The water company John Mowbray joined almost 30 years ago was a mere babbling brook compared to the mighty ocean it is today. Ahead of his impending early retirement, the Northumbrian Water chief tells Andrew Mernin about his remarkable career and looks forward to life on the open road.

IT wasn’t the thought of spending his days bobbing around the sun-kissed Mediterranean on a luxury yacht which persuaded John Mowbray to take early retirement. Nor was it the prospect of swinging away the hours on the golf course, or the notion of making megabucks as a business angel or investor.

In fact, perhaps fittingly for the down-to-earth Sunderland lad who grafted his way to the top of one of the North’s biggest firms, it was a van that made his mind up.

“I’ve got a camper van,” says the 54-year-old. “That’s what people say has turned me.”

The VW isn’t quite stocked up with tins of beans and tea bags just yet though. Before he hits the open road, he has another seven months to serve in his post as Northumbrian Water’s director of corporate affairs.

But when he does finally set off with his wife and his four-wheeled friend this summer bound for Europe, he can certainly be proud of his achievements at the Durham utility empire. He believes he will be leaving the company in a position of strength.

“I’ve got a good strong team so I’m not particularly worried about leaving because I know there are good people there.

“It was a tough decision but you just have to look at it and say, ‘Can I afford it?’, ‘Will I be able to get involved in something else?’, ‘Am I going to do more than sit at home and do nothing?’

“Going forward, the company’s in good hands, it’s well-established in its communities and has real plans to be the best at everything and already is in lots of areas.”

Despite Mowbray’s modest dream of pootling around the countryside indulging in his passion for historical hotspots, a glance at his CV suggests he won’t have quite as much time as he had hoped to spend behind the wheel of his 23-year-old VW.

Although he will leave behind his day job and some of the associated charitable and advisory responsibilities that go with it, the list of other bodies he is involved with reads like a who’s who of influential North East organisations.

Not only is there the small matter of his post of NECC president – which has another year to run – he is also chairman of Durham City Vision, chairman of the Percy Hedley Foundation Appeal Committee, vice-chairman of the NewcastleGateshead Initiative, chairman of Tyne and Wear Common Purpose Advisory Group and a director of business support group Tedco.

“I’ll stay involved with some organisations and some I won’t. There is also my son’s surveying business in Gateshead which I said I would help out at a bit.”

In the meantime, he can reflect on a career in water which started almost 30 years ago when the industry was a world away from what it is today.

After launching his career at the local council, he joined Sunderland and South Shields Water Company as an accountant when he was 26. A period of relative calm ensued until, as the 1980s drew to a close, everything changed with the dawn of privatisation. Several mergers among North East water companies then transpired, followed by a takeover in 1995 by French group Lyonnaise des Eaux, all of which eventually left Mowbray as the public face of a company far larger than the one he joined little over a decade earlier.

“Suddenly we were going through big change where we were doing legal mergers that had never been done before, we were being taken over, there was the introduction of new regulations and also we were recognising that customers had bigger and better expectations of us as a company. It was quite exciting.

“At that time there were three French companies trying to dominate the world water industry. Their plan was to use British expertise to work in parts of the world where the British were more accepted and they were buying contracts in the Far East, India, Africa, America, and Australia.”

Given the global outlook for the company which emerged in the 1990s, it is unsurprising that Mowbray’s career has not been confined to his concrete, council-esque castle in retail-land somewhere near Durham. As the utility giant’s international presence steadily grew following numerous mergers and acquisitions, so too did the global demands of Mowbray’s post.

A standout experience during his days overseas came in the late 1990s when he was dispatched to the Gaza Strip at the bequest of the World Bank.

Between trips to Asia, North America and France, Mowbray was sent to the heart of one of the world’s most politically volatile regions to tackle the age-old problem of access to water.

“It was really just before everything kicked off again but tensions were definitely bubbling under,” he says. “It was the first time I realised that water was the cause of major problems in the world.

“The World Bank wanted to give money to a utility firm to develop a water resource rather than give it to a local authority that might use it for other things. There’s an aquifer under the Gaza Strip which is accessed from Israel so we were trying to create some sort of system in the Gaza Strip so they could sustain themselves.

“Basically they didn’t have the sophisticated water supplies that they had over the border. We actually did a job and convinced them it was the right thing to do but very soon after that it started to kick off again and they never really developed it.”