Ron Hickman
Ron Hickman, who died on February 17 aged 78, invented the Black & Decker
Workmate, the portable workbench that for nearly 40 years has encouraged
millions to try their hands at do-it-yourself.
6:16PM GMT 21 Feb 2011
He also worked as a car designer for Lotus, and in the 1960s designed the
original two-seater Lotus Elan sports car, made famous on television when
Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers drove a model in powder-blue.
Hickman’s inspiration for the Workmate came in 1961, when he was sawing sheets
of plywood to make some new wardrobes for his bungalow. He was using a good
dining-room chair as a sawhorse and accidentally nicked it with his saw,
incurring the wrath of his wife .
“I always had this idea in the back of my mind for a new style of workbench,”
he said, “so I built a prototype.” He rented a room above a 200-year-old
wooden barn at Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, and spent hundreds of hours
perfecting his invention, which was light, useful and cheap. He named it the
Workmate.
After a patent agent who lived in the same village assured him that his
invention could be legally protected, Hickman approached several well-known
manufacturers, but to no avail. Spear and Jackson, Wilkinson and Salmens were
just a few of the non-takers; while the Stanley company — famous for planes
and drills — loftily informed him (in a letter which he was pleased to note
later was dated April 1 1968) that sales would be “measured in dozens rather
than hundreds”.
To date, worldwide sales of the Workmate exceed 100 million.
At first even Black & Decker turned Hickman down. But eventually, in 1972, the
firm agreed to market the invention in Europe. The early model had a cast
aluminium H-frame, but later these were replaced by frames of stamped steel.
The Workmate went on sale in the United States in 1975.
A South African, Ronald Price Hickman was born on October 21 1932 at Greytown,
Natal, where his father was a bookkeeper. On leaving school he worked as a
court clerk at Pietermaritzburg, but left South Africa in 1954 with £34 in his
pocket and sailed to England, hoping to work in the motor manufacturing
industry as a designer.
In London he initially stayed at the Overseas Visitors’ Club in Earls Court,
where he met for the first time his future wife, Helen, a fellow South African
who had also been working in Pietermaritzburg.
After spending three years as a styling modeller with Ford, Hickman moved to
the Lotus company, run by Colin Chapman, and quickly became its design
director. He headed the team that designed the trendsetting Elan sports car,
with its fibreglass body and retractable headlights. This was followed by the
Lotus Cortina, Lotus Europa and Elan Plus 2, a design of which he was
especially proud.
In 1967 Hickman left to work in Hertfordshire on prototypes for the seating in
the main lounges of Cunard’s new flagship, QE2.
He set up his own company, Mate Tools, remortgaging his bungalow to raise
capital, and continued to refine his Workmate design. In the face of rejection
from all the big manufacturers, he persuaded a DIY magazine to let him show a
prototype in a corner of the magazine’s stand at the 1968 Ideal Home
Exhibition at Olympia.
Within a year he had sold 1,800 Workmates, and in 1970 Black & Decker
relented, agreeing a royalties and copyright deal two years later.
The worldwide success of Hickman’s product inevitably led to imitations and
lawsuits. In 1977 a similar product appeared in the United States,
manufactured by Emerson Electric and sold by Sears, Roebuck, the world’s
largest mail order company, whose in-house lawyers had advised that “the
Workmate patents are paper tigers”. Hickman sued and won.
In 1982 Hickman retired an extremely wealthy man. At Villa Devereux, the house
which he designed himself on Jersey, he kept a small collection of vintage
cars, including a 1931 Cadillac V-16 drophead coupé built for a maharaja.
In 1994 he was appointed OBE for services to industrial innovation.
Ron Hickman married, in 1959, Helen Godbold, who survives him with their son
and two daughters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/technology-obituaries/8339...
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Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
