Inventor of electric trouser press
Peter Corby, who has died aged 97, was the inventor of the eponymous electric trouser press, a gadget once affectionately described as “faintly redolent of threestar hotels along with shortbread and coffee creamer.”
Peter's father John began making “valet stands” in Windsor in 1930; his first customer was one Austin Reed. It was Peter, however, who in the early 1960s patented the idea of including an electrical heating pad in the design, with the aim of “providing a press which will press a pair of trousers more quickly and will produce a better appearance of the trousers than known presses.”
At the time they were launched, the electric presses, usually equipped with a jacket hanger and a tray for pocket change, were seen as cutting-edge and aspirational, company ads promising “no more baggy knees or wrinkles” and adding that the device was “perfect for women's slacks too.”
In 1977 Corby sold the business and ownership has changed over the years. Models of the Corby trouser press continue to sell well in some 60 countries and it remains one of the few gadgets to be made entirely in Britain.
Peter John Siddons Corby was born at Leamington Spa on July 8, 1924, the youngest son of John Siddons Corby and Helen Ratray.
Peter enlisted in the RAFVR in September 1943 and was mobilized in February 1944. Trained as a flight engineer, he joined 78 Squadron in the final weeks of the war to fly in the Halifax bomber.
After the war he joined his father (who was ill and died in 1955) in the family business. A chance meeting with the Concorde aeronautical engineer who had solved the problem of how to prevent the nose-cone from freezing inspired the electrical heating pad that transformed the effectiveness of the trouser press.
In the early 1970s Corby started a leasing arrangement with hotels and in 1977 sold the whole trouser press business to the Mary Quant holding company Thomas Jourdan. The firm energetically promoted the press for use at home, not just in hotels. “Even in our liberated times few husbands know how to press trousers properly,” ran one newspaper ad, “which is why you should buy him a Corby electrically heated press ... so easy to operate that men manage at first try.”
Peter Corby held non-executive directorships in a number of other companies and, from 1974, was a name at Lloyd's of London, but he lost much of his fortune during the crisis of the early 1990s.