From selling second-hand motorbikes to a billion pound chain of garages, Sir Tom Cowie built up an empire before he was ousted in a boardroom coup. He tells Nick Morrison why he's not bitter - and what he has in common with Bobby Robson.

SIR Tom Cowie is a very happy chap. Perhaps he has a lot to be happy about: a large house in the country; a sizeable personal fortune; and continuing good health, but plenty of people manage to be miserable in his position.

Not Sir Tom. He radiates cheeriness, laughs frequently and seems genuinely content with his lot. He isn't even bitter about being forced out of the company he built virtually from scratch into a billion pound business, nor about the petty personal slights which followed. A little puzzled at how those he had nurtured could turn on him, but not bitter.

The key seems to be keeping active. He's 82 and left the motor trade ten years ago, but still has a full schedule: up at 7.30 every morning, he's in the office three or four days a week, managing his estates, his thriving metal business and his "immense" portfolio of shares, and shooting two or three days a week, although he does look forward to Sundays, when he stays in bed until 11.

"I'm very busy. If I wasn't I would die of boredom. I have got to be doing something," he grins.

Immaculate in a blue suit, checked shirt and blue and red striped tie, he's charm personified as he sits in his office in the converted stables of Broadwood Hall, just outside Lanchester, in north Durham, his home for 40 years.

He may be a Wearsider by birth, but he's a country gentleman now. He doesn't lease his own grouse moor any longer, but still goes shooting as often as he can during the season. A long-time Conservative supporter, he was a fan of Margaret Thatcher and knighted under John Major, although he threatened to withdraw his support under Iain Duncan Smith.

It was his father, also Thomas, who set up the business that would become T Cowie plc - one of the country's largest motor dealers, later bus and train operator Arriva - selling and repairing motorbikes from a shed in Westbury Street, Sunderland, after being laid off in the 1930s depression. Tom junior left school at 16 to work for his father.

"He taught me all the tricks of the trade. He was a real go-getter, he taught me the rudiments of the business and I cottoned on pretty quickly," Sir Tom says.

"We got on very well. We used to work all the hours God sends. He gave me a cheque book when I was 16 and I would go out and do the buying. It was a small company with two people, he made a good living and was very comfortable but I don't think he had any greater aspirations."

Tom junior did have aspirations, although he had to wait until after the Second World War, when he served with the Forces. After he was demobbed, he went to work for a friend as a taxi driver, but the day his fortunes changed is imprinted in his memory.

"January 1, 1948, petrol came off the ration and we reopened the showroom again with half a dozen second-hand motorbikes, and the rest is history," he says.

Over the next 50 years it was a non-stop success story, as Cowie's moved into car dealership, buying up other dealers around the country and eventually becoming a £1.5bn business with 35,000 employees.

"I was very much hands-on. I acquired some wonderful staff, they were the salt of the earth. It was a question of having enthusiasm and encouraging your guys along. You have either got it or you haven't. It is business acumen, being pretty shrewd, buying at the right price," he says of the skills that drove his success.

It also helped that he doesn't like coming off second best in anything, even shooting.

"I went to this shoot, there were eight of us, I got a bloody awful peg and I hardly shot anything all day. But I thought I liked the look of this shoot, it was not madly expensive so I took the day. They said, 'How many guns?', I said, 'One', and I went out and shot 250 pheasants," he chuckles.

He didn't step back from his business until he was 72, and even then it was not entirely voluntary. He was the victim of a boardroom coup, but now he says the plotters were probably right.

"I went with rather bad grace. Anyway, I was outvoted and they said goodbye to me. In hindsight I think they were probably right. You could compare me to Bobby Robson: done a good job, now it is time to say goodbye.

"I was very unchuffed. There was nothing wrong with the way the company was going, but there was a little bit of animosity just below me, a little bit of envy. One guy in particular thinking, here I am, flogging my butt out, and here is this guy getting all the plaudits." That guy was Gordon Hodgson, the man Sir Tom had groomed as his successor, who proved impatient to get his hands on the prize. Sir Tom appears puzzled that his protg could turn on him, but says he doesn't blame him.

He says he always made a point of publicly acknowledging Hodgson's role, but it was obviously not enough. "I was very disappointed in him; I made him a millionaire, you know. I would have expected better from anybody normal, but in all fairness I couldn't have built that business up without Gordon Hodgson.

"Gordon persuaded two or three of them to vote with him, and within a year two of them had been fired anyway," he laughs. "It is quite funny really."

As soon as he was out of the door, the company changed its name from T Cowie to Cowie Group, and five years later dropped the Cowie altogether when it became Arriva. Sir Tom's photograph was removed from the boardroom, friends in the company were afraid to take his calls and he was no longer sent a company turkey.

"Once I had gone it was ridiculous really, kids' stuff. The name was pretty deliberate. The old bugger is gone, now we will change the name. It was not really unexpected and I never even think about it. I never dwell on things like that - I always look forward, never backward," he says.

Despite his forced exit, he says he is happy to stand on his track record. The one blot on his CV is his chairmanship of Sunderland AFC in the 1980s. It started promisingly, but when Lawrie McMenemy was appointed as manager it all went downhill. He doesn't say it was McMenemy's fault, although it sounds like that. He says he let the manager run the club, but found himself on the receiving end of the fans' outrage when it turned sour.

"He was a tremendous disappointment; we just went down and down and down. He bought a lot of players who were well past their sell-by date. They were wonderful names on paper," he says.

The abusive phone calls and vandalism to his car left him wondering if he really needed the hassle, so he sold up. He also didn't like not being successful. He doesn't watch them any more: it takes too long to get out of the ground, and Saturdays are for shooting. Tomorrow's launch of his biography by Denise Robertson will be a rare visit to the Stadium of Light.

"I'm a terrible loser and I had lost. I don't play anything to lose, I would not let the kids win playing tiddly winks," he chuckles, but it's probably not far from the truth.

He has been called a megalomaniac, in the Financial Times no less, but says that is probably an "overstatement". He's just "assertive about one's position", and even though his company has been taken away from him, he was still the one who built it from virtually nothing to a FTSE 200 business.

"I'm quite happy. I have got a happy life, a wonderful family and great kids, a good relationship with the rest of the world. I never stop counting my blessings and I've always been a very lucky person healthwise. Life is a bowl of cherries. I'm rarely without a smile on his face," he grins, although he hardly needs to prove it.

* Sir Tom Cowie: A True Entrepreneur by Denise Robertson (University of Sunderland Press) £16.99 hardback/£8.99 paperback