Inventor extraordinaire
Especially when combined with an empty purse, necessity is truly the mother of invention. And few men’s creative portfolios better illustrate this than that of Cecil Downer-Groves, a prolific inventor a century ago, who took out many provisional patents, without ever following his ideas through to commercial production.
Born in 1880 in Jamaica, of English parents who worked a plantation in Spicy Hill, midway between Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, Cecil Downer-Groves (CD-G) came to the UK in 1897 at the age of 17, to train as a pattern maker’s apprentice. In the process of doing so, and afterwards in working for a South London firm of scientific engineers, he acquired many skills associated with prototype engineering. Together with an enquiring mind which evidently asked ‘how?’ rather than ‘why?, this resulted in his becoming a compulsive inventor. He lived in Thornton Heath near Croydon, Surrey, for almost all of his long and creative life, until he passed away in 1970, aged 91.
CD-G’s many patented inventions include a collar stud safety catch he created in 1913 in the heyday of detachable shirt collars, a handlebar-mounted twist-grip gearchange for a motorcycle of the type adopted by Vespa post-Second World War, a
