Sir James Fletcher. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Sir James Fletcher. Photo / Paul Estcourt

James Muir Cameron Fletcher might have lived out his life as an accountant rather than as a top industrialist had outside events not intervened.

Despite his auspicious birth date in Dunedin - December 25, 1914 - Jim or JC, as family and friends knew him, was not initially destined to run the country's largest business empire.

He was slightly built, quiet and shy. As the second son of Scots-born builder James (later Sir James) Fletcher, he exhibited little of his father's street-wise ruthlessness or cunning.

James Fletcher senior had dragged the struggling Fletcher Construction through the Depression to list it without fanfare on the stock exchange in 1940 as Fletcher Holdings Ltd. It had a turnover of just over £600,000 ($1.73 million).

Young Jim was company secretary at head office, noted more for his good manners and big ears than for his commercial acumen. He had been with the business for less than five years.

In 1942, his father, a friend of the first Labour Government, was seconded to the War Administration as commissioner of defence construction and superintendent of military works and later as controller of shipping, giving him virtual control over the wartime building industry.

The price for this concentration of power in his hands was that he had to sever his business connections for his term of office. The managing directorship of the company fell to 27-year-old Jim, who that year married his strong-willed office assistant, Vaughan Gunthorp.

Far from being a pushover in business, as some thought, Jim Fletcher showed he was made for the job. "Adventurousness was exactly the quality Jim Fletcher brought to the job of bringing Fletchers through the war," his biographer Selwyn Parker wrote in 1994. "If he couldn't fight [in the war], at least he could do his part in the trenches of management."

Fletcher was not only a relentless worker - "beaver" is an apt description - but he also paid great attention to detail, tidying up paperwork and accounting systems left in an untidy state by his father.

His business style was different from his father's - "more remote, more analytical and probably tougher", according to Parker. "The company's founder loved to chat; his son didn't. At least, not at first."

People could be forgiven for thinking that when James senior stepped down from his government work in 1944 he would take up the reins of the company once again.

That didn't happen. Instead, he let his son get on with it and accepted a knighthood from a grateful Labour Government in 1946.