The initials of Joseph Cyril Bamford, who died on March 1st aged 84, became those of the hugely successful construction equipment company that he founded: JCB. The letters themselves have become a word in their own right, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a type of mechanical excavator with a shovel at the front and a digging arm at the rear". The vivid colour that they always display has become a standard paint, known as "JCB yellow".
From modest beginnings at the end of the second World War, Joe Bamford began developing agricultural trailers. At his death, JCB was the largest privately owned engineering company in Britain, employing 4,500 people and manufacturing 30,000 machines a year in 12 factories on three continents. It had revenues of £850 million in 1999, earned from 140 countries.
Joe Bamford, or Mr JCB as he was known in the construction equipment industry, was the great-grandson of the founder of Bamfords Ltd., the agricultural engineering company based in Uttoxeter, where he was born. On leaving Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, he set out to pursue his own engineering goals, working with several engineering firms in Britain and Africa.
During the second World War he worked with the Ministry of Aircraft Production and English Electric, where he learned valuable lessons about welding techniques.
After the war, Joe Bamford joined the family firm, only to be released by his Uncle Henry, who thought he had "little future ahead of him".
So, in 1945, Joe Bamford started building agricultural trailers in a lock-up garage rented for 30 shillings a week - opening for business on the day his first son, Anthony, was born.
Demand in the late 1940s was brisk, and the agricultural trailer business prospered. A family and no money "tended to concentrate my mind", he said later.
However, it was his diversification into hydraulics in 1948 that proved to be the turning point, with the launch of the major loader, the first European hydraulic loader, whose availability of double acting rams and a variety of attachments became a driving force behind post-war agricultural mechanisation. JCB's first excavator (or backhoe) was introduced in 1953, with the revolutionary JCB MK1, an excavator with a 180degree slew fitted to a tractor.
In 1957, the first backhoe loader was introduced as the hydra-digga, incorporating the excavator and the major loader as a single, all-purpose tool.
Without abandoning his agricultural roots, Joe Bamford had moved into the rapidly-expanding construction industry; even today, both sectors remain crucial to the company's success.
Joe Bamford was among a handful of people after the war who excelled at both engineering and marketing. His engineering abilities, and passion for creating problem-solving machinery, enabled JCB to grow quickly. His philosophy was "simplicate, don't complicate".
He will, however, be remembered by the industry as much for his marketing skills - some would say pranks - as for his engineering prowess.
After scouring Europe for a 12-volt socket, he incorporated a kettle into the driver's cab, and presented the excavator personally to the first 100 owners, arriving in his RollsRoyce, with JCB1 on the number plate. He bought a corporate aircraft to fly in foreign customers, who were met by a Cadillac with the same number of seats as the aircraft. He also built an award winning factory that became a key marketing tool, and produced the "dancing diggers", whose parade down Las Vegas's main street in 1999 stopped the gamblers.
Joe Bamford ran his company according to trenchant guiding principles: don't borrow money; plough profits back into research and manufacturing; create a healthy working environment, and work hard. As he said: "The problem with the competition is that they get up late and go to bed early." In 1969, he was awarded a CBE, and in 1993 became the first Briton to be honoured in the American Construction Equipment Hall of Fame.
Joe Bamford retired in 1975, leaving the business under the chairmanship of his eldest son. He went to live in Switzerland to pursue his interests in yacht design and landscape design. His passion for engineering continued, with the development of a diesel engine being a consuming interest.
He is survived by his wife Marjorie, whom he married in 1942, and their two sons.
Joseph Cyril Bamford: born 1916; died, March 2001