Biography

Early Life

Robert first saw the light of day on 13^th of August 1916, in Palmers Green, a North London suburb close enough to London for his father, a clerk in a Railway Clearing House, to commute to Kings Cross Station by train every day. It may be that it was from his father that the young Robert first caught an interest in wood, as Mr. Read senior had a carpentry workshop in their little back room. He took evening classes and made various items such as a tea trolley, a workbox and two sheds. He also soled and heeled shoes – but his chief delight was his allotment. The house was rented, and their hope was to find a house with some land; but the great Depression made this a forlorn wish. Fortunately they were able to enjoy holidays at Tenby and Newquay, before the young Robert was old enough to go away to Scout camps.

Before her marriage in 1914, Robert’s mother had been a teacher at Southgate Village Girl’s School. His own early schooling was at Highfield Road Infant and Junior School, from where he progressed to Minchenden Grammar School in Southgate, where he became Captain of Athletics.

Employment

In 1933 he returned to school after the summer holidays but was anxious to move on into employment, though preferably not office work. The economy was still very depressed but at a parent-teacher meeting there was an offer of a place for a lad on the engineering side at a large hosiery mill within easy cycling distance from home.

The hosiery industry had centred around Hinckley and Leicester in the Midlands prior to the slump in 1926 and consisted of a number of small firms which performed only one or two operations each in the production and packaging of stockings. Most of these little firms had gone broke. The loss of any one firm in this sort of chain would seriously affect the others. Towards the end of the nineteen twenties a number of these small firms got together in London and took over the disused workhouse in Edmonton, calling themselves the Klinger Manufacturing Company, KMC. This move was far from popular with the remnants of the industry still left in the Midlands and some spare parts were difficult to obtain. It was necessary, therefore, for the KMC to produce its own. This involved a number of eccentric characters like Mr. Shufflebottom, in charge of silk throwing, and First World War veterans, who seemed very old to the young Robert, like the carpenter, blacksmith and tinsmith who made ventilating ducts by hand with tinsnips and massive soldering irons. 

Robert was fortunate indeed in his own mentor at KMC, Eddy Dawes, foreman of the workshop in which he spent most of his time on lathes, milling machines and the shaper. Eddy had been an Electrical Artificer on submarines in World War 1. He had also spent some years with a small firm known for their meteorological instruments and the manufacture of one-off instruments for universities.

From Eddy, Robert learned how to design gears and to make them use their home made dividing head. He was also introduced to 3-phase power circuits, power factor correction, peak load meters, the Lancashire boilers and steam system, industrial sized water softening and the factory wide sprinkler system. Indeed, the engineering Department of KMC had to be versatile, turning their hands to a number of processes which all made calls on their expertise from time to time. Artificial silk came in hanks and was lubricated and wound onto bobbins on reels. Pure silk came from Japan in straw bales, in hanks which were wound onto reels. Yarns went to ring spinners that required a lot of maintenance. The Hendry belts needed re-splicing from time to time to persuade all the spindles to run at 14,000 revolutions per minute. The other major job was attending to yarn guides that were cut by the silk where a slub or knot would jam in the cut and break the thread.

Then there were the knitting machines, two types, mostly 3Bs that used hinged latch needles and the Pigeon that used bearded needles. The needles were held in 300 – 360 grooves around a cylinder and had projecting buts of varying lengths that ran in a complex cam track. These components required replacement and Robert was involved in automating the cylinder production scheme. And this was not all! There were other units such as the printers and the cardboard box shop that required spares, and bearings were needed for the dyeing shop.

Alongside all this practical experience as an engineer at KMC, Robert was also continuing his formal education. He did a correspondence course in silk throwing and progressed from there to his National Certificate at Northampton Polytechnic as it then was, in Clerkenwell, now part of City University. He also gained his Higher National Certificate and endorsements and joined the Institution of Production Engineers, which was taken over by the Institute of Electrical Engineers as their Manufacturing Division.

The year 1940 was a most important one for Robert. It was then that he met his future wife, Norah Ashby. That same year marked his move from the Klinger Manufacturing Company to employment for the next forty-one years with Henry Hughes at Hainault. He first worked in the inspection department and then in development, building up an international reputation involving visits to Vancouver, flights to Greenland and trips to Zurich. His specialism was the gyroscope, and it was through this that he was able to influence one of the great developments in aviation, the Comet. When the early prototypes suffered a series of crashes, Robert was called upon to help with the investigation. He maintained that the plane required a more sensitive attitude indicator in the vertical plane during take off, and that there was too much vibration on the gyroscope. He made an instrument showing an enlarged scale of half a degree to two degrees, to be used during the critical moments of take off. To test his theory, fortunately successful, he took part in a demonstration flight with the chief test pilot John Cunningham.

The Kelvin Hughes factory finally closed its aircraft work in 1960 and so Robert, now a Chartered Engineer, went to the production unit of Smiths the parent company in Colindale where they used a tax break to undertake research. This he described as, “very free and crazy, not to say dangerous”. He managed to get back to Hainault on some “equally crazy” Ministry projects looking for mines.

Thus ended a long and distinguished professional career in engineering. But what, meanwhile, of Robert Read’s life beyond work?

Outside Work

He and Norah set up home in a rented bungalow near enough to work when they were married in 1942 but in 1946 a court order forced them to move. Fortunately they received the offer of a house that had been built but then not taken up by the potential buyer. They moved in with six-month-old Ian in January 1947, finding it very damp and cold. Gill was born there six years later. In 1957 they moved to a four bedroomed house in South Woodford that was their home for thirty years until they moved to Chester.

During this time Robert became involved as a volunteer Scout leader when his son Ian joined the 17^th Epping Forest South group in 1957, a connection that lasted some ten years. He attended weekly meetings, summer camps, district events and later became senior Scout Leader. With the Seniors, as they were then, he made two canoes and they built a Senior Scout hut in the grounds of the main Scout Hall. The lads in due course became Rovers and two achieved their Duke of Edinburgh’s Gold Award. He made a feature of pioneering and built up a stock of equipment such as ropes, spars and pulley blocks.

Eventually, the Rovers section was wound up and a more relaxed grouping called the District Service Team was instituted, carrying out tasks such as erecting and running aerial runways for hospital fetes and similar events. At around this time it was discovered that a small local hospital had some three acres of unattended land. It was arranged that the Scouts of the District could use the area, under supervision, for outdoor training such as camping and fire lighting. It was too complicated to rent the land from the National Health Service, so it was agreed that in lieu of this, the Scouts would maintain the area. This became quite a big exercise, particularly at the time of Dutch Elm Disease and Sooty Bark Disease that killed some hundred trees over the estate. The area has now been developed, preserving some of the best of the old features including some of the remaining trees.

A newspaper article written when Robert was 42, dubbed him “A man of two worlds”. Describing him as a leading expert in his field of gyroscopes, the author then reveals that, “Mr. Read shows the same intensity in tackling his hobby which in contrast to the modern technical complexities of gyroscopes, is the age-old craft of woodcarving”. The accompanying illustrations show some of the range and quality of this work in wood and metal. Robert’s special hobby also included the restoration of antiques, including reproducing and restoring antique furniture and scientific instruments. They include an exquisite reproduction of the boxwood plane that formed part of the Moisset collection, a miniature brace and a beautiful coachmaker’s plane.

From time to time Robert was commissioned to produce award trophies. His firm decided to present a trophy to the Royal Navy to recognise, by annual competition, the units who had been most successful in detecting submarines. They chose as their logo the “Little Admiral”, a half sized model of a naval officer with a full sized sextant, salvaged from the bomb damaged building. There was some disagreement about the date of the uniform but visits to various maritime museums helped trace the uniform to the 1770s and eventually the ten-inch-high figure was created in lignum vitae and coloured with a chemical to achieve the authentic green-black finish. 

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The first illustration shows it being held by Lord Lewin, Admiral of the Fleet. Another trophy, the prize awarded to the best Kelvin Hughes apprentice each year, is a hand holding a cube, whilst a third is the Ralph Akroyd golfing trophy held by Ralph himself.

As well as the precision tools, trophies and furniture, Robert’s work includes more naturalistic figures such as the seal and frog, and intertwined human forms. There is a story behind the seal carving in cocuswood. Robert was involved in some sea trials from Falmouth on board a Ministry of Defence ship with M.O.D. scientists. On a visit to the bridge he noticed a birthday card stuck to a window, showing a seal head and the legend, “Keep your chin up!”. This was also relevant to the work in hand, and so this led to the making of the wooden version, particularly as the cocuswood log was such a suitable medium.

After Bob’s retirement from Smiths Industries he continued his woodworking hobby full time. He loved to have a go at anything once but was not keen on repeating things.

It wasn’t long before Bob & his wife Norah moved to Chester to be near their daughter, where they found a nice bungalow with a garage attached by a corridor, which was ideal as a workshop. He loved tools and continued to purchase and make anything he needed for the job at hand, including the lathe used for all the turned items.

A charming chess set was made for his grandson Edward, who requested that each piece should represent a specific dinosaur. Young Edward was a hard taskmaster too, demanding the remodelling of an animal with the wrong number of toes. This major task was eventually completed making the blacks in Indian Rosewood and the whites in Boxwood. The set works on a board of three-inch squares and is housed in a box also made by Robert.

Bob and Norah loved visiting antique fairs & shops and through this they made lots of friends. Many of them asked Bob to repair and restore antique furniture and other items for them. One of his friends collected scientific equipment which of course Bob was more than happy to work on. He didn’t just repair the woodwork but could do the metalwork too, turning new screws, bolts and making keys.

He sold many of his works at fairs too and made items for his children, grandchildren, relatives and friends. Bob worked tirelessly for another 25 years creating many of his best works in his 80’s, he was never one to just sit and relax, until he passed away at the age of 90.

He always said his favourite wood to work on was tulip wood and so as a tribute on his death the family bought a Tulip tree (Liriodendron Tulipifera) to partly offset the wood he used over the years. It is growing in a beautiful setting and his & Norah’s ashes have turned it into a splendid tree and a long lasting memorial.

Based on an article by Glynn Hughes, a friend of Robert’s from Chester with whom he helped to restore a vintage Triumph Roadster car.