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Harry Roberts
Harry Roberts was born on 20 May 1910 in Mile End, London, and the youngest of his parents' six children. The family had originally been moderately affluent, but had become casualties of the rough-and-tumble of Edwardian commerce, and though they never knew outright poverty it was a constant struggle to maintain standards. Harry had to go to the local Board School, which was not where middle-class people sent their children from choice, but he always went there respectably dressed, and the family must have derived real satisfaction from the report that the headmaster gave him when he left, at fourteen.
His brother Charles, eldest in the family and twenty years his senior, had found success as a transport manager, and Harry would have liked to follow his example. The first step would have been to buy a second hand lorry, but he could not raise the necessary £40, nor was he old enough to drive. Instead, he went to work for the Rees Mace Manufacturing Company, of Cannon Street - one of the many small manufacturers catering for the buoyant market in wireless sets that had built up since broadcasting had begun, in November 1922.
Rees Mace specialized in "portables". Such sets were more properly termed transportable, being too bulky and heavy to encourage frequent movement, but they had the great advantage of being self-contained, at a time when other types of receiver often had external batteries, usually had separate loudspeakers, and always had to be connected either to an outdoor aerial or to a separate "frame" aerial, typically three foot square. Few people in central London had space to erect an aerial, but a good proportion of them were wealthy enough to disregard the relatively high price of a portable, which needed additional valves to offset the poor performance of its internal frame-aerial.
Portables were thus a promising line and when in the spring of 1925 Harry Roberts moved on to his second job it was with another firm in the same field: Pell, Cahill & Company Ltd., of Newman Street W1, who derived from that name their trade mark, "Pelican". Here, "his work included the adjustment of wireless sets and rectification of faults in sets in service", to quote the highly favourable testimonial given to him by the Managing Director, M. R. Cahill, in October 1927 — on notepaper bearing the words "In Liquidation".
The failure rate among small-scale manufacturers at this time was high; the industry was easy to enter, and some of the people it attracted lacked the necessary abilities. However, the small manufacturer did enjoy some advantages over the major companies such as Marconi, BTH and GEC, who had initiated British broadcasting with a view to profiting from the resulting demand for receivers. He could use circuits culled from the technical press or from valve manufacturers' data as a basis for "kitchen table" assembly with correspondingly low overheads, and could adapt quickly to changing fashions. Output was small enough to be absorbed locally, in part through freelance salesmen, who would demonstrate sets from a variety of manufacturers in the prospect's home.
One such freelance was Richard R. Bennett, who had been Cahill's Service
Manager, and it was he who gave Harry Roberts his next job: collecting
receivers from suppliers and demonstrating them, thus leaving Bennett
free to concentrate on contacting prospective customers. Among Bennett's
suppliers was a young man who was to play a major role in the founding
of Roberts Radio.
