Lord Bamford on why JCB is staying independent

‘If I can’t see a factory from up here,’ I mutter to myself, throwing the car round an uphill bend of the B5032 south of Ashbourne, ‘I must be in the wrong county.’ But no, I’m not lost; there below me is a long pale slab of a building that announces itself as JCB World Headquarters — adding, on a giant polythene wrap, ‘Celebrating 1,000,000 Machines May 2013’. Equidistant between the Rolls-Royce aero-engine works at Derby and the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent, what I’m looking at is the beating heart of what’s left of industrial England.

I’m here for lunch with the man whose fiefdom it is, the recently ennobled Lord Bamford. His father, Joseph Cyril Bamford, broke away from the family agricultural engineering business (actually his uncle sacked him) to start on his own in a garage in Uttoxeter on 23 October 1945, and to turn his initials into one of the world’s best recognised construction-site brands.