Forward | Harry Roberts | Partnership | Room at the Top | The War Years | Brand Leader | Transition | Vision
The War Years
Business continued to boom during the final months of peace, and with the demand for portable radios stimulated rather than depressed by the domestic upheavals of the ensuing "phoney war", turnover for 1939/40 reached £20,000. Harry Roberts was only 29 when war broke out, and was soon required to register for military service.
When he requested a week or two's deferment to close down his factory, he was asked what it produced, and was then told "We don't close down radio factories". Any expectation of "business as usual", however, was shattered when the British Radio Valve Manufacturers' Association announced that once existing supplies were exhausted there would be no more valves for domestic radio production.
Thus gratification must have been tempered by frustration when, in December 1940, Harry Roberts received a letter from his contact at Harrods informing him that "I personally had the pleasure of selling Her Majesty The Queen, when in our radio department yesterday, one of your Model M4D for her personal use." This was, in fact, the Queen's second purchase of a Roberts receiver, for in 1939 she had bought one at the Army and Navy Stores as a present for Princess Elizabeth. In 1941, perceiving that the West End was a needlessly hazardous location, Harry Roberts began looking for premises in outer London and settled on a large Thames-side boathouse in Creek Road, East Molesey, quite near to his home.
Before the end of the year, Rathbone Place was indeed bombed, but by that time everything had been moved to Creek Road except the Company's stock of cardboard boxes.
Some valves were released to set-manufacturers to allow them to make broadcast receivers for purchase by the RAF Comforts Fund, and Roberts Radio made some 2,500 sets under this arrangement, but most of its war-work was more overtly military. Morse-key and plug assemblies, aerial coupling boxes, and aerial switching units for radar were turned out in quantity for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, this work incidentally furnishing the Company with machine tools supplied by the United States under "lease-lend".
There were also a number of commissions from R.A.F. Farnborough to produce "one-off" items, sometimes so secret that drawings would be brought into the factory, shown briefly to the relevant worker, then taken away again.
Their last commission, undertaken at the end of the war, was not secret
at all. Roberts were to build for public exhibition a simulation of H2S
airborne radar, using ultrasonic waves in a tank of water to reproduce
on a cathode-ray tube the features of a relief map immersed in the tank;
the ultrasonic transducers were mounted on a trolley, which also carried
a model aircraft, and as this trundled across the tank the display
changed correspondingly. This elaborate device absorbed most of the
Company's resources for the best part of a year, so cannot be accounted
very cost-effective. But by helping people to understand how radar
worked, the project gave depth to their pride in its development, and
was certainly more useful than continuing to produce irrelevant war
material. Meanwhile, the pent-up demand for new domestic receivers was
waiting to be satisfied.
