New Zealand Memories Issue 152

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STORY That Radio Alwyn Owen N.Z. Vintage Radio Society It wasn’t until 1936 that we bought our first radio. The neighbours on one side had one, our friends the Hirons in Second Avenue had two – one in the kitchen and one in the ‘front room’- and Bob Worner, who lived in a beautifully-converted railway carriage next door to the Hirons, had a magnificent free-standing one, gloriously encased and half the size of a piano, with eight valves tucked away inside it. And we didn’t have a radio. Dad tried to tell his two whining youngsters that we were saving every penny to get out of our rented house and into a home of our own, that we had no spare cash for anything as frivolous as a radio. But then, in late 1935, his resolve weakened as the prospect of political and social change faced the country, and a radio became not a luxury, but a seeming necessity. Even so, it wasn’t until February the following year that we finally joined the 182,500 other <strong>New</strong> <strong>Zealand</strong>ers who already held licences ‘to operate a radio receiving station’ and bought a radio ourselves. It arrived in a wooden box, snugly cushioned in pages of the Northern Advocate, and once it had been unpacked, Huw and I demanded that it be plugged in and switched on, but Dad refused to do so. A radio wasn’t like a toaster or an electric jug, he explained, it had to be ‘installed’, and that was quite a process, but Herbie Aldred (who lived just a few doors away and knew a bit about radio) would help us to set it all up in the weekend. Dad didn’t mention that the radio dealer could have set it up immediately, but that would have been an additional cost to the twelve quid or so paid for the set, and on top of that, there was still thirty bob to be found for the licence fee. So we’d wait, until Herbie was free the next Saturday and Dad had collected the few necessary bits and pieces that Herbie had set down on a list for him. 4
STORY N.Z. Vintage Radio Society “A radio wasn’t like a toaster or an electric jug, he explained, it had to be ‘installed’...” Meanwhile the radio sat, mute and modest, on a shelf in our kitchen-cumlivingroom. For modest it undoubtedly was – a basic five-valve mantle set made by Radio Ltd., and in our case, distributed by Bond and Bond under their house-brand Skyscraper. Radios were then classed as either ‘mantle’ or ‘console’, the latter being free-standing, and oh Lord, how magnificent some of them were, with their beautiful inlays and rich grain, polished so that you could look right down into the soul of the wood, like the back of a fine violin. Come to that, some of the mantle sets were not too bad either in that respect either, but not ours – ours was a plain box, relieved only by fretwork covering the speaker grille, with a small escutcheon on either side, the left-hand one bearing the word ‘Volume’, and its neighbour showing in its recess what appeared to be black numerals against a murky grey-brown background. No ’tone control’, no flash ‘airplane dial’ with all stations identified, no ‘short wave’, and of course like all radios of its era, no FM... But make no mistake, for all its lack of glamour it was a perfectly efficient work-horse of a radio. As it turned out, “installation” proved not too difficult a job. We put up the aerial first, a horizontal wire that ran between a manuka pole at one end and our convenient cabbage tree at the other, and electrically isolated from them by ceramic ‘egg insulators’ that were strung in a series of three at each end of the aerial. A vertical wire was attached near one end of the horizontal portion to form an inverted ‘L’ (which indeed was the technical term for this type of aerial) and this, the ‘downlead’ would ultimately be connected to the radio. Two holes were then drilled through the wall of the house below the radio shelf, the uppermost one providing a snug fit for the ‘lead-in tube’ – an ebonite tube containing a threaded brass rod with a wing-nut at each end; this carried the signal from the down-lead to the interior of the house, where the red aerial lead dangling from the radio was attached to it. The radio’s black ‘earth’ lead was then extended, poked through the second hole, and attached to a three-foot length of metal pipe that Herbie had driven into the earth for nearly its full length – a good ‘earth’, he explained, was as necessary as a good aerial. Last of all, a ceramic ‘lightning arrestor’ was screwed on to the external wall of the house and connected between the aerial and earth. It contained nothing more than a couple of wires with a gap between them, all sealed with pitch, the idea being that any lightning strike on the aerial would jump the gap and dissipate harmlessly in the earth instead of blowing the radio sky-high – without an arrestor any insurance claim on the radio, and possibly the house, would be dismissed in the event of a lightning strike. So it was all done. The licence fee had been paid (it had been reduced to twentyfive shillings since 1934 we discovered) and with our radio now installed, we all trooped inside for the ceremonial switch-on. One thing I remember vividly: at the moment we switched the radio on, that murky brown tuning dial sprang into gorgeous life in a wonderful rich amber glow that set its black numerals in high contrast. To my nine-year-old mind, that was magic; that was the miracle, not the sound that came a couple of seconds later as the valves warmed up. I’m convinced that that first sight of a back-lit tuning dial was the trigger that led me to begin building my own radios within a few years, and later, to a career in the medium. Well, we now had our radio, but in hindsight we should have bought it three months earlier, when we’d have been able to hear the run-up to the 1935 General Election and the extraordinary event that occurred in Auckland preceding it, as radio and politics became entangled. 5
Page 1 and 2: APPETISER This Won’t Hurt a Bit
Page 3: Editor Wendy Rhodes Graphic Design
Page 7 and 8: STORY …The so-called debates do n
Page 9 and 10: OTAGO “Miss Dalrymple had a dream
Page 11 and 12: CENTREFOLD The Anglers’ Eldorado
Page 13 and 14: HAWKE’S BAY 61
Page 15 and 16: INDEX and GENEALOGY LIST Masefield

New Zealand Memories Issue 152

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