For as long as I can remember, my uncles Joe and Vic had an interest in owning shops. They may have had friends who influenced them in this regard, but it wasn’t until they came to Adelaide that the idea got off the ground in a more sophisticated way. I saw Vic’s shop in Glasgow, but not Joe’s. I’m not sure how successful these shops were as businesses or retail outlets as opposed to simply being a place to undertake their personal interests. Council houses were not particularly large and if your interests demanded more space you would have to rent, and a shop is as good a location as the next, and if you can make your hobby profitable so much the better.
Vic’s shop was on a main road in a poor part of Glasgow in a part-residential, part-commercial suburb. It was on the type of street you would drive through to get somewhere else. There was a plate glass window that was in need of a good clean that looked into a room sadly lacking in imagination. If there was any sign-writing on the window it was obscured by dirt. The entrance opened into a reasonably large space. There were no floor coverings, and the floorboards were worn smooth by years of foot traffic. Apart from a counter on the right, which ran almost the length of the room, there was little else there. It was dimly lit, but you could make out a few dusty items on shelves at the rear and on the wall opposite the counter. Behind the counter there was another smaller room. This was the workshop and that’s where we found Vic. This room was full, cluttered with radios in various states of disassembly, tools and pieces of equipment for repairing them. The smell of molten solder and flux filled the air. So, this was the business: radio repairs. You wouldn’t be at fault for walking past the shop and thinking it was empty or abandoned. A lot could have been done to brighten it up. A clean window would have been good, a window display of some kind would have helped, perhaps an ‘open’ sign on the outside, to say nothing of carpets, decent lighting, and a few display items to attract the punters.
Joe had been working in Radio Rentals as a valve jockey when we arrived in Australia. Valve televisions were what people had in the 1960s. Replacing a worn valve or two could repair most TVs when they broke down, and that’s what he did. Any faults requiring more substantial work would be repaired in the workshop. It must have been a backbreaking job. Some of those black and white TVs weighed a ton. He subsequently got a job with Philips Industries in Hendon as a leading hand. Vic ended up working in a small television rental company called Telesonics as one of the TV repairmen who worked in the backroom workshop. Vic was eventually invited to become a partner in the business by the owner. I don’t doubt this invitation would have been very attractive to him given his experience in Glasgow of owning his own shop.
Telesonics had shops in Prospect to the north of Adelaide and Modbury in the northeast. There may have been another somewhere, but I can’t recall, though a third shop at Christies Beach comes to mind. The business owned a fleet of Morris Mini vans, nicely sign-written with the business name, and they employed some staff to deliver the TV rentals and do the repair work. It’s possible that Vic’s partner saw the business’s demise on the horizon. He moved interstate leaving the business in Vic’s hands, but as a part-owner wanted a regular income from it. Money was sent to him each month. It would be at about this time that Philips Industries was beginning to wind down its Hendon plant and Joe was made redundant.
Joe had the option of staying with Philips, but would have had to move to Melbourne. He should have moved. Maybe he felt some kind of obligation to stay in Adelaide. There was a small electronics company in Newton that was advertising for staff, and he was interested in working for them. Newton is not too far from Rostrevor, and that would have been convenient for him. The job involved testing various pieces of specialist electronic equipment they made. It was also at about this time Telesonics was beginning to experience some financial troubles.
Joe was faced with a dilemma: take the job in Newton that promised to be interesting with a reasonable salary, or help his brother out and work for a much lower salary. He had sufficient experience to cope with either job. He took up employment with Telesonics, and was later to regret this decision.
Joe’s experience at Telesonics must have been an eye-opener. It turned out that Vic was a spend thrift. Joe told me of travelling salesmen who would do the rounds of businesses to see what they could sell. According to Joe, Vic could never say no to whatever their wares were. He saw Vic buying things that were pure luxuries and argued with him as to what was or wasn’t necessary. This was a reasonable point considering Joe wasn’t drawing a full salary. Another issue that pained Joe, since he had taken charge of the accounts, was that he knew exactly how much money was being sent to Vic’s ex business partner each month. The idea of sending money out of the business while Joe was on a reduced salary to help keep the business afloat must have been infuriating. He was grinding his teeth in a silent rage. The monthly cheques were stopped. There also came a point when Joe worked for no salary, but that was much later. Joe was also suspicious of one of the employees he suspected of stealing. Various small items of stock were disappearing. Although, electronic components can be expensive Vic did nothing about it. This guy eventually left when the business could no longer afford to support his salary. He promptly started his own TV rental and repair service. Curiously, he started his business servicing the same brand of televisions, and well equipped with spare parts.
It was around this time that colour television was making its debut in Australia. Telesonics could have been as competitive as the large rental companies, but this wasn’t to be. Whether by bad management or bad luck Telesonics was unsuccessful, and lost customers in droves. Dealers and department stores put the new colour television sets on display in their shop windows to encourage the punters. Television images don’t look so great in the bright light of day, and putting them in shop windows detracted from their full potential. Telesonics was setting up a display room away from the glare of the street so the quality of the picture could be seen to its full potential. Other dealers put them in their shop windows. Anyone walking past a shop with nothing interesting in its window is hardly likely to draw the curiosity of passers by, but if the punters pass a shop with a colour TV set displayed in the window switched on and displaying its colours to anyone who’d care to look then they are more than likely going to stop and stare. Telesonics had their display models tucked away in the back. So which shop will get the business? I’m not sure to what extent they promoted colour to their existing black and white rental customers. They did write to them inviting them to upgrade to colour. But something went wrong, because it didn’t work. Gradually the majority of their customers began cancelling their black and white rental contracts and taking up offers of colour TVs from the larger rental companies. They retained some customers who changed to colour, but insufficient numbers to make any difference.
There was another problem facing Telesonics. The new colour TVs were purchased from the Pye Company on finance; from the Pye Company Finance branch, no less. The deal they got from Pye Finance was such that the rental charges would pay off the purchase with some money to spare, but were committed to maintaining their payments irrespective of whether the sets were being rented or not. Many of their customers who had colour sets were returning them, but Pye Finance wanted its monthly payments as usual. When colour sets were returned in large numbers this became a big problem. Very soon the storerooms of Telesonics were at capacity in both colour and black and white sets. Rather than closing the business, Telesonics moved out of the premises.
The back shed at the Rostrevor house was converted into a workshop, and that’s where the business took up residence. There was a large veranda at the back of the house that ran the full length of the house. Part of it was enclosed and everything from the shed was stored there. There were a lot of serviceable black and white televisions that needed to be stored too. There was no point disposing of perfectly good TVs because they were black and white models. There were a lot of people who couldn’t afford colour and were happy with them. They could also be scavenged for spare parts. Consequently, my parents were asked if they could store some of them. My parents had a large garage and there was an empty space at the back and quite a few were stored there. The move halted the decay in Telesonics’ life, but the business wound down eventually. My cousin, Iain, became an apprentice with them when it was at Rostrevor and it remained in business long enough for him to complete his apprenticeship. At least something good eventuated. Though, it didn’t last long after he left. I wonder if keeping it open was a charitable act.
The storage of the televisions at my parents’ house became an issue of contention involving my brother. I could kick myself that I didn’t tell him to pull his head in, back then. John had always been interested in yachts. He had a dream of building an ocean going yacht and embarking on a round the world trip in it. He had bought books on boat building and had a great interest in building a concrete hull for his planned yacht. This type of structure was quite a novelty when they were introduced, and was quite popular for a time. You would see people shaping chicken wire around a metal framework for the hull, in preparation for the concrete skin, and in a massive plastering session the cement would be pushed into the wire to form the hull. When the concrete dried, a crane would be used to hoist it onto a truck for the trip to the mooring for finishing work. You hardly ever hear of them now. Maybe they gave trouble and sunk. Anyway, he never built his yacht. He got married and ended up with three kids instead. I wonder how much resentment there was over that.
When John was still working as an apprentice and living at home in Newton, he bought a small yacht. This may have been the inspiration for the larger project. It was a ‘moth’ and was a rather brilliantly designed thing in that it didn’t have a conventional hull, that would take water as dinghies inevitably do as they splash around. It was rather like a big surfboard with a mast to support its single sail. Like a surfboard, any water that splashed on it ran off immediately. It was as unsinkable as any boat could be. It was designed for one person, but I had been on it with John on various occasions. In fact, there had been three people on board at times, but it hardly performed well with so many. He bought it second hand, and I believe the original owner had built it himself, and had made a nice job of it too. It came with a wooden frame for storage and handling. This frame was like a gigantic wheelbarrow of sorts. With the boat strapped on top of the frame, a specially designed wheel fitted to one end, and with the two wheel-barrow-like handles at the other, one person could pick the whole contraption up and move and steer the whole lot as though it were a huge wheelbarrow. It was also light enough to be transported on top of a car roof rack. No boat trailer was required with this design! Being very boat-proud, there had to be a place to store it safely at home out of the weather.
There was a large shed on my parents’ property at Newton. There had never been a car parked in this garage, which is rather ironic to say the least. Instead the garage was used as a storeroom and workshop. After a few years it became too small for all the stuff it was expected to store, and an extension was added to the back. It was a steel and timber construction, and it had been a straightforward task to disconnect the back, drag it back a bit, and fill in the sides with more corrugated iron. So, with the problem of where to put the boat the shed seemed the logical solution, and adding on a bit on to the back of the garage made sense. My parent’s had no objection to extending it once more, and as John was prepared to pay for and build the thing himself, why not. He was employed as an apprentice and could afford the cost of the materials. A new six foot extension was added to the back of the shed, which made for a very long shed indeed. He built the extension to include a huge shelf like structure on the inside at about chest height, and by way of a large hatch, which opened from the side of the garage, the boat was pushed inside through this opening, and it rested on the shelf. The space under the boat shelf made a good place to store long-term items. It was an excellent solution to the problem of where to store the boat.
The years past and John moved to Sydney. He lived in a flat for a few years at Narrabeen with Carole, whom he was later to wed. They went off to live in Western Australia and spent some time in the UK, but eventually returned to settle in a northern Sydney suburb. As you would expect he shifted his things from Adelaide to Sydney, including the boat. In fact, on various occasions everyone helped set him up in his new house by giving him furniture or helping around the house when problems arose. He seemed very settled, living in Sydney.
So, all these years later, when Telesonics was being squeezed out of business and Vic badly needed a place to store the black and white television sets, he asked my mother if she could help out in some way. Of course, there was a vacant spot in the garage where John used to store his boat. That space had been empty for years and was now just a dusty, hard to get at place at the back of the shed, and there was a huge removable hatch on the side where the sets could be easily loaded without having to cart them right through the garage. It was just made for old television sets. What better spot could there be? Well, naturally my mother was able to say, “Of course, you can put your televisions there.”
My brother happened to be in Adelaide on a flying visit. The company he worked for in Sydney occasionally sent its staff to various locations throughout Australia on work related issues, and John would occasionally travel to Adelaide, and when this happened he stayed with his parents. There was no cheaper accommodation than staying with the folks, and in anticipation of such visits my mother kept his old bedroom free for him. It was his job that brought him to Adelaide on this occasion.
It was about lunchtime, and I had just arrived back at the house, and saw Joe’s car parked in the driveway. This was odd, because he never usually called during the day. The only time you’d see Joe at our house was on some rare social visit in the evening when he came with his mother along with June and Peter and his family. I think he considered he had little time for socialising. So what was up?
I soon discovered him moving the television sets from the back of the garage, where they had been happily stored for months, and loading them into his car. He was sullen and grumpy. He was loading the back of his station wagon with televisions and transporting them to the Rostrevor house. Only two or three at a time could be loaded and he was continually driving up and down loading and unloading them. I stopped to talk to him. He was in a state. Annoyed, to say the least, and physically worn out.
What had happened was that earlier that day John had been looking around the garage. He may have been checking to see how much of his stuff was still left behind, and had noticed the television sets stacked up at the end. This must have got him thinking. He had gone up to Rostrevor to demand Vic remove them. Vic wasn’t around, but Joe was. So, he ordered Joe to remove them under the threat of them being chucked out onto the road. And of course, that’s what Joe was doing: removing the television sets.
To this day I find it amazing that everyone concerned lost their sense of perspective over this incident. Here is the way it should have gone: When John demanded the televisions be removed Joe should have said, “Fuck off. If you touch any of those televisions I’ll sue the arse off you.” He could have phrased it differently if he felt inclined. I wouldn’t doubt for a moment, though, that when he was lifting all those heavy TV sets he had wished he had told him where to go.
I also don’t doubt for a moment when John discovered them in the garage he immediately spoke to my mother to enquire as to what they were doing there. I can image the conversation going something like this: “What are all those television sets doing in the garage?” My mother would have responded because my father had little standing in the eyes of his son; his opinions or requests held little value in John’s eyes, and would have been ignored. They both knew this and accepted this situation. It had been like that between them for years. Yes, it would have been my mother who dealt with this question. She would have something like, “Vic had asked if they could be stored here and I said it would be alright.” The issue was not so much the presence of the television sets, but their location in the garage. They were being stored in the section John had built for his boat, and he didn’t want them there. Remember, the boat was in Sydney and wasn’t coming back to Adelaide. I wasn’t present to witness the lead up to all this, and came on the scene just as Joe was about half way through moving them. He explained what had happened. I tried to persuade him to leave them where they were explaining that John had no right to make such demands, but he preferred to move them. He said he didn’t want to create trouble. I helped him shift the rest of them.
I was incredulous my parents allowed their son to lord it over them in such an overt manner. I was incredulous that John demanded they be removed. I was incredulous he threatened to dump them. They weren’t Joe’s property, but he needed to act for his brother in response to the demand of an upstart. I wonder who was the more humiliated: my parents for acquiescing to his demand, or Joe for being placed in an untenable situation. Both of them had been bullied, and they acquiesced.
Just whose property was this, that such demands could be made? Whose garage was this? Well, our parents’ garage, of course. What sort of strange reasoning was going on in John’s mind? Logic which held that regardless of the fact that he had left his parents’ home, left the nest, flown the coup, and settled in a city thousands of miles away, years prior to this incident, and he still thought he retained some ownership. He had moved out years ago, and here he was issuing commands about what could or could not be stored in his parents’ garage. Can you believe this?
He should have been told to pull his head in. I was disappointed in my parents, and furious with John. It wouldn’t be that they supported him positively by saying, “Okay, John. You go right ahead and get Vic to remove those old televisions.” No, it wouldn’t have been like that. They would have cowered slightly and said something about thinking it would have been all right, and that they didn’t think John would have minded at all.
It’s obvious that there was no ownership dispute. My parents owned the property. And whilst it was also clear that my brother purchased the materials to extend the garage when he was a teenager, he was modifying the property of his parents. I found his behaviour obscene and am amazed it was tolerated.
Let’s go back in time, quite a long way, and consider this experience in another perspective. My brother had developed an interest in electronics as a boy, and may well have visited Vic at his radio shop in Scotland. There may have been some uncle-adoration in play. An adult who knew things about radio would have been exciting to a child, and that adoration may have led him to the hobby interest that subsequently developed. Certainly this interest grew to become his goal in the workforce. It’s also possible this childhood interest led him to be willing to share living quarters with Vic when the time came. When we arrived in Australia, space was very tight in the Rostrevor house, and John and Vic shared a single bedroom for two years. There were, after all, seven people living in a three bed roomed house. Whatever happened over those two years I have no idea, but John subsequently never said anything kind about his experience with Vic, and on repeated occasions thereafter said he hated him.
I have no doubt his arrogance in ordering the televisions removed from the garage had little to do with any notion of using ‘his’ part of the garage. He would have known himself how absurd that was. He saw it as an opportunity to attack Vic, and wreak some revenge. It was also an opportunity to exert some power over his parents. I still find myself shaking my head in disbelief at the memory of it.