One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 21, the wireless, the telly and the cost

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

I have been thinking and writing about how the consumer boom of the 1950s made an impact on our house and in particular the lives of Joe and Mary Ann.  Now I do have to be careful.  I never met either of them and by the time I washed up here for the first time in 1976 nothing was left of their possessions.  But they had installed a telephone by the mid 1920s and had a television in 1958.

I expect they had bought into the full run of new electrical equipment but these had all been cleared out after Mary died leaving only an old 1940s gas cooker.  But assuming they had that full range I have become intrigued at what the cost would be and how this squared with their income.

And there again I run into trouble.  Joe was a builder who owned a lot of houses which he had built and which he rented out all of which must have marked him off as earning above the national average, and in the 1950s he progressively moved to selling them off.  But I don’t have any figures for his income so we shall have to fall back on national average earnings and the price of the goods which while they were to fall during the 1950s were astonishingly high in 1949.

The minimum wage for a 47 hour week in 1949 was £4.14s, [£4.60p]* and there is anecdotal evidence which pushes the figure up to £5 and in one case £7.
The cost of the Murphy Radiogram was £92, with credit deals of a £1 a week and a deposit of £9.5s and even a 122m. 5 valve 3 waveband wireless cost £26.17s.9d [£26.89p].  All of which made these items quite expensive.

But there must have been cheaper versions, after all most homes had a wireless which was pretty much the main source of home entertainment from the 1930s through to the mid 1950s.  All those stories of neighbours coming into watch the Coronation in 1953 are well testified.

We must have got our telly sometime around 1955 so my earliest memories are of the wireless and in that respect there is a direct link to the Scott’s and to my own grandparents.  I don’t suppose that what I listened to was that much different from the wartime broadcasts from Saturday 1943**.  The Forces network became the Light Programme and was a mix of popular music and comedy while the Home Service provided more serious stuff in the form of news, drama and talks.

It all seems pretty tame stuff and for most people sitting at home on a wet Monday evening in February it was all there was, but there is no doubting that much of it was entertaining and certainly some of the drama and particularly the comedy has stood the test of time.

But moving pictures are magic and it is easy to see the attraction, even given the fact that the screen was small, broadcasts broke down and the programmes were sometimes just downright boring.  That said we adopted the approach that the telly was still not quite respectable and our first one had doors which closed the screen from view during the day, and allowing the casual visitor to see just a piece of furniture.

I wonder what Joe and Mary Ann would make of plasma screens which convert a wall into a cinema or the freedom the lap top gives to listen to music, follow the breaking news or just watch a repeat TV programme.  They would I suspect nod with approval, recognising the wonderful opportunities that are now possible.  No more the tyranny of all watching mum’s choice of programmes or waiting for the programmers to decide when we can watch again an old episode of Dad’s Army.  But there is always a downside.  The telly in the corner of the front room has been replaced by screens all over the house and in each room someone will be doing something on their own.

Pictures; from the collections of Graham Gill and Andrew Simpson

*http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alan/family/N-Money.html based on figures from the Department of Employment and Productivity, 1981

** Derby Evening Telegraph July 3rd 1943