Founded by Major JFE (Frank) Clarke and Sargent Alex Smith in 1946 (who had served together in the REME (Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers) in WWII) they started out repairing radios, and moved into making early HiFi Radiograms for upmarket stores like Harrods. The Major (as he was always known in the company) heard that there was a contract for schools radio equipment coming up, and they designed the required radio, amplifier and speaker prototypes in very short order, and won the initial contract against major companies like HMV/ EMI.
The resultant business kept the company busy for the next 30 plus years, including many record players and a number of tape recorders. The TR634 was claimed to be the first all transistor professional recorder that included a 10 watt power amplifier and the apocryphal story was that a number of other manufacturers paid the south London factory a visit to see this new advance in electronics. Against the competition of Ferrograph and Vortexion it held its own, both of these still all valve (tube) products.
The company also designed a record player for the blind (where the turntable arm was in the lid of the player) and latter two versions of a tape based system, the latter version was in production for about 30 years and used in the UK and across the world for “Talking Books” having the ability to take a complete unabridged novel on one multitrack tape cassette. This remained in production until the demise of the company with some 70,000 machines and millions of cassettes being produced at the Wallington factory. It was replaced by the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) with the “daisy” cd based system.
The Major was awarded the OBE for services to the blind community.
for more information see http://ferrographworld.com/pdf/A%20history%20of%20Clarke%20and%20Smith%20Winter%202008%20Bulletin.pdf