NEWS
DIGBY HARPER RECEIVES BRUFMA AWARD
Digby Harper, the former Managing Director of Celotex UK was presented with the BRUFMA award for outstanding achievement to the polyurethane industry at the recent BRUFMA Annual Dinner.
The award, in memory of Malcolm Whitehead, a long-standing employee of Elastogran UK, was presented by BRUFMA President Eileen Lancaster.
Digby’s career began after graduation from UMIST University in Manchester when he joined ICI Plastics Division in 1966 as a Junior Marketing Trainee, where he worked for Bob Haslam (later Lord Haslam). He then became a market research assistant before transferring in 1970 to the ICI Building Development Group (BDG) as "Corporate Marketing Liaison Officer", trying to tie together the marketing activities of 28 business units in ICI all of who were marketing products to the construction industry. One of these was ICI Agricultural Division, making Purlboard PUR foam insulation.
In 1973 he left ICI to join Lovell Housing, part of the Lovell Construction Group, as Commercial Manager. Lovell Housing was a contracting business specialising in Timber Frame construction, mainly for the public sector who developed a pre-finished panel system (today this might be called a SIP system) for export, which was insulated with PIR block foam.
In March 1979 he joined Celotex as Marketing manager and was appointed to the Celotex board as marketing Director in 1983. In 1988, following the Buyout of the Jim Walter Corporation by KKR, he was a member of a nine-man management team who bought the Company from its USA parent, with the active involvement of Jim Walter himself as our Chairman and majority investor. Following Jim’s death in 2000 the Sundeala business was demerged and the Celotex headquarters was relocated to Hadleigh in 2002.
In 2003 he became Managing Director of Celotex, and initiated the largest capital spend in the Company's history, to more than double production capacity. At the same time, with all the other shareholders from the 1988 buyout having retired, he led a second management buyout with the objective of releasing the retired shareholders from their involvement, and transferring a significant share of the Company's equity to the current management team. This involved bringing in AAC Capital Partners as providers of venture capital. With their agreement as part of the long term strategy they set about recruiting Richard Pemberton as his successor in 2006, enabling Digby to fully retire in early 2007.
During his career he has been President of the Association of Building Component Manufacturers (1985/86), President of BRUFMA (1991/92), a member of the Management Committee of The National Council of Building Materials Producers (BMP) (1986 to 2000), Chairman of the BMP Environment Committee (1993-2000) and a non-executive Member of the Council and Non-executive Director of the British Board of Agrément (BBA) (1993-1999). He was appointed non-executive Chairman of BBA in 2007.