The Southampton Boat Show "wasn't as good as we had anticipated", he said.

"It didn't quite pan out so you have to make adjust-ments, " he told us. "You have to do the right thing for the company and you try to do the right thing for the employees, but sometimes you have to make these adjustments."

The split between redundancies and lay-offs was 50/50, said Cutsforth, who held out a ray of hope for those laid off by when he told us: "I believe in the next 30 to 60 days we'll be able to increase lines again."

He said the company had new dealers in Norway and Spain and that: "Barcelona is going good for us and Hamburg is starting to kick off, Paris is just around the corner and France is our biggest market this year."

This is just a hiccough, he insisted. "We 've trained a good workforce and we don't want to lose them permanently."