Lord Bamford is best known for his position as Chairman of JCB, one of Britain’s most successful family-owned businesses.
Anthony Bamford’s path into the family business after leaving Ampleforth College started with an engineering apprenticeship at Massey Ferguson in France. The three years spent on the Continent were to prove invaluable in preparing him for a JCB career that started on the shopfloor in 1964 before he moved into management to lead the company’s early export drive into Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
When his father retired in 1975 after 30 years at the helm to allow “younger management to show its strengths”, he set about transforming JCB into a world leader in construction equipment technology. An early move was to start producing major components in-house by opening an axle factory in Wales in 1978.
Since becoming Chairman, he has taken JCB from a one-factory operation in Staffordshire with a turnover of £43 million to a global business with 22 plants around the world employing 12,500 people making over 300 different products. Recent results speak for themselves – JCB reported a turnover of £2.62 billion in 2016 and earnings of £287 million. A new £63m factory was opened in Brazil in 2012 and two new factories costing £62 million were opened in Jaipur, India during 2014.
Lord Bamford was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen in 1990 and awarded the Commendatore al merito della Repubblica Italiana in 1995. He has presided over JCB winning 30 Queen’s Awards for Innovation and Enterprise since the company’s first award in 1969 and in 2013, Her Majesty The Queen conferred the honour of a Life Peerage upon the JCB Chairman with Lord Bamford taking the formal title of Baron Bamford of Daylesford in the County of Gloucestershire and of Wootton in the County of Staffordshire. Lord Bamford was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014 and appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 2015.
Lord Bamford and his wife, Carole, Lady Bamford OBE make sure JCB becomes an integral part of every community in which the company operates. JCB supports the NSPCC in the UK and its employees are active fundraisers for the charity’s campaigns to end cruelty to children.
