Ronald Price Hickman was born in South Africa in 1932 and arrived in London in 1954. He found work at the Ford Motor Company at Dagenham, first as a clay modeller and then helping to style the Anglia 105E. At Earls Court he met Colin Chapman, and after three years at Ford moved to Chapman’s new company in north London as production engineer and general manager, working on the Elite.
With John Frayling he headed the team that designed the Elan, which came into production in 1962, and he also designed the first Lotus Europa as part of the GT40 project bid. He left Lotus in 1967 and moved to Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, where he worked on seating for the QE2 and on his invention, the Workmate.
The idea came in 1961 when he accidentally cut the leg off an expensive Swedish chair he was using as a sawhorse. Stanley turned down the licence, so he sold benches himself at trade shows until Black & Decker began making them in 1973, paying him a 3 per cent royalty. By 1981 ten million had sold and by 2011 more than 100 million. He moved to Jersey in 1977 and died in 2011.
