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Friday Night Was Amami Night
by Maggie B Dickinson
The first radios in the UK were known as wirelesses and I still
inadvertently use the expression from time to time.
Until this invention the only voices I’d heard in our living room were
from family and friends whose main amusement, especially of a winter
evening, was to gather round the coal fire and talk to each other. What
I particularly enjoyed were stories of my parents’ childhood days and
listenening to accounts about our ancestors who seemed to have evolved
from another planet.
When we’d run out of topics we all looked for images in the red hot
coals and identified them with the poker. Then at supper time we got out
the long toasting fork and held our bread over the glowing embers for a
golden crisp slice of toast which we lashed with lots of yellow butter.
Before bed we drank Ovaltine and then cleaned our teeth with the
communal toothpaste. This was a pink solid substance in a round tin, the
lid of which had an image of a Walt Disney-style castle – possibly
Segovia Castle in Spain. Later on, still in the fifties, we switched to
tubes of Pepsodent whose jingle was You’ll wonder where the yellow went
when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.
On Friday nights our gathering had to be interrupted on account of it
being bath night, when extra coal was shoveled onto the fire and the
large zinc bath placed in front of it. The bath was kept outside on a
hook in our back yard, next to a wooden meat safe fixed high up on the
wall. In the absence of a cold pantry or refrigerator these small boxes,
which had a wire mesh door to keep out the insects and vermin, housed
dairy products and meat in everyone’s yards.
After filling the bath with several buckets of hot water the
cleanest child climbed in first, clutching a bar of green Fairy Soap.
The further down the queue you were, the hotter the side of the bath had
become by your turn (and the dirtier and soapier the water) so that
you’d to watch out for splashing your eyes or getting third degree burns
if you inadvertently leaned against the wrong side of the bath.
When the final body had climbed out the whole bath was carted outside
and its contents thrown onto the cobbles which were given a stiff
brushing. The way things are going with the planet I can see us all
having to revert to this kind of practice – minus the fire of course.
If Friday night was bath night we also followed the company’s
slogan Friday night is Amami night when everyone’s hair got washed in
Amami shampoo. Was there any other I wonder? It was also music night on
the Light Programme so we were serenaded whilst we soaked.
Our first radio was a bakelite affair and I’ve never forgotten the awe
of hearing sounds coming out of this tiny box and the thrill of being
entertained and educated by the selection of programmes. It seems
ridiculous now to recall how the BBC didn’t allow regional accents: all
broadcasters spoke exactly like the Queen. Up here in the north of
England it was odd to hear such cultured voices in our homes.
I’m unsure of the exact year when we replaced the bakelite affair
with a Bush Valve Radio, model MB60, but it was somewhere in the
mid-fifties. The radio operated from mains or internal batteries and
gave us the choice of Medium or Light wavebands. We fiddled the knobs
through two services; the Light Programme I’ve just mentioned, which
gave us the bulk of entertainment, and the Home Service that entertained
to a lesser degree and provided serious stuff like the news and shipping
forecasts along with regional features. In the evenings only, if you
were educated to classical stuff, you could enjoy the highbrow Third
Programme.
Once the bakelite wireless was plugged in (which renders the title a
misnomer for a start) a whole new horizon presented itself. My favourite
programme in those early days was Dick Barton, Special Agent with the
leading man played by Noel Johnson along with his sidekicks Jock and
Snowy. At its peak 15 million listeners tuned in to the daily episodes
which totalled 711 by the time the programme ended in 1951. I can still
warble the signature tune “The Devil’s Gallop” if pressed.
Later in the fifties we also bought one of Bush’s first
transistor radios, a TR82C. Currently it is possible to buy original
models of these Bush radios for £35 and £10 respectively, although the
valves for the MB60 (DK96, DF96, DAF96, DL96) are no longer available.
It was in the early fifties that I discovered the pirate commercial
station Radio Luxembourg (which operated from that diminutive European
country) with its fluctuating reception – originally on long wave before
using 208 metres medium wave. Many of our famous disc jockeys like Jimmy
Savile cut their teeth on Luxembourg and gave teenagers like me the
music they wanted to hear, including the Top 20.
It’s around sixty years now since I heard that first song come out of a
wireless. The woman had an incredible voice that simply stunned me for
its acrobatics, perfect pitch, wide range of notes and the ability to
deliver. I imagined, in those heady days of the magical new audio
inception, that this singer was the human equivalent of a nightingale.
For a long time I visualized her as slim, white, English, and impossibly
beautiful.
Several years on, in both 1958 and 1960, I got to see her for
real at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. She’d come over to England
with a production by Norman Grantz called Jazz at the Philharmonic. On
these memorable and overwhelming occasions she shared the programme with
a host of talented American musicians such as Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz,
Roy Eldrige and Ray Brown. She was, of course, the late, great, Miss
Ella Fitzgerald.
Maggie B Dickinson 2007
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The un-named radio is Model MB60
The transistor Radio
with the name
Bush is the TR82C.
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