Simon Robinson, Service Engineer, Royston, 1963-1964

Simon Robinson started at Pepper and Hayward (P&H) in Royston, working on radios and “anything with valves in”, including Pamphonic Public Address (PA) rental items.  P&H were asked to do Reflectograph servicing on behalf of Pye/Pamphonic by Mr Blyton (a brother of Enid Blyton) who ran servicing at Pamphonic.  Simon was headhunted into the Pamphonic service department, specialising in Reflectograph tape machines, which suffered from wear on the German-made Miniflux record/playback heads.  (Reflectograph was originally owned by Minisonic, who were based in Hemel Hempsted).

Other colleagues were Tom, an engineer originally from W Bryan Savage Ltd (specialists in equipment “shakers”, bought out by Pamphonic), and Wally Maiden, who had come from Pamphonic in Hemel Hempsted.

The chief development engineer was Cunningham Sands, whose name appeared on most of the technical drawings.  He was also from W Bryan Savage.

At that time, Pamphonic operated out of Royston, being based at the very smart Pye/Ling factory site (long demolished).   However, Pamphonic service had to operate out of a Nissen Hut on the site.

Pamphonic moved in 1964/65 to PyeTVT in Cambridge, and Simon left and returned to P&H, continuing to do servicing on Reflectograph tape decks, on behalf of Pamphonic.

Simon later started his own company, “Transcription Audio”, making hand-crafted top-end valve hi-fi amplifiers.

(from a telephone conversation in August 2020)