Percy Shaw, home-town Halifax hero who invented cats eyes

One of 14 children whose father, a Halifax dyer’s labourer, struggled to support on a £1 weekly wage, Percy left school at 13 and set up his own business repairing roads and paths with a mechanical roller he made from an old Ford engine and three lorry wheels.

The story goes that one foggy night in 1933, he was driving back home to Boothtown from Bradford when he hit an unlit and tricky stretch of road with a sheer drop down a hillside.

His solution to navigating it next time was to make a flexible rubber moulding containing glass and metal beads which could be inserted at intervals down the centre of the road so that the reflective surfaces shone in a car’s headlights. As passing traffic depressed the moulding, the reflectors were automatically cleaned by rainwater collected in the base of the moulding.

His company, Reflecting Roadstuds, found orders difficult to come by at first, but when the wartime blackout arrived his fortune was made.

He was not one to spend it lavishly, however. As Alan Whicker discovered in an early Yorkshire TV documentary, curtains were few and far between at his house, though his cellar was stocked with crates of his favourite Worthington’s bottled beer. His other indulgences were the pair of Rolls-Royces parked outside.

In a poll of the best British designs of the 20th century, cats eyes made the top 25, in the august company of Concorde and the Spitfire.