Engineer in the oil and gas industry

Born: December 25, 1954;

Died: April 16, 2017

KENNETH MacDonald, who has died of cancer aged 62, had a long and successful career in the oil and gas steel fabrication industry.

He was among the first group of practical students at the training school set up at Highlands Fabricators Ltd to provide workers for the then new fabrication yard at Nigg, on the Cromarty Firth, in 1972. Later he delivered highly-skilled, specialist oil-related work at facilities all over the world including Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Malaysia, Angola, Ghana, Mexico and the Yemen.

After developing his skills at Highlands Fabricators, Mr MacDonald went on to work at other Scottish yards servicing the North Sea oil boom, including Ardersier, near Inverness, Kishorn in Wester Ross, Methil in Fife and the pipeline-bundle fabrication facility at Wester, near Wick, Caithness. Mr MacDonald then embarked on productive career at oil and gas fields around the world.

Known to colleagues throughout his working life by his primary-school nickname Kenny Dodd, Mr MacDonald was born in Brora in Sutherland, the son of George MacDonald and his wife Joyce, although he was mainly brought up by his grandparents Kenny and Winnie MacLennan, after his parents split up.

Like almost every smart working-class lad of the era, the young Kenneth aspired to serve his time as an apprentice in a trade and qualified as a plumber with Alexander Sutherland & Sons, the Golspie-based firm that was then the main building contractor in the far north of Scotland.

Later, when BP chose a 170-acre site at Nigg to build platforms for its Forties Field, Mr MacDonald was among the first workers taken on at Highlands Fabricators for its newly-established welding school. He went on to work on Highland One, as the massive Forties Charlie platform was called. It was the largest, the heaviest, most complex oil platform jacket ever fabricated in the world, and destined for some of its stormiest seas.

The later 1970s and early 1980s saw Mr MacDonald working at all the major Scottish oil fabrication sites, before being recruited for contracts in Norway, the Netherlands and in the United States, especially in Texas, Alabama and Florida.

In the second half of 2016, he decided to slow down and took a job at Ross-shire Engineering, in Muir of Ord, near his home in Inverness. It is a subsidiary of locally-based Global Energy, now the owners of the mighty Nigg yard, where it all started for him.

Mr MacDonald took his wife Karla for a holiday to Florida late last year and felt unwell shortly after his return home. He was diagnosed with cancer in November 2016.

His son Raymy followed in his father's footsteps and was working on an oil-related contract in The Congo. The couple's daughter Carrie is a hairdresser at an Inverness salon.

As well as his immediate family, Mr MacDonald is survived by his brothers Bremner and Rossi and sister Yvonne and his two grand-children Olivia and Noah.

BILL MOWAT