Prince William visited the company’s headquarters in Rocester, Staffordshire, where he met JCB chairman Sir Anthony Bamford and was shown JCB’s first-ever product, a screw-tipping farm trailer made by JCB’s founder, the late Joseph Cyril Bamford.On the shopfloor the prince toured the fabrication area where components for JCB machines are made and met welding team leader Mick Grantham, who has been with the company for nearly 30 years. The royal visitor was then shown the JCB High Mobility Engineering Excavator (HMEE), the high-speed JCB backhoe loader. Last year, the British Army invested £7 million ($A14.4 million) in a fleet of HMEEs for deployment in Afghanistan. The JCB HMEE is capable of up to 95 kilometres per hour on paved roads, making it the world’s fastest version of this machine. “JCB has come a long way in the past 63 years, from my father’s first-ever product, a farm trailer, to the 750,000th JCB machine. I can hardly believe we have made so many products,” Bamford said.
