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# How Hard Could It Be?
- URL: https://www.thesitrep.org/how-hard-could-it-be/
- Published: 2026-09-07T16:02:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T16:42:06.000Z
- Description: Ten days to produce a factory, a workforce, a prototype and the money. He had none of them. The police had a man on the hill watching him scrub the floor at 3am. They bought it anyway.
- Author: Andrew Mann
- Tags: Royal Marines, Series One

Jez Hermer walked onto the floor of a cold, half-dead factory in St Helens that built the back ends of tipper trucks. December 2010\. The country was still climbing out of the credit crunch, the presses stood idle, and nothing was coming in. In ten days he had to turn the place into a working armoured-vehicle factory: a workforce, a prototype, and proof he had the money to deliver. He had none of it. No factory of his own, no prototype, no bank that would lend him a penny. He had never built a vehicle from scratch in his life.

Three weeks earlier, his brother Duncan had spotted a line in the monthly defence bulletin. The Police Service of Northern Ireland wanted a new fleet of armoured Land Rovers, fully costed design due by 4 January. Hermer had never designed one. So he cancelled Christmas, sat down with a single draughtsman, drew the Pangolin from a blank sheet, and priced it low because he had no idea yet what any of it would cost. He won.

"I cancelled Christmas, worked my arse off," he says, "and I fucking won it." Then, drier: "I just cuffed it. The biggest cuff in the world."

Days later the phone rang. A flat voice. Eric, from the PSNI. There was a ten-day standstill before anything could be signed, and the police meant to use it. They wanted to see his factory, his workforce, a prototype. "And we need proof you can fund it," Eric said, "because we pay on delivery." That part, Hermer says, "was the biggest mountain. I didn't know how big it was."

So he found a firm in St Helens that built tipper bodies and had no work on, run by a man called Richard. "I don't know anything about fucking armoured vehicles, mate," Richard told him. "Doesn't matter," Hermer said. "Just do it anyway." No armour plate could be had at that short notice, so they mocked one up in mild steel and worked round the clock. Duncan flew to the Gulf, Australia and Singapore and came back with an offer of the funds necessary to undertake the contract, because no British bank would touch a company that had never delivered anything. Hermer went round that shabby factory on his hands and knees, scrubbing it clean and hanging photographs of armoured vehicles on the walls, dressing a truck shed as something a police buyer might believe.

The PSNI came, and they bought it. Many months later, over a curry in Belfast, they told him the truth. They'd had a man on the hill opposite the whole time, watching through a long lens. They'd seen him scrubbing the floor at three in the morning. They'd seen him hang the pictures. They knew exactly what he was. "We fucking knew," they laughed. "But you'd done everything we asked. So we thought, let's see if he can deliver." Ask Hermer what gave him the nerve, and there's no talk of courage. "Lack of knowledge," he says. "The Dunning-Kruger effect. You don't know what you don't know, mate." It's how he's wired. "It's in my DNA to think: how hard could it be?"

> It's in my DNA to think: how hard could it be?

He has spent his life answering that question with his hands, building things other people think too small, too risky or too odd to bother with. He has only ever done the one job. The material keeps changing. None of it has made him rich, and that was never the point.

## The boy in the workshop

It started in a grammar-school workshop in Kent, with a teacher the boys called Metalhead. Maurice Smith ran the engineering department, hard as nails, half-moon spectacles, steely grey hair, and taught boys who were no good at sitting still how to cast aluminium and file steel true. "I'm not an academic," Hermer says. "Never have been." He couldn't get out of that school fast enough. But the workshop was the one room where his brain came on, and Smith knew it. He'd drop spoonerisms and onomatopoeia into a lesson on casting, and they lodged where the English master's never did. "If I've had one mentor in my life who gave me the passion for creating things," Hermer says, "it's him. And he wouldn't have a clue."

He left at sixteen and joined the army to fix helicopters, training as an aircraft technician on Lynx and Gazelle. The engineering, though, was the part he could take or leave. "Soldiering was my thing," he says. "I thought, I've got one shot to be a soldier. I can always come back to engineering." So he did what technicians didn't do and volunteered for the All Arms Commando Course, then pulled off the strangest promotion of his life. On the stroke of midnight on 3 September 1990, he stopped being a corporal in the REME and became a Royal Marines second lieutenant, marching about Lympstone for weeks in a green beret with no flashes on his arm, a commando not yet quite a Marine.

## The job nobody asked for

The posting that took the next seven years arrived the way a lot of Royal Marines jobs do, because someone had to fill a slot. Hermer was coming off a tour in Sierra Leone when they handed him his next appointment: trials officer for a new armoured vehicle, the Swedish BvS10 - the vehicle that was to evolve into the VIKING. "I'd never heard of it," he says. "I thought, that sounds technical." He assumed they'd picked him for his engineering background. They hadn't. They didn't know he had one. It was, he says, "complete and utter" chance.

The job was meant to last two years, and nobody wanted it, because it led nowhere near general. Hermer took to it like a duck to water, then kept volunteering to stay. He ran the Viking's cold-weather trials in Norway and its hot-weather trials in the desert, worked hand in glove with the Swedish manufacturer, and got a degree of independence that still half amazes him. "I was just allowed to get on with it," he says. They delivered "on time to the day, and on budget to the dollar." Then came the harder sell: convincing the Corps that a complex, crewed machine needed its own trained specialists, not drivers borrowed from the motor pool. He pushed, and he persuaded, until the Royal Marines stood up an Armoured Support specialisation. Two years became seven. "It completely screwed my career," he says. "Not that I had one. But I was much happier doing something I totally and utterly believed in."

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/cb/d7cb0050-371c-463d-8f9c-5c2cfac1b45f/content/images/2026/07/202605_Sitrep_AM_0122-Exposure.jpg)

Chatham dry dock. "The maritime thing was always there," he says. "It had always been there."

## Helmand

By 2006 the Viking was no longer a trials project on a Swedish proving ground. It was going to war. The Royal Marines were deploying to Helmand, and the vehicles Hermer had spent half a decade refining were going with them: their first real test, against a threat far heavier than anything they'd been built for. Before they could ship, ceramic armour panels needed steel lugs welded on, and there was no time and nobody spare. So a major in the Royal Marines spent his summer leave at Marchwood docks doing the welding himself. "Everyone else is on leave," he says, "and we welded all these lugs on. I'm not shitting you."

He didn't hand the vehicles over at the dockside and go home. He'd built the specialisation around them, so he went out with them, commanding the armoured support company. Six and a half years after he first laid eyes on a prototype, he sat in the lead vehicle of a column two and a half kilometres long, taking it through a city no one had crossed in three months. "Six and a half years," he says, "from seeing the first prototype to being in the lead vehicle, going out into operations for the very first time." Things went wrong, the way they do. Nobody was lost on that move. The work brought him an MBE.

## Out of uniform

He already had a foot in another world. Years before, on a tour of Sierra Leone, he'd rescued a chimpanzee, and it had pulled him towards Monkey World in Dorset, the largest ape sanctuary in the country, and its founder, Jim Cronin. Hermer became a trustee and flew off in his own time to investigate the illegal trade in endangered primates.

He left the Corps the way he does most things, fast, and in temper. There was a confrontation on a parade square. Even an outfit as good as the Royal Marines promotes the odd man past his reach, or catches one on a bad morning, and Hermer ran into exactly that, in front of his own company, just back from Helmand. He resigned his commission in the back of a moving Land Rover. There's no wronged hero in the telling. He's the first to say he'd had enough.

That same evening, the phone rang at home. Jim Cronin. He had weeks to live. "I need you to run the park," he said. So Hermer served out his notice running a sanctuary of two hundred staff for a dying friend, the Corps content to let him go. It turned out to be an education: a sprawling business of retail, catering and science, far bigger than the pub and restaurant he'd run on the side while serving. When he was ready for his own thing, he began it the way he'd always pictured it. "At the kitchen table, with a notepad and pen and a telephone." The idea was to sell his hard-won knowledge as a consultant. It did not stay modest.

## The company

Consultancy turned into premises, premises into a team, and the Pangolin into a company that built whole vehicles. At its peak OVIK produced its own platform, the Crossway, on its own chassis and its own axles. "This is the only company in the UK building entire vehicles from scratch," a motoring magazine told him, and he was proud of that. What he's proudest of, though, isn't the metal. His one real skill isn't engineering, and it isn't welding. "It's putting teams together. That's the thing I learned in the Corps, it's not about you." He's blunt about his limits. "I'm not an inspirational leader. I'm not really a natural leader. But I can find good people and put them together." His method is to hand over the rope and step back. "I'm very good at giving people enough rope to hang themselves. Give a bunch of hairy-arsed fabricators a thing to make, they'll make it. Ask them to solve a problem, they'll set the world on fire." Mistakes he forgave on one condition. "Just put your hand up. People are scared to own up, and all sorts of bad juju comes from that."

> That's the thing I learned in the Corps — it's not about you.

He was too busy living it to see how thin it all was. Bespoke armour gets built in tens, not thousands. The Home Office pays late, never pays too much, and holds you to every warranty. Sixty people depended on him, a couple of million of his own money sat in plant and a pension, and there was no slack anywhere. To keep his skilled men busy between contracts he took on anything: prison vans, dog vans, mobile armouries, counter-terror vehicles for twenty-odd police forces. "OVIK was always cash-stretched," he says. "There was no redundancy. No buffer." The appetite that built the place also kept it fragile. He took the jobs nobody else wanted, and they never left him a margin.

## The week it ended

In March 2020 the margin ran out. OVIK had a two-million-pound order for seventy armed-response vehicles, for Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Covid arrived, the delivery was postponed. Not cancelled. Postponed. And the cash stopped. "Before I'd even heard the word furlough," Hermer says, the creditors moved. The sum that finished a six-million-pound company with its own factory was sixty-eight thousand pounds. "All gone over sixty-eight grand."

Failure, he'll tell you, is the ordinary thing in business, not the exception. Most firms never see five years. Most never pass to a second generation. They go quiet and disappear. Knowing it didn't make the day any softer. He tried to sell the company inside a week, to a Gulf-based consortium that wanted the Crossway designs; they pulled out too, because of Covid. Then the liquidators came. "A slow-motion train crash." Fourteen years of work, his own factory, his own designs, half-built armoured vehicles on the floor, a row of men in suits – being very unhelpful and verbally aggressive. There was a finished vehicle out in the car park. "I said, I'll move that for you, and I got the keys. They went: no, Mr Hermer, you can't move that. That's not your vehicle anymore. Hand over your laptop."

Somewhere in those years the cost wrote itself on his body. A Marine commander at twelve stone had become a businessman at nineteen. Too many flights, too much airport food, and, he says plainly, too much drink, "because it took the edge off at the end of the day."

He talks about the worst week of his working life with something like pride, and it isn't about him. Sixty people lost their jobs overnight. He got on the phone and found new ones for forty of them. "I won jobs for forty of them," he says. "Quite pleased myself about that." Then he went home, climbed onto a digger, and turned over his own garden, again and again, while he worked out what had happened. His wife Jenny, a solicitor, watched him do it and told him to stop. There was a yard-manager's job going in London, on the river, for people she knew. He didn't want it. He'd been running a six-million-pound company. "Get your arse to London," she said. "It'll be good for you." He went.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/cb/d7cb0050-371c-463d-8f9c-5c2cfac1b45f/content/images/2026/07/202605_Sitrep_AM_0092-Exposure.jpg)

The day OVIK went down, sixty people lost their jobs. He found new ones for forty. "Quite pleased myself about that."

## The river

It was good for him. London meant houseboats, pontoons, piers and moorings, and within a month he was running five companies and a hundred-odd men. But Hermer doesn't stay an employee long. "My feet were really itchy," he says, and soon he had his own firm again, Sterling, named for an uncle who'd won the Air Force Cross dragging a Dutch trawler's crew out of the North Sea.

The boats weren't new. He'd registered a marine business back in 2009, while OVIK's armour was still rolling out of the factory. "The maritime thing was always there," he says. "It had always been there." The second act had sat on his bench the whole time. The collapse cleared the other work off it.

Today it's a grade-one-listed shipyard shed at Chatham, one he tried to buy for eighteen months and couldn't, where he keeps an office, a workshop, and the next thing he's building: a floating modular house, eight homes to a platform, for students and social housing and any city with a basin of water "doing fuck all." Project Archimedes, he calls it. He's living off his savings, little coming in, and plainly loving it, because he needs the jeopardy to get out of bed. He blames an ADHD he's never been formally told he has. "I need that uncertainty. I need an objective to aim at." The one piece of doctrine he carried out of the Corps is the discipline he has to force on himself hardest of all. "Selection and maintenance of the aim. That's what I learned. And I'm all over the place, so I have to keep reminding myself."

> I need that uncertainty. I need an objective to aim at.

He passes Metalhead on without thinking about it. Standing behind his own apprentices over the years, he's caught himself saying it: this is how you file a piece of metal. I was taught this by a man called Metalhead, back in the day. The debt goes forward, to the next not-quite-academic boy with his brain finally switched on.

The one thing he hasn't built is the letter. Maurice Smith is still alive, as far as he knows, and for two years Hermer has been meaning to write and say thank you. To say, it was you. He hasn't done it. "Bless him," he says. "He won't be around forever."

Know someone who belongs here? andrewfjmann@gmail.com

****Sidebar — the world's oldest armoured unit**  
  
Posted to Bovington, the home of British armour, Hermer went digging through the history and decided his Royal Marines could out-ancestor the Army. The first armoured cars used in war were Rolls-Royces run by the Royal Naval Air Service; the first tanks came under the Navy's Landships Committee, brought to Bovington under tarpaulins marked "water tanks," which is, he'll happily tell you, why we call them tanks at all. He had a sign made naming the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group "by lineage the world's oldest armoured unit." He was ordered to take it down. He left it up.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/cb/d7cb0050-371c-463d-8f9c-5c2cfac1b45f/content/images/2026/09/wordmark_navy.png)