It’s not quite true to say that every front room had one, but many did. Sometimes bought for cash, sometimes on hire purchase, a house wasn’t a home without a radiogram.
In September 1962 my mate Paul Butterworth, who like me was ten years old and had just started his last year at primary school, broke his leg. I don’t recall how the accident occurred, but it was a bad break, and he was in plaster from toe to thigh, poor lad. He lived a few doors up from our house, and as he was confined to a wheelchair his parents were understandably worried that he was going to miss crucial months of school, leading up to his 11+.
They needn’t have worried. Being a cheery and helpful sort of child I immediately volunteered to push poor Paul to and from Navigation Road Primary in his National Health Service-supplied wheelchair. And it was great fun. Our route took us along Foxhall Lane, which was straight as a die and almost completely untroubled by traffic. So every morning and afternoon I would push his chair into the middle of the road and position ourselves level with the first tree, and Paul would count us down on my beloved Timex wristwatch.
On the word ‘go’ the most unholy and doubtless unhealthy drag race would begin, as I sprinted as fast as I could from one end of the lane to the other, pushing Paul at as high a speed as I could manage – all the time with his plastered leg stuck out in front like the bow-spit on a sailing boat.
Every day we got faster. And faster still. It was a source of great pleasure to us both, though in overall terms it did slow down the process of actually getting to school – having covered the distance in record time we would have to stop while I got my breath back and we both laughed ourselves silly. We discovered very early on that we could be as late for school as we liked; we had a wonderful excuse, and I was in unaccustomed good books with our form master for the Samaritan-like good deed of pushing the invalid the two miles or so to school.
The really good bit came at the end of the first week though. On the Friday evening Mr Butterworth thanked me profusely … and then gave me sixpence! Riches beyond imagination! Now, if you are a mere youngster, please don’t mock; sixpence was a lot of money. My usual bus fare to and from school was one penny (one old penny) a day, and if I walked and spent that on sweets at the little kiosk by the railway station instead, it would get me a bag of toffees and a liquorice submarine.
After receiving this bounty for each of three weeks I walked (always walking – I wish I could do it so easily now) into town and undertook one of the landmark negotiations of my life. I bought my first record. And of course, like just about everyone else I can still remember that first vinyl single. It was Telstar by The Tornadoes, and it was a huge hit at the time – a soaring, organ-based instrumental with ‘out of this world’ sound effects. In ’62 and early ’63 it was in the charts for twenty five weeks.
It cost me one shilling and three pence, so I had thru’pence change, and I can’t remember exactly but it’s highly likely that I spent that on sweets to fuel me for the walk home. The record was, of course a 7-inch black vinyl, with a stuck-on paper label, and it came in a flimsy paper sleeve. I carried it home as if it were the most precious thing in the world, which at that moment, for me, it was. That was a very grown-up moment.
There was a problem though. I didn’t have anything to play it on. My big sister had a small portable record player, which I’d like to think was a Dansette but I really can’t be sure, and that meant careful negotiation and doing both the washing up and the wiping. It didn’t matter; I got to play my record, and it was wonderful. I had no idea that the sound quality was appalling, and that every time I played it the needle scratched away a tiny amount of the vinyl. That record is on the juke box in my kitchen now, and unless I’ve had a pint or three and my critical faculties are a little blurred I can hardly bear to listen to it. Crackle, crackle, hiss, hiss – I heard none of it back then.
My record collection didn’t progress much over the next couple of years, but in 1965, without any warning, a new piece of furniture arrived in our front room. Like countless thousands of other British houses, our suburban semi had two sitting rooms – what estate agents would nowadays call reception rooms – and we spent most of our time in the back room, facing the garden, and the front room was kept ‘for best’.
One day I came home from school and my proud and delighted parents told me to go and look in the front room; it was obviously going to be something jolly special … and it was. Under the window was a large, shiny wooden box supported by for spindly legs. It was something over three feet long and was finished in a vaguely mahogany veneer, and on either side of the vertical front face there were slotted wooden sections with fabric mesh behind. It looked terribly modern, and like nothing else in the room (rooms weren’t interior designed of course; the décor and furniture was an odd collection of the historic and the accidental). The top had a lid the in the centre that lifted up to reveal a recessed turntable and a VHF radio.
It was our new, brand new radiogram. A whole new concept in furniture; there had been radiograms in the States since the Thirties but they were still relatively new in Britain (well, certainly in Timperley, which has never knowingly been a capital of style). There were certain domestic landmarks in the Sixties; new objects in the house that one could almost tick off; the radiogram came a few years after the television, just after the twin tub washing machine and just ahead of a toaster or an electric kettle.
I believe, though my memory could well be playing tricks on me, that it made by Ferguson. The brand names back then were all reassuring British-sounding – Thorn. Pye, Ferranti, GEC – and not a hint of the Orient about any of them.
I’ve got no idea how much the radiogram cost, but by our standards it can’t have been cheap. A bit of research shows that it wasn’t difficult to pay £100 for such a thing, and when you think that a brand new Ford Anglia would have cost less than £500 it rather puts it into perspective. Not that my dad’s Ford Anglia cost £500 – he never had a new car in his life. About the time we got the radiogram he part-exchanged his maroon 997cc Anglia for a splendid two-tone 1,200cc Ford Anglia De Luxe; a source of great pride, and perfect for Sunday afternoon drives in the Cheshire countryside.
Nowadays you would just go out and buy something like that; put it on the credit card and not even think about the cost. Back then my mum and dad would have to have budgeted for it and set money aside specially, as they did for holidays.
Writing this now, it occurs to me that I’m not sure why they bought it. They weren’t particularly interested in music and rarely used it. My sister had her own record player, and anyway, she had discovered boys and was rarely home (the cause of much friction and shouts of ‘I’m not having a daughter of mine going out dressed like that’). There can only have been one of two reasons; perhaps they actually did buy it for my use, but I’m not being cruel in saying that’s unlikely. It’s probably more that it was the right thing to buy at that time. Not in terms of impressing other people, but through the Fifties and the Sixties ‘ordinary people’ acquired material goods as a way of proving to themselves that they were climbing the ladder, and their life was significantly better than their parents’. In the Seventies and Eighties people started taking expensive and ever more adventurous foreign holidays, again showing that they had disposable wealth and were damn well going to enjoy it. In the Nineties they joined health clubs which they only ever visited twice. What happens nowadays? It’s gone small scale again and we measure out our existence with MP3 players and ever more wonderful mobile phones.
Whatever their thinking, I adored it. Apart from the essentials like Ready Steady Go and Top Of The Pops and the programmes that we all watched together by way of a family ritual – Steptoe And Son, and Doctor Finlay’s Casebook - I soon stopped watching television (which, mercifully, was in the back living room of course). I took over the front room and made it my own. Thanks to an ability to get up very early at weekends and in the holidays I earned fortunes on a milk round (far more than the poor suckers who lugged newspaper bags round ever got), and I started spending it all on records. If you left the stacking arm off the record on the turntable it would play again and again, and I really can remember buying Substitute by The Who (released in May 1966) and playing it endless until my mother made me take it off and put on something else – anything else.
The whole point was that the thing was stereophonic. So exotic. So modern. The space between the speakers enhanced the stereo effect, and the wooden cabinet did wonders for the sound. It was head and shoulders above a tiny, tinny Dansette. Being a snob even at that age I insisted on called ours a stereogram rather than a mere radiogram; insufferable little prig.
Shops that sold electrical goods – in the High Street, not purpose-built buildings the size of aircraft carriers out on ‘retail parks’ – were full of radiograms. They suddenly came into fashion, and all the well-known manufacturers offered a dazzling range. It was a curious concept; entertainment as furniture – furniture that entertained you. Most, like ours, were modern and looked like they were made by G-Plan or Parker Knoll. They were a completely new form of domestic furniture, and it had been a long time since you could have said that of anything. Furniture doesn’t come in new forms, for heaven’s sake! They looked very good with long low coffee tables. Very groovy. Some disguised their purpose though – rather like those televisions that were built into mock-Regency cabinets and had little doors with brass handlers to coyly hide the cathode ray tube.
Ours had a space in front of the turntable which allowed you to store about a dozen LPs, but I soon filled that. I had stacks of records stored under the radiogram – okay with my mum so long as I kept them neatly. By the time I was fifteen they would have included albums by The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Pretty Things, Cream, Bob Dylan and The Byrds.
By then an indulgent older cousin had given me a Grundig TK5 open-spool tape recorder with a big Bakelite microphone, which I thought was just fabulous. I could link it to the record player via a five-pin plug and record my own music tapes, and then I would play them back through the radiogram because the speakers were so much better than the little 4-inch in the Grundig.
I discovered that I could get the very best sound if I lay on the floor with my head under the radiogram. Weird but true. I could only ever get it loud enough if my mum and dad were out, which wasn’t often, but I decided on a modification. I bought a huge twelve-inch Fane speak and hid it right under the radiogram, up again the wall, and wired it into the left hand speaker (where the bass came from) – bringing the wires out through the back grille so that they would pass undetected. That rather messed up the stereo effect, but it gave me much more power and volume. Wonderful. I was really set up. I could make my ears ring. If my dad had ever found out he would have gone mental.
What ever happened to radiograms? When did my parents get rid of ours, and where did it go? Did they take it to the tip, thinking it was so out of fashion and quite worthless, or did they sell it, and is it now in some groovy, retro warehouse apartment delighting the cool and fashionable? And if so, what’s it worth?
Nowadays there are no parallels between wood and hi-fi sound; music systems come in black boxes and are strictly functional. They look like what they do. Items of furniture they are very definitely not. Try going into Curry’s and asking for a sound system in red or blue. You’ll have black or, at a pinch, aluminium, and lump it. Maybe some of the magic has gone, along with the mahogany veneer, or is that just silly sentiment?
By the way, going back to the start of this story, eventually my mum got to hear that I was being rewarded for what should have been a purely altruistic act of charity, and told kind, nice Mr Butterworth that I didn’t want paying for pushing Paul to school, and I would be delighted to do it for nothing. To say I was thunderstruck and deeply angered isn’t putting it nearly strongly enough; I hold it against her to this day. I had been wise though; I had saved what I had earned before the funds were cut off at source and not blown it on sweets. That meant that I was able to make another trip into town and make a second purchase just after Christmas; What Now? by Adam Faith – and yes, that’s on the juke box in the kitchen too.