The Arrival of Electricity Changed How We Lived

The Arrival of Electricity Changed How We Lived.
The landlord of the house we rented in Shardeloes Road must have been quite a decent landlord by the standards of those days. We moved there before I started school in 1934. He agreed to install electricity, providing my father shared the cost with him. My father was keen to improve our living conditions and it made a lot of difference. Electric light was much better for me to read by and do my homework. We had an electric water heater in the bathroom, and a wireless set that worked off  mains electricity. Before the war, most people had a wireless set that worked from a large high tension battery and a lead acid accumulator, slightly smaller than half of a modern car battery. The accumulator had to be taken to the shop to be exchanged for a recharged one every week.

The Wireless.
From five o'clock until six o'clock every day there was Children's Hour. There were some lovely stories such as Toytown. The character of Larry the Lamb was played by an actor, whose voice was recognised by everybody. The only alternative to the BBC  was a commercial wireless station called Radio Luxembourg. On Sunday evening, I would listen to a programme advertising Ovaltine. There was supposed to be a club called the Ovaltinies. To join the club your parents had to buy tins of Ovaltine. A special coded message was sent out to members of the club. My parents did not buy Ovaltine so I did not know the code  but somehow I managed to work it out for myself. I'm quite sure my father did not help me. It was a very simple code, where one stood for A, two stood for B. Looking back, I am surprised that I managed to work out the code with no help, because I would I would have been only about eight years old at the time.
Our wireless set worked off  mains electricity and was quite sophisticated. It would have cost about £10 in 1935 [=£440 in 2010]. It was powerful enough to pick up short wave wireless  programmes and also could amplify sound from a separate electric turntable but  we did not have one until I got married. We used it for this purpose in the late 50s. Some people had a very expensive [=£900]piece of furniture called a radiogram. It had a gramophone turntable, a wireless, a big loudspeaker and sometimes storage for records, but it would have been very bulky.

[You may wonder how I have converted prices to their equivalents today.  I used the Retail Price Index for that year to the RPI for Jan 2010. There is no simple way of comparing how 'expensive' things seem because wages, taxation, housing, availability of credit have not increased in the same ratio.]