As one half of the electrical appliances company Russell Hobbs, Peter Hobbs became more than just a household name but a household presence too — the company’s kettles and coffee percolators are staple items on kitchen benchtops around the country. Russell Hobbs burst on to the scene in the 1950s, and its appliances stood as iconic symbols of Britain’s boom period of postwar prosperity. It was Hobbs who first approached William Russell, and, becoming business partners in 1952, they managed to embed heating elements into ceramic, leading to the first coffee percolator that kept coffee hot once it had dripped through, and the first fully automatic kettle that safely switched itself off when the water reached boiling point.

While the company is now the producer of toasters, food processors and cookware, it was the kettle that was Russell Hobbs’s flagship product. Its curvaceous, chrome design sold more than five million in its first 20 years between the 1950s and 1970s. The design underwent several reincarnations, dubbed K1, K2, K3 and K4, and the last version only gave way to the less shapely jug kettle in the 1990s.

Peter Wallace Hobbs was born in Langton Green, Kent, and educated at Skinners’ School in Tunbridge Wells where he was a keen amateur dramatist. He started work at the Kent-based Weald Electricity Supply Company in the 1930s but was keen to serve his country when the Second World War loomed. He was retained against his will for a year, but then enlisted in the Royal Engineers and trained in Bangalore before being commissioned into Queen Victoria’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners.

He served in the Middle East with PAIForce (Persia and Iraq), as an adjutant to the Commander, Royal Engineers, 6th Indian Division, and in Pakistan he worked at the staff college in Quetta and as Brigade Major in the Sialkot District. Returning to Britain he commanded a field company in Ripon, North Yorkshire.

When the war was over Hobbs tranferred his electrical skills into developing household electricals. He took a job at Morphy Richards in South Africa, where he became the managing director. He later moved back to Britain, but continued to work in electrical products. Although he went on to be the sales partner within Russell Hobbs (with Russell taking charge of design), he too was a natural innovator who came up with many of the ideas that made the company successful. Indeed, it was his quest to embed elements in ceramic bodies for coffee pots that led him to Russell, whom he consulted as to how it might be done. Russell worked out a way to do so, and in October 1952 the two entered into business. Russell Hobbs was born.

The 1950s were affluent as people left behind the hard days of the war; new products hit the market and people enjoyed having the money to purchase them. In 1956 Russell Hobbs, working out of a factory in Croydon, South London and launched the pioneering K1 kettle, which contained an automatic switch-off feature, enabling people to carry on with what they were doing without worrying that the water would boil over. Other manufacturers had already developed an automatic cut-out using fuses or spring-loaded ejectors should the kettle boil dry, but Russell Hobbs’s design improved on the mechanisms by turning itself off when the water boiled. At the rear of the K1 there was a bimetallic strip and, when water boiled, steam was forced through an opening in the lid to the strip, which knocked the switch off.

Russell Hobbs kettles soon became regular items on wedding present lists through their reputation as both durable and stylish.

With Russell developing new products and Hobbs focusing on sales, the company was expanding. In 1963 it was sold to Tube Investments. The company’s strong reputation has ensured that it has remained Russell Hobbs, despite being owned subsequently by Salton Europe.

In the 1960s Peter Hobbs accepted a place on the main board of the Valor stoves company, where he remained until 1971. His wife, Daphne, whom he had married in 1966, suggested that as he had always expressed a desire in having a controlling interest in a restaurant, that he start one. They did just that, opening Manleys restaurant in Storrington, West Sussex.

On his retirement Hobbs and his family moved to Malta where he had restored a farmhouse in the 1960s on the nearby island of Gozo, near the fishing village of Xlendi. In Gozo he had had a hobby farm where he produced mushrooms in a cave, but long-distance management proved too much for that venture.

In 1983 the family moved to the department of Corrèze in southwest France, where he enjoyed the challenges of gardening in a continental climate of wet winters and hot, dry summers.

Hobbs was a staunch High Church Anglican and took communion with dispensation from local Roman Catholic bishops in the communities where he lived. In South Africa he had been involved in the Coloured Anglican Mission in Johannesburg with Father Harry Leach and with Father Anthony Hunter, who later became Bishop of Swaziland and godfather to Hobbs’s son.

Hobbs enjoyed travelling and racing yachts, along with the American film producer Don Murphy, and was a member of the Royal Ocean Racing Club. Even in his late eighties Hobbs was active helping his son to restore a local property in France.

Hobbs’s wife died in 1996. He is survived by their son.

Peter Hobbs, partner of Russell Hobbs, was born on May 3, 1916. He died on April 11, 2008, aged 91