One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 36 from radiogram to download

Bought on Grey Mare Lane Market in 1972

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.*

My record collection covers a short period, from the mid 1960s into the early 80s.

And because we didn’t buy a record player well into 1965 I never really got into singles.

For me it was the L.P., which cost just 29 shillings available from the music shop or from Eltham Library on the High Street.

Most of what I bought I still have and while friends insisted I transfer the collection to CDs and junk the vinyl I never did.

Their claims that the CD lasted longer and didn’t suffer from scratches was all very good, but the joys of listening to  old LPs are the scratches and the memories of who I was going out with at the time, and for that matter the party where that  long scratch across three tracks happened.

An Eddison record circa 1920s

For Joe and Mary Ann it would have been those old 78 rpms which came in plain brown sleeves and were brittle and had that tinny sound, like listening to music through a paper bag.

I often wonder whether Mary Ann followed the advice of those 1950s DIY programmes and applied heat to make them into decorative fruit plates.

If she did there were none here when we moved in.

Of course I don’t really know if they had a record player or what they liked to listen to, but given that they had a telephone installed by 1924 and a television just thirty years later I bet they did.

Nor would it have been one of those hand wound ones for Joe was into electricity.  He had seen its value and embraced it, proudly boasting that his houses were built with electricity through out.

The 1950s radiogram

And so I think they would have bought into CD, the video player and ultimately the computer

But Joe died in 1968 and Mary Ann in 1974.  John, Mike and Lois who took over the house stuck with the telly and an old record player.

So it was all down to me to introduce the state of the art hi fi system.  Each piece of which was bought from a different manufacturer because not one company could be trusted to make a good record deck, amplifier, speakers and tuner.

And the system looked cobbled together with spaghetti of wires trailing from the back.

I am not sure that really it was any better than the all in one sound system but by golly you thought it was.

And now the family sit in different rooms each with a device offering “catch up”, music, or games along with the ability to surf the net.

The evening of all sitting around the telly watching the same programme on two channels has pretty much gone.  The upside is that you are longer at the mercy of your parent’s favourites, but the downside is that you spend less time together in the evenings.

And I wonder what Joe and Mary Anne would have made of that.

Picture; cover of the Marvin Gaye Tammi Tyrell LP Easy, 1969, Edison Records "Diamond Disc, early 1920s, Wikipedia Commons and the Murphy A.138R Radiogram, courtesy of Graham Gill