A Suffolk manufacturing company which began life in a small shed is celebrating extraordinary export success.

Broadwater Mouldings Ltd in Beccles and Horham, near Eye, was started by Suffolk entrepreneur Pat Betts, now aged 91.

On Tuesday ((December 3) the £19m turnover company - which has been trading for more than 50 years - was presented with a King's Award for International Trade by Lord Lieutenant of Suffolk Claire Countess of Euston.

Pat and Judy Betts listening to a speech by the Lord Lieutenant of Suffolk Lady Clare  (Image: Sonya Duncan)

It was a proud moment for the team and for Mr Betts - who remains company chairman and refuses to retire.

He still goes into his Framlingham office twice a week to check up on how the business is going. "I just like going to work - I'm still interested in it," he explained.

Broadwater - which counts Charles de Gaulle Airport, Amazon, Caterpillar, Leyland DAF, Philips Healthcare and DPD among its customers - creates sophisticated fibreglass casings which are used on everything from JCB cabs, airport chutes, supermarket post boxes to MR and CAT scanners in hospitals.

The firm offers design services right the way through to spray finishes.

Mr Betts - who also owns Hatcher Components of Framlingham, a fibreglass cab parts manufacturer for the haulage industry - decided to create a separate business manufacturing parts for other industries.

It became Broadwater and was named after the road in Framingham where the business was based.

Pat Betts, Matt Herbert, Lady Clare Euston, Mags Humphrey and Carl Reddington (Image: Sonya Duncan) Last year, three quarters of Broadwater's turnover - or around £14m-worth - was from overseas trade. It is listed among Suffolk’s Top 100 companies in the annual Grant Thornton and Birketts survey.

Today the company employs around 185 people from across Suffolk and Norfolk. These gathered at the 84,000sq ft Beccles factory where they were joined by around 25 workers bused in from the smaller Horham site for the ceremony.  

Lady Clare Euston described Broadwater as "unstoppable" and a "remarkable success story" as she presented a scroll personally signed by King Charles and then prime minister Rishi Sunak.

"What you have achieved since Patrick Betts founded the group in 1968 is nothing short of remarkable," she said.

The Broadwater workforce (Image: Sonya Duncan) "And since 1973 trading independently as Broadwater, you have grown, expanded the workforce and diversified the business, including into boat building, passenger transport, telecoms, parcel handling and others."

The firm's managing director, Matt Herbert, started with the company in 1986 as a trainee and rose through the ranks to his present role in 2006.

The company's strength was in keeping its head down, and fending off stiff competition, particularly from China, he said. It was able to offer a "value-added" service that clients wanted.

(Image: Sonya Duncan) One of its big breakthroughs came in 1987 after it won a prestigious contract with Dutch giant Philips Healthcare, for whom it makes highly specialist CAT and MR scanning equipment.

"We have just had good people," said Mr Betts, who was at the ceremony with wife Judith, and owns parent company PH Betts Holdings.

Outside of work, the entrepreneur - who also owns race horses and lives near Framlingham - enjoys the odd round of golf and goes to Portman Road to watch Ipswich Town Football Club play.

"I like it. What else would I do? Never give up," he said. "I try not to interfere too much but if I see something I want changed I tell them."

The award ceremony (Image: Sonya Duncan)

He began creating his business empire after returning from two years in Canada after heading over there in his early 20s.

His father owned a coach business in Romford. The family moved from Romford to Brentwood and later to Suffolk after his father purchased farms in Cretingham and Otley.

Pat was sent to Woodbridge School as a boarder and "hated every minute". As a young man he worked on his father's dairy farm but disliked the life.

"It was hard work getting up in the morning. I milked a herd of cows for a year without a day off and thought that's it and went to Canada. I worked as a mechanic in the north just below Churchill," he explained.

He and Judy were going to move to Canada but her mother was getting on in age so he came back home and they tied the knot.

On his return to England, he started a haulage business - which was when he got involved in creating mouldings for the cabs.

(Image: Sonya Duncan) "We had the lorries so I made an illuminated sign to go on the top of the lorries we had. We made those and thought we could do other things so we got this shed at Martlesham."

He recruited one worker and gave the enterprise a year and £5k. One year passed without drawing a single customer and it rolled into year two and £10k.

Then all of a sudden, an order came in from Days Garage in Lowestoft, which wanted the mouldings for their Heathrow buses.

Pat Betts on the shop floor (Image: Sonya Duncan) Orders started to flow in from other customers and the business took off, moving to Framlingham then to an old mushroom factory in Denmark Street, Diss, and on to Horham.

A modern facility at Ellough, near Beccles, became available after the previous occupants went bust and they took it on.

Mr Betts said his company was quick to adapt to Brexit and grow its overseas sales. But he believed government needs to be more supportive of manufacturing in the UK.

"They seem to think there's no manufacturing in the UK. That's rubbish - there are loads of companies. We need enthusiasm and not help financial necessarily but just to be aware how difficult it is to run a company in this country," he said.

(Image: Sonya Duncan)

Pat Betts (Image: Sonya Duncan)