Captain Mark Cooper., Dartmouth Harbour Master
Captain Mark Cooper liaised with NATO’s 28 member nations to successfully implement a mutually beneficial and cohesive defence plan before he was appointed Dartmouth’s new harbour master.
His honed communication and leadership skills should stand him in good stead to aid the formation and delivery of the DHNA Strategic Plan aimed at safeguarding the future of the River Dart for the benefit of the people living along its banks and satisfying the river’s three user groups.
Of course the authority is never going to please all of the people all of the time but Captain Cooper says he will try his best to ensure everyone’s views and opinions about the future of the beautiful Dart are taken into account.
Just four weeks into the job when I interviewed him, Captain Cooper seemed to have a handle on the unique challenges facing the authority and his role in tackling them.
“I thought the job was all going to be about moorings, navigation, buoys, pilotage, slipways and yachts but when I got here for the interview I realised it was really about stakeholder engagement,” he said.
“There’s a diverse interest in DHNA and for me it’s the balance of getting the people from the stakeholder groups to have their input into discussion on where we take the river in the future. How do we position ourselves to best look after that and what do they want.”
“The board look after things but their decisions reflect the needs of the stakeholders and for me, the policy needs to be clear. It’s just like NATO, whatever I do I will upset somebody so having a clear policy that reflects feedback from those stakeholder groups will help me to avoid some criticism. I hope to help the board focus on the further development of long-term policy and strategic objectives derived from the current five-year plan.
“The Strategic Plan already developed by the board takes into account significant input from stakeholders including the community and my job now will be to move the plan forward ensuring that my actions follow the plan. But this will not be simple and I expect to have to seek clarity from the board to enable me to successfully operationalise the plan. The current plan uses words like safety, protection, environment and thriving community and these can be read to mean different things to different stakeholders. ”
Captain Cooper’s accommodating nature showed itself when I made an impromptu visit to the harbour office to fix a time and date for an interview. He agreed to a chat there and then in the spare half hour he had between meetings in his busy schedule.
In a way, his working life has come full circle as he has returned to the town which launched his career on his 19th birthday when he joined the ranks of trainees at Britannia Royal Naval College back in 1983.
Almost exactly thirty-four years later, just 4 days after his 53th birthday, Captain Cooper was back in town for the first day of his new job as harbour master. In the intervening years he has enjoyed an illustrious naval career which included navigating various submarines (HMS Otus, HMS Superb and HMS Vanguard) before passing “perisher” (the Submarine Command Course) and being appointed second in command of the nuclear powered submarine HMS Sovereign, known as a ‘hunter killer’ sub. Captain Cooper says he had many interesting and exciting operations that took him across the globe, normally at a few hundred feet below the surface.
After HMS Sovereign, Captain Cooper worked ashore at Northwood in London as a staff navigation officer for the UK’s submarine flotilla. Part of his role included liaising with the UK fishing industry in order to improve communications between the Royal Navy and the fishermen.
From there he was promoted to Commander and was appointed Commanding Officer of HMS Torbay, then went on to work for Flag Officer Sea Training before taking over the running of the Royal Navy Submarine School at HMS Raleigh at Torpoint. Next, Captain Cooper secured a submarine defence procurement job with the MOD.
He then worked for an organisation called the UK Maritime Battle Staff. “While I was there we were employed in an operation in the Gulf to look after Iraqi oil platforms and help the Iraqi navy rebuild their capacity to protect their oil platforms. We taught them how to use their ships and how to defend their platforms with point defence weapons.
“While in that team I was deployed with the UK Maritime Liaison Team for operations in Libya – striking Libya with land attack and air to land missiles with the aim of protecting civilians from government forces under the leadership of General Gaddafi. I went to sea on the American command ship USS Mount Whitney as the liaison officer for the RN within the American led Coalition Task Force.”
Next in his varied career, he was promoted to Captain and was appointed as the lead for NATO’s plans and policy based at the NATO’s Maritime Command, Northwood, London, where he dealt with piracy in Somalia and counter terrorism in the Mediterranean.
Finally, he was sent to Norfolk, Virginia in the USA to join the NATO defence planning team. “My role was to try to get the defence plans of 28 member nations (there are 29 now with Montenegro) to be coherent so if a potential operation came about they would have interoperable and standardised kit and there would be a reasonable spread of equipment across the nations.”
Captain Cooper is keen to enjoy a long career at the helm of the harbour authority and says he relishes a challenge. He said: “Dartmouth is quite unique and there are lots of people who play a community role. Many of these people have had highly demanding careers, have a wealth of experience and want to give something back to the community. Dartmouth is quite different to many small ports that tend to have either a leisure or commercial focus, Dartmouth has a nice balance of both.”
Married with two grown up daughters, Captain Cooper currently lives in Plymouth but plans to move nearer to Dartmouth. He currently rents a flat in the town so that he can be on hand if the need arises.
He is also looking forward to bringing his old 28ft Beneteau yacht back to the UK from America so he can enjoy sailing in the local coastal waters alongside the many sailors he sees from his office window casting off from their moorings in the River Dart and heading out to the bay beyond.
First published By The Dart magazine March 2017