John Harvey-Jones was one the great industrial leaders of his generation, and one of the very best known.

In 1980 Imperial Chemical Industries made losses of £16 million. A profit was scraped together the following year but it was not until the flamboyant John Harvey-Jones was made chairman in 1982 that Britain’s largest company began to recover. Only two years later ICI became the first British company to announce pre-tax profits in excess of £1 billion.

By turning the company around, at a time when many people despaired of the monetarist policies of the first of Margaret Thatcher’s Governments, the ebullient Harvey-Jones helped to prove her point that industry could flourish in Britain if it pared away outmoded practices and became competitive. He also made himself one of the City’s — and subsequently the country’s — favourite businessmen.

After leaving ICI, he starred in an unlikely hit television series, Troubleshooter, in which he paid flying visits to a wide variety of companies — from a fruit juice factory to Shropshire Health Authority — looked at the books, interviewed all and sundry, and gave tough but gripping advice. Whatever the company or the problems, he obviously loved business and conducted it with a contagious sense of fun, and he had a knack of finding the heart of the matter.

His television diagnoses could be devastating — he sometimes made it clear that he thought the managers or family owners had no chance of succeeding, or should be changed forthwith — but he was full of enthusiasm for good ideas, inventiveness, quality and initiative. At a time when the Government was urging the importance of enterprise and the European Union was busy strangling it, he managed to make industry look exciting. There were four series in all, as well as a number of programmes looking at the appalling problems facing industry in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s.

In many ways, John Henry Harvey-Jones was far from the typical industrialist. An only child, he spent his earliest years in India. His father was a soldier, guarding the Maharaja of Dhar, and the young John had his own ceremonial elephant. His love of curry was to be lifelong.

He was sent to a prep school in Deal in Kent (which he hated), and at 13 progressed to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, destined for a naval career.

He served in submarines from 1942 to the end of the war, when, having qualified as an interpreter in both German and Russian, he served with various Russian missions until 1947. He then held a succession of appointments in Intelligence, including a secondment to the Cabinet Office, for which services he was appointed MBE in 1952. Between 1951 and 1953, he was first lieutenant aboard HMS Amethyst and, until 1954, he was a lieutenant-commander at HMS St Austell Bay. For the next two years he was in charge of the Russian section of the Admiralty.

Harvey-Jones would have stayed with the Royal Navy had circumstances not changed his plans. In 1956 his four-year-old daughter Gaby contracted polio. It was the turning point of his life. Furious at the Navy’s refusal to release him to be with her and his wife, he resigned his commission to take what he later described as a “grubby little job in industry,” as work study officer with ICI on Teesside.

Within two decades that little job had taken him on to the board. En route, he gained experience in diverse areas such as purchasing and supply, sales control and personnel, becoming head of the agrochemicals and plastics division in 1973. His naval background was not forgotten, and, once chairman, he was dubbed “The Admiral”.

He did not look the part of an admiral of industry, and his appointment ruffled feathers which probably needed ruffling. He immediately announced that he would reduce the number of directors, and declared: “I think we are a bit well behaved at board meetings at the moment.” He added: “I want people to get heated. It’s got to be for real.” Meetings were moved from the old boardroom to one considerably smaller and less imperial.

He became ICI’s chairman at a critical time in the company’s history. By cutting manning levels and putting money into plant, he gradually solved the problem of overproduction with low productivity. The workforce in Britain was cut by a third in five years, and profits per employee more than doubled. Whereas the previous management had been inclined to concentrate upon existing operations, he looked for new opportunities. An acquisitions team was formed as the key to expansion, promoting the company internationally: it was, for example, by buying the American firm Glidden that ICI, maker of Dulux, became the world market leader in paints. Meanwhile, reliance upon cyclical sides of the business, such as commodities, was reduced.