This chapter recounts the childhood life of Charles Orr Stanley. It focuses on his family.

C.O. Stanley had every reason to suppose he had struck a good deal. The Granta works where W.G. Pye was making its radios occupied 27,000 square feet of land close to the river Cam in Chesterton, then a village on the Cambridge outskirts. New employees were struck by the clear layout of the plant and its cleanliness. Women, dressed in blue overalls and hats, were the majority of the workforce and did the assembly work; men operated the lathes and presses. As is often the case with things that are new, the factory hovered between the future and the past. When demand for radios fell off in the summer, women employees moved to the fields to pick fruit for Chivers, the East Anglian jam-maker. And while radio might be revolutionising the way people were informed and entertained, the cabinets of Pye radios remained a traditional craftsman's triumph of hand-polished wood (customers could choose between mahogany, walnut or oak). Some of the guarantee and service books in the light blue colour of the university were carefully inscribed by hand. Packing cases with completed sets were stamped 'Made in Cambridge British and Best'.

Two days after Britain declared war on Germany, the board of Pye voted to give Charles Orr Stanley a free hand in all government work. Before a year had passed, Charles Harmer suggested that the directors should make it plain that this 'free hand' was 'intended to cover the operations of the company's business as a whole... in the present abnormal circumstances of national emergency'. There were no objections. Just as war strengthens the authority of a state, Pye's plunge into the unpredictable business of equipping the fighting services served to justify Stanley's domination of his company.

Robert Renwick, who never believed that work had to be done in an office, conducted much of his business at the Savoy Grill, where he ate lunch almost every day. Once a week, when C.O. Stanley was in London, he joined Renwick there, and over bottles of their favourite Pouilly-Fuisse the two men plotted the future. It was one of these lunches, in 1949, that sparked the idea of a campaign to break the BBC's monopoly of broadcasting.

On his trips to the USA, C.O. Stanley had picked up the American enthusiasm for open-plan offices, but the long top floor of the new Pye headquarters on Chesterton Road, Cambridge was little more than a glass-roofed shoe-box. The new, supposedly democratic layout had little effect on those who worked there: life was characterised by a strict, if informal, hierarchy. The result was that no-one could afford to put a foot wrong because their own and their family's well-being depended on Stanley's favour. He still inspired affection, and people's respect for him grew with the company's success, but this degree of dependence on one man also bred fear. Even people who did not depend on Stanley for their well-being could feel oppressed by him.

This chapter recounts the story of C.O. Stanley and his son John as they lost the majority of the Stanleys' family holdings of Pye to Philips. Eindhoven's first attempt in November 1966, during which they acquired a large part of the Stanley family holdings, was outbid by Thorn, but a new offer two months later was successful. The takeover of a leading British electronics company by a European group required discussion in Cabinet (the Government had the power to use exchange controls to block the bid). Ministers considered Pye's telecommunication and instrument businesses technologically interesting, expanding and profitable, but thought little of its prospects in radio and television, a judgement that proved correct, though Stanley would have furiously contested it. The Philips' offer was allowed to go ahead.