Museum Board

Peter Harrison (Honorary President)

Peter has over 60 years of experience in the hospitality industry. He was trained in British Transport Hotels including Gleneagles, Charing Cross hotel, Hotel Terminus in Paris and the Midland Hotel Manchester. Peter was a senior manager with Bass Charrington and Holiday Inns. Throughout his career, Peter has developed strong acumen in budgeting, auditing, stocktaking, marketing and retail skills and with his family, have been involved with the Project since inception.

Francis Russell (Chairman)

Francis is the former chairman of the Russian Arctic Convoy Project and the former chairman of the Aultbea Regeneration Company. He joined the Bank of London and South America (later acquired by Lloyds Bank) in 1964 as a management trainee prior to being posted overseas. During a 35-year career he served in Central and South America, the Bahamas, Europe and the Far East. For the last nine years with the bank, he was responsible for assessing the corporate loan assets and strategies in all the overseas branches of the bank. Following his retirement, he worked as a consultant for Lloyds and played a role in the sale of the bank’s Latin American branches. His final role was as head of credit risk for International Private Banking in Geneva. Francis is fluent in Spanish and also speaks German and Portuguese. He has a keen interest in naval history.

Christopher Connolly OBE (Vice Chair)

Christopher (Chris) Connolly retired as a Captain in April 2020, following a forty-year career in the Royal Navy. He spent three and a half years as Defence/Naval Attaché at the British Embassies in Russia and Belarus. Whilst there he organised key elements of a Royal visit to Archangelsk, to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the first Arctic Convoy and supported three further commemoration events in St Petersburg. He also led a joint project with the CWGC and the Russian Navy to place the world’s most northerly CWGC gravestone at a previously unidentified site at the top of the Kola peninsula.

Ed Duncan

Ed has been best known locally for his landscape photography over the past 20 years but also brings a passion for innovation and engineering to the museum board built up from over three decades in pioneering technological design roles. Ed previously headed up a silicon chip design group with ST Microelectronics in Edinburgh and opened design centres across the world developing the world’s first digital cameras used in mobile phones and other consumer applications. Ed holds various patents for analog and digital electronic inventions and has additionally been awarded several accolades for innovation in developing new technologies for medical and other bio-sciences such as aquaculture. Ed feels the most prestigious award was being invited to Buckingham Palace back in 1998 to receive the Queen’s Award for Technology.  At present, he is directing technical aspects of innovative start-up projects at Edinburgh University, working with fellow academics on photonics sensors with multiple and several ground-breaking applications such as hydrogen detection and ‘typing with your brain’

Elizabeth Miles

Elizabeth previously worked in oil/gas brokerage, pipeline feasibility studies, tanker berthing and bills of lading. She was a commodity trader for a Japanese company and now is a partner in the family-owned hospitality business in the Highlands.

Andrew Macmillen

Andrew read Russian at university which led to a career in the healthcare industry, firstly in the USSR where he first learned of the Arctic convoys on a visit to Murmansk in 1990. After an international business career with GlaxoSmithKline, he returned to the UK and led a healthcare start-up through several fundraising rounds. Recently retired he has a keen interest in military history, especially as his half-uncle served on the Atlantic convoys.

David Freeman LVO 

David enjoyed a full career of nearly 36 years in the Royal Navy. He first visited Aultbea in 1973 in the minesweeper HMS ASHTON. His last two sea appointments were as the Navigating Officer of HMS ARK ROYAL,  which included a visit to the NATO OFD, Loch Ewe, and later as the Navigating Commander of HMY BRITANNIA, for which service he was honoured in being made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order. He retired from the Royal Navy in 2005 to be the Chief Executive and Club Secretary of the Royal Thames Yacht Club in London, and since 2019 has been the Court & Membership Secretary at the Honourable Artillery Company from where he will retire on 30 September 2025.

Jenny Wiseman

Jenny started her career organising the consultant conferences at the Royal College of Physicians in London, followed by organising all aspects of the lives of two consultant surgeons. She moved to BP, where she organised management training courses, then worked for the Chief Medical Officer, followed by training for, and doing, time and motion studies. She worked at CBS Television while living in New York. Jenny then trained with Prue Leith on her return and was cook/major-domo for the family of a former US President for 2 periods of 6 weeks while they were in the UK. She ran a management consultancy business with her former husband and had her own business making celebration cakes.  She was then in partnership with her current husband running an award-winning fish smoking business.  Finally, she was a butcher for nine years at the museum location.

Susan O’Brien KC WS

Susan began her career as a Solicitor in 1980, then was called to the Scottish Bar in 1987. She became a Queen’s Counsel in 1998, and was in full time practice until 2019. This included part-time appointments at various stages as: an Employment Judge; a Sheriff; and a Chair of Pensions Appeals Tribunals, which handle benefit appeals by members of the armed forces. During the Second World War, her uncle Dr Thomas Robson served as a navigator in the Canadian navy on the arctic convoy route, and his stories sparked her interest in this project.