Dyfrig Morgan James was installed as the Master of the Worshipful Company of Paviors at a ceremony held in St Martin-within-Ludgate on Wednesday 7 March 2018. He succeeded Miles Ashley as Master.
Dyfrig was born and grew up on the family farm in West Wales. He is an honours graduate in geology from Queen Mary College, London University, a Chartered Geologist and Fellows of the Geological Society, Institute of Quarrying and Institute of Welsh Affairs, Wales’s leading independent think-tank. He received further business training at London Business School and at IMD in Lausanne.
He began his career in local government at Cheshire County Council and, in 1982, joined the National Freight Corporation, later becoming part of the management and employee buy-out from the government. He held a number of senior management positions in distribution, waste management and minerals businesses, with assignments in Chicago, Hong Kong and Prague. After a successful floatation of NFC, he joined Redland PLC in 1994, who were later acquired by Lafarge SA, a global building-materials company. He was Managing Director of Lafarge Aggregates in UK for six years, before becoming responsible for Lafarge’s Northern and Central European business, with operations from Russia to Ireland. In 2011, he became President and Chairman of Lafarge UK, before it merged with Tarmac, when he became a Non-Executive Director.
He is now Non-Executive Chairman of Addax International and Non-Executive Director of GRS Roadstone. He is a trustee of two large pension schemes, as well as running his own company, which undertakes mentoring and consultancy work. He was a keen member of Round Table, becoming its National President in 1993/94, when he chaired their AGM with 5,000 delegates. He is a fluent Welsh speaker and had sufficient French to negotiate his annual salary.
He now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife Glesni, and they also spend time in their other homes on the coast in West Wales and Provence in the South of France. They have two sons, Rhodri who is a Pavior, and Huw who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies include watching rugby and cricket, walking his beagles along the Welsh coastline, fly fishing, travelling and, of course, drinking fine wines. His adopted charity for his year in office was Alzheimer’s Research UK.