Billionaire Englishman who deserves praise
With a certain baroness departed from the scene, and Anglo-Irish history being dissected on all sides, I would like, from the sidelines, to pay full tribute to a forgotten Englishman whom we have never fully acknowledged for great service right up to the present day, to generations of Irish men and women, especially farmers and other manual working men.
I refer to the man whose friends called him Joey, whose granny called him Cyril, whose uncle called useless, and who was a failed Brylcreem salesman in postwar England.
To my mind, Joey was special and we owe him an awful lot. Because he was a staunch Catholic in an era when that mattered, if ever a case develops for his beatification, I will fully support it.
If you are now out on your well-developed farm, hale and hearty, and still supple and fit in your 50s instead of crippled with hard labour for decades, you owe that to Joey.
If there is a good road leading to your farm, and the finest of water gushing from the taps, then say thanks to Joey, rather than merely to the county council.
The uncle may have described Joey as useless, and sacked him out of the family garage after a month, all those years ago, even in hard times, and with a babby on the way. But I would argue the uncle was wrong. I would even argue that Joey — a one-time scrap collector — should be thanked by our Government for being the man who largely fuelled the Celtic Tiger at its best, both on and off the farm.
Oliver Cromwell may have murdered thousands (and Margaret Thatcher was no friend either), but Joey compensated for a lot.
Before any of ye open your mouths to argue with me about the beatification suggestion, can I say immediately that I know Joey was as mean as ditch water to his own wife, Marjorie, in those early years when the Brylcreem was not selling. I know she had to make the curtains and the cushions in their home, even when they did have a few bob in later years. I know, too, that Joey, though he served in the RAF in the war, had a very yellow streak in him, though he did not display that until the ’50s.
We all have flaws. And when he did get a start for himself out of the scrap dealing, and was fit to employ a few lads, he would sack you even quicker than the uncle sacked him, if he caught you slacking on the job.
I know all that.
But give him credit, after the uncle sacked him and Marjorie was pregnantly making curtains, for what he did with the first load of scrap sheet metal he bought in 1945.
He rented a shed so small you could hardly swing a cat in it, bought a secondhand welder for a pound, laid hands on a couple of old Jeep axles, and, because he was at least a trained welder, he built a tipping trailer of the compact type useful for local farmers in Uttoxeter, where he lived. He had no trouble selling that trailer for £45, with an old horse’s cart thrown in by the buyer, and dammit if he did not convert that old cart into another trailer, another £45, and then he was away in a hack.
In a couple of years, he was employing five or six lads, had moved the trailer garage to an old cheese factory, and was on his way up, even though Marjorie still had to make the curtains and cushions at home, and look after baby Anthony.
You are wondering about the yellow streak I mentioned earlier. Well, sometime around 1953, Joey got a rush of blood to the head, and employed a lad by the name of Leslie Smith to design a trademark for a new range of what were then called backhoe loaders, which he was developing. These had a digger at one end and a bucket at the front. It was Joey’s idea to paint them yellow, and Leslie Smith’s idea was to convert Joey’s initials into the company trademark in big bold black letters on the yellow paint. And that is the beginning of the story behind the JCB diggers and other vehicles which are now a part of our everyday horizon.
But there’s more. There were other garage men/inventors rushing their diggers out on the market, and the competition was fierce. But Joey had a brainwave that worked. Joey saw to it that a 12-volt socket was fitted into every one of his JCB cabs, so that the operator (often an Irishman) was fit to boil a kettle, and make himself a pot of tea when necessary. And there was also a cigarette lighter socket, so that he could light up a Woodbine before starting up the engine again, and doing more digging and drainage work in a few hours than a whole squad of men in a week.
That clever marketing ploy worked from the beginning, and that is why JCB is now part of the English language in its own right. And the Irish language too. And that is why I reckon that Joseph Cyril Bamford (for that was his proper name) is entitled to our warm appreciation.
He died a billionaire of course, about a decade ago, the babby that was Anthony now heads up the international JCB empire, and I’ve been told that even in tax exile in Switzerland, the curtains on the windows were still made by Marjorie.
