An important figure in British aviation, Arthur Marshall built a family garage, car hire and motor engineering business into one of Britain’s most influential privately owned aerospace engineering companies.

In the years before the Second World War he also played a vital role in the evolution of flying training for the RAF, and also played an important part in wartime aircraft repair.

In the 1960s the company was involved in aspects of the design and construction of the supersonic airliner Concorde. It also played an important role, as Lockheed’s service centre in this country, in maintaining the C130 Hercules, the workhorse of the RAF. Marshall of Cambridge, of which he was chairman and joint managing director from 1942 to 1989, became one of the largest privately owned companies in the country.

Arthur Gregory George Marshall was born in 1903, the eldest of eight children of David Marshall, a businessman who founded Marshall of Cambridge as a car hire and motor business in 1909. He was educated at Tonbridge School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in engineering. He also gained an athletics Blue for the quarter-mile and was subsequently selected as a reserve for the British team at the 1924 “Chariots of Fire” Olympic Games in Paris.

He obtained his pilot’s licence in 1928 and in 1929 he and his father bought their first aircraft, a DH Gipsy Moth. Marshall combined his work in the garage with giving flying instruction in his spare time, and an expansion of the aviation business led to the purchase of land just outside Cambridge in 1935 on which the present Cambridge airport was developed.

Marshall started giving flying lessons after completing only 70 hours himself, and he was made a master instructor by the Guild of Air Pilots in 1931. From his experience he became convinced that selected ab initio pupils would make the best flying instructors, in contrast to the accepted RAF practice that only the more experienced pilots could perform this role. Operating on this principle, Marshall’s flying training methods resulted in the company’s elementary flying training schools being the most productive in the country. His scheme was eventually adopted across the RAF, for which the Marshall flying schools trained more than 20,000 pilots and instructors during the Second World War.

Marshall also initiated the incorporation of his company into the Government’s Civilian Repair Organisation. During the war, the company repaired more than 5,000 aircraft. Completed aircraft were test flown by the company’s full-time test pilot, but Marshall would relieve him on alternate Sundays when he would fly any aircraft that became due for test. It was on such a Sunday that he flew, for the first time, a Flying Fortress that had been repaired after a wheels-up landing.

Marshall became chairman of the company on his father’s death in 1942, and remained in this position for the next 48 years. After the war he established a vehicle-body building division which, as Marshall Specialist Vehicles, became a substantial supplier to the Ministry of Defence. He also developed Marshall Aerospace into a substantial maintenance and repair business.

In 1960 it was invited to design and build the complex “droop snoot” and retracting visor for Concorde. Later it designed and built a high-precision medical research sled for use on the space shuttle Challenger, which flew 121 orbits of the Earth in 1985.

In 1965 Marshall of Cambridge was appointed as the first Lockheed service centre in the world and gained the MoD contract for postdesign services for the RAF’s newly purchased fleet of C130 Hercules aircraft, a relationship that continues to this day. The company was widely applauded for its work during the Falklands conflict when some of the RAF Hercules were converted by Marshall to an in-flight refuelling capability within 20 days of receiving instructions. Marshall’s also undertook the conversion of the Tristar airliner into an RAF flight refuelling tanker.

Meanwhile, the motor business, which was further developed by Marshall’s son, Michael, became one of the country’s largest privately owned garage groups.

Marshall always fought shy of the public eye. He was a cautious businessman, imbued with relentless energy. When appointed High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely in 1969, he adopted for his arms the motto “Felix Qui Laborat” (Happy is he who works).

Marshall was particularly proud to have created a business that provided local employment in the days when Cambridge was overdependent on the university for its prosperity. He was also proud that the airfield owned by the company provided the region with a fully licensed Customs airport, at no cost to central or local government.

Jesus College elected him an honorary Fellow in 1990, and in 1996 the university awarded him an honorary LLD. In 2001 the Sir Arthur Marshall Institute of Aeronautics was formed as part of the university engineering department.

Marshall’s support for UK aviation included the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators, of which he became a Liveryman in 1958; the Air League to which the company contributed flying scholarships; and the Aerodrome Owners Association, of which he was chairman in 1964. In 1939 he founded No 104 (City of Cambridge) Squadron of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, which in February 1941 became the Air Training Corps.

He was appointed OBE in 1948 and knighted in 1974.

His working hours were legendary and, right up to his retirement in 1989, at the age of 86, he was working a seven-day, 65-hour week. At 90, he completed his autobiography, The Marshall Story — a Century of Wheels and Wings. He had held a pilot’s licence continuously from 1928 until 1988, when it lapsed only because he was too busy to put in the flying hours necessary to keep it valid.

He married Rosemary Dimsdale in 1931. She died in 1988, and he is survived by his two sons and a daughter.

Sir Arthur Marshall, OBE, aerospace entrepreneur, was born on December 4, 1903. He died on March 16, 2007, aged 103