The word JCB has now itself become a household name, appearing in the Collins and Oxford English Dictionaries as an official definition of "earthmoving equipment".
It also made Bamford and his family very wealthy. At his death, JCB was the largest privately owned engineering company in the UK, employing 4500 people and manufacturing 30,000 machines a year in 12 factories on three continents. The family fortune was valued at £1.2bn last year.
Bamford was renowned for combining engineering genius with marketing flair. He incorporated a socket for a kettle in the first JCB diggers and personally presented the machines to the first 100 users in his Rolls-Royce, which had JCB1 on the numberplate.
The machines themselves were also strongly branded, coloured in trademark black and yellow.
Bamford was also famous for his no-nonsense business philosophy, creating such epithets as "Don't complicate, simplicate" and "Problems are only solutions in disguise".
He handed over the reins of the firm to his son Anthony in 1975, who became chairman of JCB Group at the age of 29. Bamford was knighted in 1979.
