An extract from 40 Motoring Heroes: Pioneers, Inventors, Mavericks, and Game Changers
Percy Shaw: One for The Road
Having a pub named after you is an aspiration for some people. Certainly, it’s not a bad epitaph. Nell Gwyn, Charlie Chaplin, John Fielding VC (of the Boer War’s Rorke’s Drift fame), and Sir Frank Whittle (jet engine designer) are among those who have achieved this accolade. So, if you visit The Percy Shaw in Halifax, you might wonder after whom it is named. Indeed, a pub is integral to this story.
Halifax resident Percy Shaw is one of the great pioneers of safe motoring, yet his name is not widely known today. Born in 1890, the fourth child of a dye-works labourer father, Shaw left school at 13 to work in a local cloth mill. When the works closed, father and son set up a business adjoining their house, making tools. Here they gained a reputation for turning their skilful hands to all sorts of manufacturing, including shell noses and cartridge cases in the First World War.
Illuminating the way home
On the death of his parents, Shaw progressed to setting up a tarmac-laying business. Driving home from his customary pub one foggy evening, he caught sight of a cat at the roadside. In fact, all he could see was its eyes, piercing the darkness and the mist. What if, he thought, there was a series of cats’ eyes spaced out along the centre line of the road to illuminate the way home? It was Shaw’s Eureka moment.
A switched-on Yorkshire inventor, Shaw set to experimenting. But his best bet was just to copycat. He proceeded to sheath an iron shoe in rubber, in which he implanted two reflectors cut like diamonds to catch light from a variety of angles. Being a tarmac layer, it is rumoured that he used this skill to dig up road sections overnight, lay his road studs, drive past numerous times to see how the headlights reflected, reinstate the road, then set off home to further refine his design. By 1934, he had patented a design and, encouraged by the emphasis on road safety in that year’s Road Traffic Act, (see Leslie Hore Belisha, p70), Shaw set up Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd. to produce the Catseye (no apostrophe). The name is registered, so no competitor can use it, and his Halifax company still trades today.
Ingenious design
The real brilliance of the road stud’s design lies not just in the bright reflection of light but in its self-cleaning ability. The rubber mount is suspended in a bracket, so that every time a vehicle runs over a Catseye, a squirt of residual rainwater in the iron casing cleans the reflectors. They don’t need any special maintenance – just let nature keep them sparkling.
At first, sales were excruciatingly slow, but were boosted by the increasing emphasis on road safety. The wartime blackout was to prove beneficial as Shaw was called to Whitehall to explain his invention. He achieved sufficient government funding to produce 40,000 of his reflecting studs. However, Japan’s entry into the war and invasion of Malaya slashed the supply of rubber dramatically. Experiments with scrap rubber failed to work properly – apart from recycling the crepe soles of shoes and boots. Once the war was over, however, Reflecting Roadstuds’ production bounced back.
Twenty years later, in 1965, Shaw was awarded the OBE for services to export, and today, the company produces a million items a year.
Spartan pleasures
Percy Shaw led an almost austere life. Despite his wealth – allegedly becoming a multi-millionaire – he continued to live in the very same Halifax home (Boothtown Mansion, right next to his factory) that his parents had moved into when he was just two years old. He stayed there right up until his death in 1976, aged 86. Well-known TV journalist Alan Whicker made a memorable documentary in 1968, which showed that, despite his wealth, Shaw lived a simple bachelor’s life. His home had no carpets or curtains because “they collected dust” and there was hardly any furniture – except for a TV set in each of four rooms. What was striking in these pre-remote-control days was that each set was left permanently on and tuned to a different station. Did the shining white dot in the centre of the screen, when transmission ended, remind him of his own invention?
Yet, Shaw did have some pleasures – the pub, friends’ company, golf, as well as TV. His prized possession was tucked away in his garage, a Rolls-Royce Phantom V limousine. It was his one real luxury. Sporting the personal registration plate PS 1274, such a car would usually have been fitted by the manufacturers with a glass division between the chauffeur and passengers. But not for Percy. Given his delight in driving the limousine, Percy specified that the glass division should not be fitted, so that he could maintain chatting easily with the friends he drove to his local golf club. That was not the only unusual aspect of owning such a prestigious car. Percy was remembered in the local newspaper for regularly buying tripe in the town market and, so legend had it, he would sometimes eat it with his bare fingers in the rear seats. How he kept his greasy fingers off the luxurious leather interior is unknown!
The pub bearing his name was sold on in January 2024 by Wetherspoons to a small, independent local brewery, who has committed to keeping its name and legacy. Whilst Percy’s life was certainly eccentric, his contribution to road safety was huge, through an invention we all take for granted.
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Read about more fascinating individuals from the world of motoring in 40 Motoring Heroes: Pioneers, Inventors, Mavericks, and Game Changers