Trevor Baylis obituary

Trevor Baylis, who has died aged 80, is best known for being the inventor of the wind-up radio, but he also created hundreds of other devices, including many to help people with disabilities. He liked to proclaim: “I don’t do things because I want to do good; I do things because I like to show off.” Nevertheless he did a great deal of good with the wind-up radio, which he conceived in 1991 and first produced in 1994. He held in contempt what he called “spivs, crooks and vulture capitalists” and suggested there should be a royal academy of invention that would help neglected inventors get their ideas off the ground without being ripped off.

His dislike of exploiters came from experience. A few years before his wind-up radios began to sell at the rate of 120,000 a month, many of them bound for Africa, he had conceived more than 200 devices to help people with disabilities. He did most of this in less than three months of creative effort in which food and sleep played inconspicuous roles. The inventions included one-handed bottle and can openers, whisks, graters, sieves, sketching easels, embroidery frames and binoculars, as well as smoking aids for those who had difficulty in co-ordinating their limbs (he was an unreconstructed heavy pipe smoker).

The success rate of his devices, assessed across 97 activities in hospitals, was 76%; the NHS funded a nine-month study and bought eight sets of what he called Orange Aid equipment. But the ideas were not taken up commercially and he found himself £20,000 out of pocket. So he went to the City.

“It was a fateful error,” he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, Clock This. “Within 18 months they had relieved me of my inventions and changed the name of my products, all without any financial reward. They had done me up like the proverbial kipper, eaten me for breakfast and spat me out, bones and all.”

He learned his lesson, and as a consequence, the wind-up radio was produced by a firm in which he had a secure interest, ensuring that the inventor benefited along with the management and the customers.

Trevor was born in north London but moved to Southall with his parents when he was two. His mother, Gladys (nee Brown), and father, Cecil – a quality inspector with the Britannia Rubber and Kamptulicon Company near Wembley – had met at a church hall dance. “My parents forged a quiet bond of joy together that I have never been able to match in any relationship as an adult,” said Baylis. But he did not seem to regret this too much. “It would have left me slack with boredom,” he said. He had many women friends, and dedicated his autobiography to 21 of them, but never married.

He spent six months of the second world war in Brixworth, Northamptonshire, and returned to look out for fires over London, the “most beautiful sight” he had ever seen. He would collect the foil dumped by German bombers to confuse anti-aircraft gunners – and still kept it, many decades later, in his workshop.

At Dormer’s Wells secondary modern school in Southall he found himself to be bad at lessons – he left at 15 without any qualifications – but good at swimming. He won many competitions, and it was the chief regret of his life that he was not selected to swim for Britain in the 1956 Olympics.

He was also good at making things with his Meccano set. When he was 12, his father bought him a Myford lathe, his regular reading was Model Engineer magazine and he started to do experiments, one of which led to him shooting off a neighbour’s chimney with a rocket, fired by homemade gunpowder.

In later life he revealed that he had been sexually abused by an Anglican curate as a young boy, an experience that he said made him lose all belief in religion. He became emotionally detached, he said, and put up a shield of jauntiness.

His first job was in a soil mechanics laboratory in Southall, where he helped to investigate the suitability of soil for building on. Around this time he declared himself a Marxist, though a less political individual it would have been difficult to find.

Called up for national service in 1959, he served as a physical training instructor with the Royal Sussex Regiment. On one occasion he was reprimanded, after driving a go-kart around the parade ground, for encouraging the visiting defence secretary, John Profumo, to drive it himself.

His demobilisation was followed by six months’ unemployment, but Baylis was not discouraged. The job he eventually took, with the swimming pool manufacturers Purley Pools, lasted for eight years and set him on the road to becoming an inventor, giving him a workshop in which he could devise mechanical improvements.

In 1964 he produced a chlorination system that he claimed to be 20 years ahead of the competition, and at the same time began work as a freelance stuntman. He devised and built a 35ft diameter tank in which he had to teach Peter Cook and Dudley Moore how to escape from a car in water. He took the tank around Britain and Europe for displays, once persuading Austin Mitchell, then a Yorkshire TV reporter and later a politician, to ride a killer whale in it.

In 1970 Baylis appeared as Rameses II in a Berlin circus, was shut in a sarcophagus and dropped into the water. The crane went out of control and for a time he was trapped, so that when he finally did get out, the relieved applause was thunderous. He said later that his stay in Berlin was the happiest time of his life.

From the £6,300 he earned in Berlin, he started his own business, Shotline Pools, and dived off the top of a house into his first steel and PVC pool. But at 45, after his father had died and he himself had been ill for a year with a blocked intestine, he gave up stunts and devoted his life to inventing.

His invention of the clockwork radio came about after he had reflected that if an old-style gramophone could be wound up with clockwork and produce a sound, so could a radio. For this work he was appointed OBE in 1997. He also received many honorary degrees, and in 1997 presidential gold and silver medals from the Institute of Mechanical Engineering.

In later years, and for the first time comfortably off, he set up Trevor Baylis Brands, a company to help other inventors turn their ideas into successful products. He also continued with his own designs, including a shoe that generated enough electricity to operate a mobile phone. He lived for many years on Eel Pie Island near Twickenham, west London, with a workshop just inside the front door and pictures of himself and his inventions all over the house. In 2015 he was appointed CBE.

He admitted that his chief defect was a distrust of people. “Anyone in possession of a good idea is at the mercy of jackals wanting a piece of the action,” said the ebullient inventor. “In business, basic decency has no cash value.”

Trevor Baylis, inventor, born 13 May 1937; died 5 March 2018