It belonged to my father who housed it, with it's little sister speaker in the extension that he built. Set in a wooden frame, carefully measured, and built to minimise any vibration it was a monstrosity that we all took for granted for many years. It would appear that he first acquired it in 1952 which was about the same time he met my mother at a Music club in Newcastle upon Tyne. The members got together to listen to classical music gramaphone records and quality of sound was paramount.
My father and a friend from Switzerland who had been a member of the club corresponded at length in the following years regarding this and a Leek amplifier - I need to find and check all the correspondence to see exactly where this fits in.
To his dying day Dad took great pride in the sound quality he had managed to achieve through his set up and was reluctant to listen to music in any other way.
So it was traumatic for us to disasemble the mammoth box in the corner of the room. We had tried to move it between us and were barely able to shift it leading us to the conclusion that Dad had weighed it down with concrete in his 'concrete phase' Having built his record deck from concrete this seemed a real probability. The crunch came last weekend, when something had to be done about it and the lads took to the frame with various tools in an attempt to prise the wood from the weight. Lo and behold, as the frame came apart, out poured mountains of sand.
My sister said she wanted the sand for her garden in Edinburgh, and I said I wanted to photograph the speaker before we got rid of it. Next thing we knew, and the lads had carted the lot off to the local tip. When they returned, and we discovered their error, the air was blue! It took a while for my sister and husband to resolve their differences over this, but my dear husband drove straight back to the tip and spent some considerable effort (with the help of an onsight worker) to retrieve the speakers from the bottom of the skip into which it had been thrown. It has a large magnet component and kept clinging to the side of the skip.
Well I have my photo now. And I know it seems a silly thing, but it was my solution to preserving something of Dad's pride and joy.
