Percy Shaw, the Halifax-born inventor of Catseyes, was born at Lee Mount [15th April 1890].
His father, Jimmy Shaw, was a dyer's labourer. Percy was one of 14 brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters.
The family moved, and from the age of two, he lived in a house which was originally part of the Boothtown mansion – dated 1769 – within what was to become the site of his factory.
He left school at 13 and had several jobs: he sold surplus fruit and vegetables from the garden; he worked as an odd-job man repairing mangles and other machines; he worked in a blanket mill; he worked as a bookkeeper – after taking an evening class; he worked as an engineer in a wire-making mill; he devised a method of backing carpets with rubber (but lacked the resources to exploit his idea); he developed a miniature roller for laying macadamised paths.
In 1933, he conceived the idea of reflecting roadstuds whilst driving from Queensbury to his home in Boothtown when he realised that headlights reflecting from the tramlines enabled him to find his way. He developed a device comprising a mirror and a spherical lens mounted in a rubber pad. The pad was in turn set in the centre of a cast-iron well which was designed to be sunk into the surface of the road. The crucial feature was that, as traffic passed over the rubber pad, it would be forced into its iron base and the lens would thereby be wiped clean by the rubber, in the manner of an eye and an eyelid. After a year of experiments, Shaw patented his invention and then laid fifty of his reflective studs, at his own expense, at a notorious accident blackspot near Bradford.
In 1935, he established Reflecting Roadstuds Limited with his last £7 10s and £500 from two of Percy's fellow directors. Shaw called his device the Catseye road reflector.
The factory was set up in and around the Boothtown mansion. A sycamore tree which he knew as a child and which he refused to have felled was built into the extensions to the factory.
In the first years, sales of Catseyes were in the Halifax area, but, in 1937, the Ministry of Transport ran a competition to identify the best road reflector. After two years, Shaw's device remained in working condition, the others having broken or ceased to reflect. The government introduced legislation for their design and use in Britain. It was suggested that studs would be more useful at the side of the road, but the discontinuity at side-roads and junctions would reduce their effectiveness.
Although they experimented unsuccessfully with synthetic products, the factory's production was hit by the fall in the availability of rubber following the Japanese invasion of Burma in World War II.
In 1947, along with Wilfred Pickles, he was chosen as a representative Northern character in a BBC anniversary. He appeared on the BBC radio programme Down your way, and with Alan Whicker in a biography for Yorkshire Television when Percy commented
London was all rush, rush, rush and tip, tip, tip: very boring
He received the OBE in June 1965.
Although his invention made him a millionaire, he continued to live a simple, bachelor life at the Boothtown mansion. One luxury was his Rolls Royce, registration number PS 1274.
Percy died in Halifax [Q3 1976].
Probate records show that he left effects valued at £193,500
This & associated entries use material contributed by Jeffrey Knowles
Page Ref: ZZ_118
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