Today we are back at my uncle's house with so many more varied things to find yet. Please note, this house has been emptied, none of this stuff is still there. Finding all these things, many of which I remembered from visiting my grandparents' house as a child was like plunging into emotional turmoil. We murmured in recognition, we gasped in amazement. We burst out laughing a number of times. We burst into tears a few times too.
My uncle's tape recorder. It was older than me. The Truvox Tape Deck Mark III came as a kit. You got the tape deck itself - the rectangle of cream-coloured material and then found yourself a box to put it into and bought or made an amplifier and bought a loudspeaker. Uncle Geoff made the box out of plywood and covered it in green material. I presume he made the amplifier as well with the three knobs on the right hand side. Bottom right is a Magic Eye. It glowed green except for a tiny arc at the bottom which acted like a meter needle - the gap between the two edges of green light got larger or smaller depending on the volume, both when recording and playing back. If the edges touched when recording then you were overloading the tape and the sound would be distorted.
I'm not exactly certain of the date, but in 1953 the colour of that black cover over the recording and playback heads became gold coloured on new models. Compared to most tape recorders it ran backwards. The full spool of tape went on the right and it travelled to the left hand spool. This of course makes it impossible to play any of the tapes recorded on it on a more modern player without a bit of jiggery pokery. It was two-speed. The deck could be used at either 7½ inches per second or a more economic 3¾, though this did affect the quality of sound. There wasn't a switch to select the speed. Instead you will notice that there are two wheels of different sizes on top of the machine next to the empty spool. One of these was put on the spindle on the left of the tape heads and acted as a pinch wheel. Large wheel for 7½ inches per second and the smaller one for the slower speed.
Stamps. Oh my goodness... Stamps... Uncle Geoff had always collected stamps. There were boxes and suitcases and albums and envelopes full of stamps. There were envelopes from the Post Office with full sets of new stamps, which he had on subscription as they came out. Unfortunately as he got older he found it too much trouble to open them, take the stamps and mount them in his special stamp albums, held in special holders to preserve their mint condition.
Likewise he hadn't opened any junk mail for quite a while. We found we had to open about ten years of mail in case anything referred to or contained anything of value... It took a while... It ended up with immense piles of leaflets, envelopes, demands from TV licensing to license the TV in the "empty" house. "We will send someone round!" these said regularly every six months... Whoever they sent should have looked through the letterbox - the pile must have almost reached it...
There were childhood collections of stamps. Small albums with a page for every country. By the time he got to adulthood he stopped buying stamps from anywhere apart from the UK - which included stamps issued in Wales, Scotland, Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
The only exception was for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977. When that occurred he bought 3 copies of every single stamp that commemorated the event from all over the world. That's what this box is. Unfortunately all other stamp maniacs (sorry! philatelists!) did the same...
So how big was this collection? Well, he only had five stamps from the reign of Queen Victoria. But he had every other single stamp, in mint condition, ever issued since the start of the reign of King Edward VII, whose very first stamps are shown here. They were issued in 1902 and lasted until 1913. They are shown mounted in holders so as not to be spoiled by the gum of a stamp hinge. There were also lots of other duplicates of used stamps both loose and in albums.
Terrified at the thought of sending them by carrier, we stuffed the collection into the back of my car and took it to a specialist dealer in Warwick. Apart from those two boxes by the wall on the left, which are someone else's, all of those boxes are full and contain my uncle's stamp collection. Selling in the middle of the current austerity etc. was not a great experience...
Anyway, so that's the stamps. Now for the medicines! My uncle had inherited from my Grandma Burke the habit of taking the phrase "How are you?" as a desire of the enquirer to know every single symptom down to the weight, dimensions and number of "I've been coughing up green chunks all week..." Long before the Internet they had a massive tome - an encyclopedia of ailments, illnesses and limb loss that was consulted as soon as anyone sneezed or even sniffed. "Oh, I have been poorly..." my grandma would say, "but we've looked it up and we know what it is!"
"But Grandma, you can't have licked a Peruvian tree frog..." we would point out. Unfortunately one of the bottles in this Biochemic Medicine Chest has been broken at some point but, fearful of not being able to treat any outbreak of Galloping Gob-rot, it has thankfully been replaced and filled with the required antidote.
Nu-San Burnojel somehow manages to bring napalm to mind more than a jel for the relief of burns and wounds... Luckily it also sorts out abrasions, cuts, sunburn and general affections of the skin as well. I might try some, as sometimes my skin feels like it wants to get far too affectionate and Miss Franny has to pull me away by my ear...
Kaolin is a type of clay and widely used in medicine. In fact the medicinal use of clays both internally and externally go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. Before you start to recoil in horror, let me remind you that use of clays in spa treatments is still in wide use and the preparation of Kaolin and Morphine as an oral medicine for diarhoea is also still available but not as widely as it used to be due to newer treatments. Such were the horrors of skin ailments in that encyclopedia of grandma's that she invested in two massive half-pound tubs of the stuff!
And yes, the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that the tins seem to be standing on top of an arcade pinball machine. Correct. There were three, but I'll deal with them in a future article. The nice man who took them says we can go for a game when he's got them going...
Iron Jelloids. To be taken like a pill and one to be swallowed three times a day with or after food. Note for the unsure - that is three different pills - you don't have to regurgitate it to be swallowed again... Oh, the fun we had with Grandma and a good magnet...
What the heck is a Derbac comb, I hear you say?
It's for getting nits out of your hair... Or fleas off the cat... Or Peruvian tree frogs before you feel the urge to lick one...
Wylex plugs. Before the standard three-pin plugs that we have today in the UK, this is what your plugs would look like with the earth being the round pin.
We started with a reel-to-reel tape recorder so we'll end with this. This is a tape splicer. Using this handy little device you could chop the tape into bits and rearrange them all in a different order using the razor blade and then the Scotch tape. Or any old clear sticky-backed tape. The razor blade was very sharp and just shoved any old how in the box. I found it with a shout.
"Hey our kid - pass me the medical encyclopedia, the Biochemic Medicine Chest and Burnojel please!"
