Radio Man: the Remarkable Rise and Fall of C.O. Stanley
Radio Man tells the story of C.O. Stanley, the unconventional Irishman who acquired Pye Radio at the beginning of the broadcasting age. Though he started with little experience and even less money, he was to make Pye a major player in the British electronics industry - only to crash it spectacularly forty years later. This revealing and meticulously researched text is written within the broad context of the political, technological and business changes of the time, and shows how a very ambitious businessman was brought down by the qualities that made him so successful.
Inspec keywords: radio applications
Other keywords: Charles Orr Stanley; transistor radio; TV rental market; mobile radio phone; modern electronics; television set; rise-and-fall; Pye camera; radio man; television camera
Subjects: Radio, television and audio; Radio links and equipment; Radio and television broadcasting; General electrical engineering topics
- Book DOI: 10.1049/PBHT030E
- Chapter DOI: 10.1049/PBHT030E
- ISBN: 9780852962039
- e-ISBN: 9781849190237
- Page count: 368
- Format: PDF
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Front Matter
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1 An Irish family
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This chapter recounts the childhood life of Charles Orr Stanley. It focuses on his family.
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2 Birth of a salesman
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This chapter discusses the life and times of C.O. Stanley. Stanley knew there was money in selling radios; the question was whether he wanted to make them too.
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3 Radio man
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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'.
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4 C.O. goes to war
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As preparations for war became more obvious, towards the end of the 1930s, Charles Orr Stanley's impatience to be doing something for the war effort was clear to those around him. Even Dennis Fuller, then only a junior member of Pye's research team, sensed his employer was 'maddened not to be in the thick of it', and by the spring of 1939, Stanley was asking acquaintances how to get a war-related job in Whitehall.
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5 The fighting factory
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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.
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6 Boom and bureaucrats
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The peace for which C.O. Stanley had stealthily prepared since 1943 brought even greater opportunities than he foresaw. Britain's spending on household durables quickly reached, and then overtook, the level of 1938. High employment and growing industrial production would by 1955 make the real average weekly wage a third higher than in the last years before the war. With Germany and Japan in ruins, and American industry more interested in its home market, Britain's manufacturers had by 1950 captured one-fifth of a booming world trade in exports.
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7 Liberating television
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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.
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8 West Briton
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In 1950, when the BBC was considering starting its television service in Ulster, C.O. Stanley warned that British broadcasts in the North would reach parts of the Republic and that 'this would create a great deal of discontent from the people who want to see television from their own Irish station'. He was right, and as the 1950s wore on, politicians in Dublin were increasingly embarrassed by the growing number of Irish citizens who bought television sets to watch Ulster's television. In 1951, Stanley put on Ireland's first demonstration of television at the Royal Dublin Society's Spring Show, and tried to appeal to Irish sensibilities. He called television 'a great art' that would allow Ireland to 'continue the tradition of our Dublin theatre', and he suggested that television could reduce emigration by bringing entertainment and education to the most abandoned parts of the countryside.
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9 Danger years
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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.
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10 The palace revolution
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C.O. Stanley flew out to Australia on 6 February 1966. When the Pye board assembled for its first meeting in Stanley's absence, it made Frank Duncan vice-chairman. Two days later, it appointed David Hobson of Cooper Bros., Ether Control's auditors, as Pye's financial adviser. The title gave little idea of Hobson's power. From that moment, the group's figures were under his control. When Stanley got back to Britain on 8 March, the day the Pye board held its inquisition, the 'palace revolution' had gone too far to be stopped. Stanley himself was the first to use this term, which expressed his shock that an act of such gross 'lèse-majesté' had been committed.
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11 Son and father
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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.
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Back Matter
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