Portable Radio
Circa 1930’s
This ‘suitcase-style’ portable, battery-operated radio receiver was once owned by the family of amateur filmmaker, Nick Williamson, at Wentworth House, Bocking.
During the 1930s Nick’s parents, Edward and Nellie, had opened a boarding house along Bradford Street for single workers, offering furnished rooms, meals, and a communal area, possibly where the radio would have sat.
The 1930s was an important decade for British radio. The wireless had already transformed the domestic household, connecting ordinary people to world affairs, exposing them to brands and advertising more easily and enabling closed-off sections of society to be accustomed with wider social and political affairs for the first time. Families sitting round a wireless in the evening became a staple of the British living room.
The radio often called a ‘luggage radio’, is housed in a leather-covered case with a classic Art Deco wooden paneled design inside. It uses vacuum tubes, also known as radio valves, to amplify and detect signals and it was powered by two batteries; the Marconiphone H.T. Battery and the Sterling Grid 9 Volt Bias Battery.
Marconiphone was a section of the Chelmsford based Marconi Company dedicated to researching domestic radio technology. The Marconiphone H.T battery would have cost 8 shillings, the equivalent of about £35 today. Sterling Telephone & Electric Co Ltd, based in Dagenham, manufactured electrical components and was purchased by Marconi in 1926.
It is estimated that 87% of British households owned a radio in 1939, and the BBC had a listenership of 34 million people as the British population kept informed about the outbreak of the Second World War. Despite the launch of a television service in 1936, radio still commanded a larger audience and radio stars earned more than the first TV stars.
