80s, a founder of both Barrow Civic Society and the Friends of Furness Abbey.

His wife Sybil, whom he married in 1950, died in 2011.

Afterwards, aged 87, he joined his daughter Rose in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, where they were involved in rowing, boat painting and the restoration of his father’s boat Treize.