WHILE I WAS making the tank programme in 2017 I spent a few days filming at JCB’s World Headquarters in Rocester, and the project wouldn’t have happened without them.
Rocester itself is a small village in Staffordshire, on the Derbyshire border, and the footprint of the JCB headquarters can’t be much different from the size of the whole village. Just driving up to the place is impressive. In front of the massive grey steel building, with the famous yellow and black logo high on its wall, is a lake that the public can walk around; the grass is all perfectly cut and everything is spotless. Rocester is the place where Joseph Cyril Bamford began his company, in 1945, just at the end of the Second World War. The company has always been headquartered there, even though it’s a household name around the world and the firm is still owned by the Bamford family.
J.C. Bamford grew up in engineering, but left the family business to start out on his own, in a shed with some basic welding equipment he bought for a few quid. Mr Bamford was what they’d call a workaholic today. He died in 2001 at the age of 84, but by then had already passed the business to his son. Mr JCB said the problem with his competitors was ‘they get out of bed too late and go home from work too early’.
During the tank project I got to know a few folk at JCB and they said if I ever needed to borrow some of their kit all I had to do was give them a call. It didn’t take me long to phone them up, because I wanted to get cracking with the small dirt track I had planned for the new house. I thought I’d better get in before they changed their mind. The land where I wanted to put it needed levelling out, so I asked for a loan of some heavy machinery and they were happy to help out.
I drive fork trucks all the time at work, so I’ve got a feel for what the knobs do, but I didn’t have the tickets to operate the machinery they dropped off. Luckily the bloke who delivered them was ready for this and was qualified to assess me in my own yard and now I have tickets to operate a fork truck, roller, excavator and backhoe. I can drive them all for work if I need to.
When JCB asked if I would hand out some awards to its engineers at their annual ceremony I was happy to do it. The first date, in March 2018, was snowed off and I couldn’t get out of Lincolnshire, but I could make it to the next date, in May. They’d always wanted to give me the grand tour, but I didn’t have time when we were filming, so I spent the day of the award ceremony with them, and it was fascinating to find out how much they do.
JCB started out making farm trailers from military surplus materials that were dead cheap to buy at the end of the war. Just four years later, J.C. Bamford designed the Major Loader hydraulic kit, that meant regular British-made Fordson tractors could be modified to take shovels, bulldozer attachments and muck forks. Mr Bamford knew he was on to something and kept developing the idea until he came up with an excavator attachment for the back of a tractor. That would be the blueprint for the backhoe loader, a piece of machinery that the company became so synonymous with that when most people see one they don’t know it’s called a backhoe loader, they just think it’s a JCB. The company’s trade name has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition of ‘A type of mechanical excavator with a shovel at the front and a digging arm at the rear’. Before that invention trenches for building, water and gas pipes and agriculture were dug by hand, with pick and shovel, but JCB properly revolutionised the job.
Plenty of other companies make their own version, but JCB has half the market share to itself. It’s not all they do; they make 300 different products in ten factories across four continents. They are a big way of going.
I was taken to one of JCB’s own quarries. It costs them £5 million a year to operate and they use it purely for prototype testing; they don’t directly earn a penny from it. They can burn 3,000 litres of diesel a day just testing prototypes and the competition. They have other manufacturers’ stuff in so they can benchmark their own products against what else is on the market. The quarry is state of the art, with a helipad so that wealthy buyers from big construction companies from around the world can fly in for demonstrations of the latest machinery.
How much did they plough into our tank job? It must have been £200,000–£300,000. I didn’t see the programme, but I’m told it didn’t come across as a JCB advert. They’re not in the business of making tanks. They have some military contracts, but that’s it. I think they did it because they’re a British company and they’re proud of what our engineers achieved and wanted to be part of celebrating that. If it gave them a bit of marketing, then all well and good, but they were doing it for the right reason and went over and above to make the tank a reality.
Because JCB are family-owned and don’t have shareholders or the stock market to answer to, they think about things differently. The quarry is one example, the JCB Academy is another. A few minutes from the headquarters, in the middle of Rocester, the academy is housed in an eighteenth-century mill and is a senior school and training centre for apprentices.
The academy opened in 2010 and takes high school-age lads and lasses from a 50-mile radius of Rocester. The aim is to get the schoolchildren used to working in industry, so they have a focus on engineering and science-related subjects, and their hours are nine to five.
Pupils can apply to go there as a regular high school from the age of 14, though they’re lowering that soon. At the moment students have to start at another high school then move to the JCB Academy when they’re old enough. They take 200 pupils per year and the school is hoping to expand so they can take kids for the whole of their time at high school.
There are three main groups that the incoming pupils can be put in. One group is those whose parents think it’s a good idea for them to be there. Then there’s a very small group where it’s the kids themselves who have decided it was best for them; that’s their direction in life. The final group is the pupils that other schools want rid of. They’re disruptive, or troublemakers, and the academy will sometimes take them. One of the guides who was showing me around the school’s workshops told the tale of a lad who turned up there a few years ago with a record of behavioural issues a foot thick, and now he’s one of the top apprentices at JCB. The academy knows for a fact they’ve sorted some unruly kids and put them on a better path, by teaching them in a way that appeals to them and in a way the kids can see is going to help them in the future.
If I’d have had an opportunity to do that when I went to school I’d have ripped their arms off. I’d have lived in a ditch to attend a school like that.
School leavers can apply for apprenticeships at JCB, or other big companies in the area, including Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Network Rail, who also have a stake in the academy. I was shown around the workshops by a couple of JCB apprentices. It was an eye-opener. I didn’t know there were still places like that, where they give an apprentice a drawing, and say they can use whatever machinery is in the workshop to make the part. The apprentices explained that the tutors see how different people go about the task and work out what each of them is best at, before they tell them, ‘Well, this is what we thought was the right way to go about it, but if you’ve done it that way, then that might be better.’ It was brilliant. They had a load of kit, including a load of milling machines like mine, and a welding workshop. They wanted for nothing, except more space.
I bought my first second-hand milling machine at the age of 19, from money I’d earned doing barrow jobs, work on the side. I was building race engines, for other riders, from that age, but if I’d been able to go to somewhere like the JCB Academy I’d have had a head start. The idea of it is not a million miles away from an idea me and Andy Spellman have been working on, to have a place in Lincolnshire where local lads and lasses can visit on school trips and learn about some of the trades and careers open to them. We want to open their eyes beyond working in a call centre or in a shop; not that there’s owt wrong with those jobs, they’re just not for everyone.
Martyn Molsom, one of JCB’s chief engineers who I’d met through the tank project, was showing me around and we drove to each site in a Volkswagen XL1, the little £100,000 limited edition hybrid that does over 300 miles to the gallon. Like most, if not all, motor manufacturers, JCB are looking to the future of different fuel sources for their products. Loads of their stuff is diesel and, because so much of it works in cities, there’s pressure to make greener options. Having the Volkswagen on test was a way of seeing how other companies solve similar problems.
JCB are pushing for electric. They’ve launched an electric mini-digger, but they haven’t just taken the diesel engine and fuel tank out and put the electric motor and batteries in its place. No, they’ve looked at it in a whole different manner. It makes me think, Does an electric digger or backhoe loader need to look like a diesel one when it becomes electric? The counterweight and the driving position could change. They also spoke about how inefficient tracks were, there’s that much drag with tracks, compared to wheels, so they’re always looking for something that would work right when it is on wheels. I could’ve listened to them for hours.
At the headquarters they have a visitor centre, called The Story of JCB, a permanent £5 million exhibition. It’s like a museum, but they don’t like it being called that, and it’s dead interesting too, with machinery from the entire history of the company, a full-size wireframe excavator made by the artist Benedict Radcliffe and a display about the armoured backhoe excavators they sell to the American military. It was explained that mines have gone off underneath these JCBs and the drivers have climbed out unscathed. The military-spec ones cost £250,000 for the regular version, and £350,000 for the armoured one fitted with bulletproof glass, and they’ve sold 1,000 to the US Army alone.
The company aren’t afraid of showing they’ve earned a few quid out of the job, and there is a display of models of all the aircraft JCB have owned, going back to the 1960s. They have a fleet of private jets, not little ones either, and Sikorsky helicopters. They’re planning to build a £60 million golf course near the World Headquarters, to bring the Masters there. I don’t know a lot about golf, but even I know that’s a big deal.
What must that company be worth? And they want me to hand out awards to their best engineers. JCB encourage all their staff to keep studying and gaining more qualifications, and this do, in their own plush auditorium, was a prize-giving, recognising the achievements of staff from the young, newly qualified designers right up to senior management level.
I was asked to hand out the awards and framed certificates, which I was happy to do, then there was a bit of a question and answer session. Some of JCB’s headquarters’ best folk are saying stuff like they’re big fans, and they love the stuff I do, and it makes me feel a bit awkward. I don’t know what it is they love. I’m just a wanker, so I can’t see it myself. And it’s not my upbringing that makes me like that. While my mum’s worse than me, and she won’t take any compliments, I reckon if my dad was praised he’d get a strut on. He loves all that. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that.
During the Q&A someone asked about tractors and I told them I had a John Deere. That changed the atmosphere in the room for a minute or two. JCB are on the edge of the tractor world, with the Fastrac, that they have been building since 1990. It was a whole new and very specific kind of tractor. It’s not a 15-furrow tractor, like my John Deere; it’s more of an agricultural hauler. It’s the perfect thing for pulling a digestate spreader. And it’s quick, for a tractor. Not many folk complain about being stuck behind a Fastrac on a country road. I do prefer to buy British if I can. I bought the Aston Martin, and it bit me on the arse, but I don’t regret it. If JCB built the kind of tractor I need for the work I want it to do I’d definitely look into buying one, but they don’t. Yet.
At the end of the presentation, after all the awards and all that had been done, one of the top brass introduced their new electric mini-digger, as it drove onto the stage, and let me have a go in it. Then the brightest lads and lasses wanted to talk to me. Again, I don’t know why. I’m not even an engineer, I’m a mechanic. A fitter. I can do a bit of machining, but I’m not a toolmaker. When I see them I think I should’ve worked harder at school.
On the drive over to Staffordshire that morning I was in the same mindset I’d been in for most of the year: look how much I’ve got on at work, how much I’ve got on in the shed: do I need to be driving across the country and spending the day with JCB? No, not really, I realised, but I knew it was the right thing to do. And I’m glad I did. I had a brilliant day and felt better for doing it. I’d go as far as to say they’re an amazing company.