Sir Neville Bowman-Shaw was a rambunctious businessman who kept his company Lancer Boss — which at its height was Britain’s largest independent forklift truck manufacturer — in his family for 37 years.
Although he believed that people provided “the presence, the spark, the flame without which a company cannot generate any true commercial fire,” he conceded that he was not “a people person” and had a hot temper. “My worst characteristic,” he said, “is that I can still rile, which is stupid and I regret it.”
Bowman-Shaw’s family were drawn into his love affair with collecting and restoring old tractors; house guests had to be nimble to avoid a day in the garage with their host. His quirks were not always an asset in running Lancer Boss. “I would say 45 is the oldest you would want to employ an Englishman because they are poorly educated, and, even worse, badly trained vocationally,” Bowman-Shaw once declared. Unsurprisingly, managers were more inclined to leave Lancer Boss than most comparable employers.
Born George Neville Bowman-Shaw in 1930, he attended Caldicott preparatory school and was then taught by private tutors. He joined the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards in 1950 on a three-year commission.
Back in civilian life, he embraced his farming heritage (the Bowman-Shaws had migrated from Scotland in the 16th century to farm in Buckinghamshire) and had an interest in farming technology. He found jobs with three forklift truck makers: Matling, Materials Handling Equipment (GB) and Matbro. He was sacked , however, from each company — once for telling the managing director how to run the business.
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In 1957 he and his younger brother, Trevor, set up Lancer — a nod to the Dragoons — and began importing forklift trucks from the Netherlands. After they fell out with their supplier, they decided they could make better trucks themselves and a new venture was born: Boss Trucks was so called in the hope that it would “boss” the market.
Bowman-Shaw recalled: “We started drawing the first side loader in a dining room in Tite Street, Chelsea, with WH Smith manuals on teaching yourself engineering drawing.” When they were ready to assemble and test the machine in December 1958, they moved to the Slough trading estate, sleeping in coke buckets either side of a heater. “I had a rather smart girlfriend, and she used to come round with the chauffeur, bringing food parcels.” They started manufacturing in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, near their family’s estate.
Although the front axle fell off their first effort, they were relentless innovators who earned a name for making side-loading trucks that could shift lengths of timber and pipe. They later took advantage of the shipping container boom, during which Lancer Boss became a world leader with a forklift that could handle empty containers of up to 130,000lb.
The company grew rapidly through the 1960s, and Bowman-Shaw was nearly persuaded to float it on the stock market. Poor results delayed the plan and gave him a taste of how the City could turn on companies hit by short-term setbacks. He concluded: “I don’t think a company like us should go public till we’re so big we’re relatively indigestible. It’s a bit of a vanity trip.” Instead of investors, though, he was eventually defeated by the demands of lenders.
By the early 1980s Bowman-Shaw was riding high — not least in The Sunday Times Rich List, which estimated his wealth at £60 million. He felt that the time had come for expansion. European rivals beat him to several purchases, but in 1983 the senior executive of Steinbock, a Bavarian forklift truck company, rang him to say that its banks had withdrawn credit and would Lancer Boss come to the rescue? Within a week, Bowman-Shaw had persuaded the banks to write off Steinbock’s £1.3 million debt so he could buy the business for a nominal £2,000. It was a fateful deal that would spell the end of the company. Relations started badly — “They thought they were God’s gift to society, and we, in a naive way, thought we were,” Bowman-Shaw said. When the Lancer Boss name was put on trucks, the workforce painted it out and replaced it with “Steinbock”.
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Still the deal gave its chairman Bowman-Shaw the confidence to expand further; he bought a Spanish forklift manufacturer that remained lossmaking, and acquired the Milan-based Hyco. Within 18 months it was sold at a loss. In 1993, one of Steinbock’s banks installed a German, Ludwig Schneider, as the chief executive of Lancer Boss. Bowman-Shaw was increasingly losing day-to-day control of the business. The following year he was summoned to Hamburg, where he was put under pressure to sell the firm to another German company, Jungheinrich. He refused but was bypassed in the deal and receivers took over the Lancer Boss head office. Its Leighton factory was eventually closed down under Jungheinrich in 2003.
Stripped of his company, Bowman-Shaw, then 64, said he would most of all miss “my driver — we were in the same regiment”. He added ruefully, “I have lost a fortune and it need not have happened.” Yet he and his brother set up another venture, Bowman Mechanical Handling, which imported trucks from Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
Having met Georgina Blundell at a party in London, Bowman-Shaw married her in 1962 and they had four children. Their eldest son, Andrew, became an arboriculturalist who now runs his own tree and woodland management business. (His fate was sealed aged 14 when he was sent into the woods with a chainsaw and his father’s advice to “be careful and don’t cut your leg off”.) Their youngest son, Justin, is a teacher in Tasmania and their daughter, Annabelle, lives in Wiltshire and tends horses. Their second son, Fergus, was found dead at the age of 30.
The family bought Toddington Manor, a dilapidated Regency house, for £100,000 in 1979. Lady Bowman-Shaw said: “For two years, we dug, burnt, bulldozed, bored and exhausted our friends, and spent energy I never knew we had encouraging an army of builders and making gallons of tea.” They added sheep, cattle, rose and herb gardens, fishing lakes, a croquet lawn and a cricket pitch. Five years ago the house was put on the market for £8 million. The Sunday Times described it as “a quintessential piece of England,” with 12 bedrooms, a billiards room, an orangery, a turret and 176 acres of farmland, pasture and woodland.
Bowman-Shaw received a knighthood in 1984 for services to British exports. His greatest pride, though, was accruing a large collection of old tractors, at one stage owning 150. He gave the first, a wartime Allis-Chalmers, to his wife as a birthday present in 1964. It was equipped with a special seat so that all of their young children could reach the pedals and learn to drive it.
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His last words to Justin showed he was irascible to the end, telling him, “Oh, stop buggering about!”
Sir Neville Bowman-Shaw, entrepreneur, was born on October 4, 1930. He died of heart failure on July 11, 2015, aged 84