EKCO (from Eric Kirkham Cole Limited) was a British electronics company producing radio and television sets from 1924 until 1960. Expanding into plastic production for its own use, Ekco Plastics produced both radio cases and later domestic plastic products; the plastics company became Lin Pac Mouldings Ltd.
The company's founder Eric Kirkham Cole was born on 4 July 1901 at Prittlewell, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, and was educated at Southend Day Technical School, followed by a three-year apprenticeship. Cole and his future wife Muriel Bradshaw started out making radio sets in 1924. [1]
William Streatfield Verrells, a schoolmaster and freelance journalist from Southend-on-Sea, wrote an article in a local newspaper asking if it was possible to power a radio set from the mains electricity supply rather than batteries. Cole saw a possible business opportunity and set about building his battery eliminator, which he later demonstrated to Verrells. Suitably impressed, Verrells joined Cole in a business venture, with Cole manufacturing the battery eliminators, and Verrells marketing them. In 1926 a private company E.K. Cole Ltd was formed with Verrells as chairman and Cole as vice-chairman. With the extra funding that was raised, the company set up a new factory at Leigh-on-Sea in 1927. After further expansion E.K. Cole Ltd became a public limited company in 1930, and moved to a spacious new factory at Southend-on-Sea. The company also began to concentrate on the manufacture of mains powered radios rather than battery eliminators which were becoming obsolete.
The company suffered a major financial setback in 1932, when a fire swept through its research and development laboratories. The blaze destroyed much of the design work for the company’s new range of receivers.
Ekco launched its first car radio at the 1934 Radiolympia exhibition. Another important development for the company was the introduction of bakelite cabinets for its radios. Initially these cabinets were made for the company in Germany by AEG, however the introduction of high import duties on the cabinets in 1931 led Ekco to establish its own bakelite moulding shop adjacent to its Southend-on-Sea works. [2] The company employed famous architects such as Serge Chermayeff and Wells Coates to design its bakelite radio cabinets. [3] [4]
In 1935 Ekco made a substantial investment in Scophony Limited, the developers of the ingenious Scophony projection television system. Although the system showed great promise, its development was halted by the Second World War, and not resumed postwar. [2]
Before the start of the Second World War, the Government decided to disperse certain production to locations away from obvious bombing targets. This led to a shadow factory at Cowbridge House, [5] Malmesbury, Wiltshire, being established by Ekco. This was followed by other shadow factories at Aylesbury, Woking, Preston, and Rutherglen. The wartime headquarters of Ekco was based at Aston Clinton House in Buckinghamshire. Following the outbreak of war, the Southend-on-Sea factory was evacuated apart from the bakelite moulding shop whose large moulding presses could not be moved easily. Less than a year later, the empty factory was re-equipped to make wiring looms for aircraft such as the Avro Lancaster. [2]
Malmesbury specialised in the top-secret development and production of the new radar systems as part of the "Western Development Unit". Radar equipment produced at Malmesbury during the war included the AI Mk. IV and AI Mk. VIII air interception radars, and the ASV Mk. II air to surface vessel radar.
In addition to radar equipment, Ekco also manufactured the ubiquitous R1155 and T1154 aircraft radios at its Aylesbury shadow factory. Ekco carried out extensive development work on both units before putting them into production, significantly improving on the original Marconi design. The R1155 and T1154 were also produced by Marconi, Plessey, and EMI. The company also manufactured the Wireless Set No. 19 tank radio at Woking. It was a Pye designed set made by several other British and American companies. In 1942, Ekco began production of its Wireless Set No. 46 portable man-pack radio, and large numbers of these were made at the company's Woking and Southend-on-Sea factories.
It is estimated that by 1945 EKCO had over 8,000 people working for it across various sites making mains and portable TVs, mains and portable radios, radiograms, tape recorders, car radios, electric heaters, thermovent heaters, electric blankets, plastic toilet seats, various plastic utensils, plastic bathroom fittings and 'Superbath' baby-baths. It was at one of those sites in Malmesbury, Wiltshire that in 1948 production of the 'Thermotube' tubular heaters started.
In 1947, the company introduced the Wireless Set No. 88 VHF man-pack transceiver for use by the British Army.
Ekco bought the Dynatron business in 1954 [6] and the Ferranti brown goods brand in 1957 (though not Ferranti's heavy industries, defence electronics or meter businesses).
During the 1950s, the company produced a number of military radar systems including the ARI 5820 ranging radar for the Hawker Hunter; the ASV Mk. 19 air to surface vessel radar for the Fairey Gannet, and the Red Steer tail warning radar for the Avro Vulcan. EKCO also supplied weather radars for a variety of civil aircraft such as the Bristol Britannia, De Havilland Comet, Vickers Vanguard, Vickers VC10 and BAC 111. The company also made the E390/564 weather radar for the Concorde. In 1970, EKCO's radar activities were subsumed into MEL, the military electronics subsidiary of Philips.
Ekco merged with Pye in 1960 to form a new holding company, British Electronic Industries Ltd, with C.O. Stanley as Chairman and E.K. Cole as Vice-Chairman. The following year Cole resigned from the board and retired. He died on 18 November 1966 in the Bahamas due to a bathing accident, his wife Muriel having predeceased him in 1965. [1]
British Electronic Industries was put up for sale in 1966, and in the same year Pye closed the Southend-on-Sea factory (but maintained its car radio repair workshop until 1977) as part of its restructuring plan. In 1967, Philips Electrical Industries emerged as the new owner of the Ekco/Pye business which was then split into three different companies. By the early 1970s the Ekco brand had all but disappeared.
In the late 1930s, Ekco began producing its own radio valves at its Southend-on-Sea works. Following the company's decision to abandon the venture, the plant was converted to a lamp factory. In 1943, Ekco acquired Ensign Lamps based in Preston. In 1950, Ekco sold 51% of its lighting subsidiary, Ekco-Ensign Electric Ltd, to Thorn Electrical Industries.
The main factory at Southend-on-Sea was, after being sold to the Access credit card company, demolished to make way for a housing development. [7] The Ekco name lives on within the development, [8] and the site still hosts the Ekco Social and Sports Club. [9] A statue of Eric Cole was commissioned for the housing development in 2020. [10]
Southend Museums Service is home to the world's largest collection of Ekco material including radios, television sets, electric heaters and blankets, bathroom accessories, domestic design, kitchenware, and a large archive of documents and ephemera.
Bakelite, formally polyoxybenzylmethyleneglycolanhydride, is a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin, formed from a condensation reaction of phenol with formaldehyde. The first plastic made from synthetic components, it was developed by Leo Baekeland in Yonkers, New York, in 1907, and patented on December 7, 1909.
Prittlewell is an inner city area and former civil parish in Southend-on-Sea, in the ceremonial county of Essex, England. Historically, Prittlewell is the original settlement of the city, Southend being the south end of Prittlewell. The village of Prittlewell was originally centered at the joining of three main roads, East Street, West Street, and North Street, which was extended south in the 19th century and renamed Victoria Avenue. The principal administrative buildings in Southend are located along Victoria Avenue, although Prittlewell is served by Prittlewell railway station.
The Marconi Company was a British telecommunications and engineering company that did business under that name from 1963 to 1987. Its roots were in the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company founded by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1897, which underwent several changes in name after mergers and acquisitions. The company was a pioneer of wireless long distance communication and mass media broadcasting, eventually becoming one of the UK's most successful manufacturing companies. In 1999, its defence equipment manufacturing division, Marconi Electronic Systems, merged with British Aerospace (BAe) to form BAE Systems. In 2006, financial difficulties led to the collapse of the remaining company, with the bulk of the business acquired by the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson.
The term All American Five is a colloquial name for mass-produced, superheterodyne radio receivers that used five vacuum tubes in their design. These radio sets were designed to receive amplitude modulation (AM) broadcasts in the medium wave band, and were manufactured in the United States from the mid-1930s until the early 1960s. By eliminating a power transformer, cost of the units was kept low; the same principle was later applied to television receivers. Variations in the design for lower cost, shortwave bands, better performance or special power supplies existed, although many sets used an identical set of vacuum tubes.
Pye Ltd was an electronics company founded in 1896 in Cambridge, England, as a manufacturer of scientific instruments. The company merged with EKCO in 1960. Philips of the Netherlands acquired a majority shareholding in 1967, and later gained full ownership.
The Rainbow Codes were a series of code names used to disguise the nature of various British military research projects. They were mainly used by the Ministry of Supply from the end of the Second World War until 1958, when the ministry was broken up and its functions distributed among the forces. The codes were replaced by an alphanumeric code system.
The Central Museum is a museum in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England. The museum houses collections of local and natural history and contains a planetarium constructed by astronomer Harry Ford in 1984.
Larkspur was the retrospectively adopted name of a tactical radio system used by the British Army. Its development started in the late 1940s with the first equipment being issued in the mid-1950s. It remained in service until replaced by Clansman in the late-1970s although some elements of Larkspur were still in service well into the 1980s. It was widely exported to British Commonwealth armies and other friendly nations.
An AC/DC receiver design is a style of power supply of vacuum tube radio or television receivers that eliminated the bulky and expensive mains transformer. A side-effect of the design was that the receiver could in principle operate from a DC supply as well as an AC supply. Consequently, they were known as "AC/DC receivers".
The R1155 was a British communications receiver, commonly used in aircraft along with its associated T1154 transmitter. It was used extensively by the Royal Air Force during World War II, mainly in larger aircraft such as the Avro Lancaster, Handley Page Halifax, Vickers Wellington and Short Sunderland. Some were also used in vehicles and air-sea rescue launches.
Malmesbury is a town and civil parish in north Wiltshire, England, which lies approximately 14 miles (23 km) west of Swindon, 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Bristol, and 9 miles (14 km) north of Chippenham. The older part of the town is on a hilltop which is almost surrounded by the upper waters of the Bristol Avon and one of its tributaries.
The Military Wireless Museum is a private museum operated from Kidderminster, Worcestershire which displays a collection of military wireless equipment from around the world. It developed from the private collection of Ben Nock and marks the importance of wireless communications in the UK and around the globe during World War II and later years.
Hacker Radio Limited manufactured domestic radio and audio equipment. The company was formed in Maidenhead by brothers Ron and Arthur Hacker in 1959, and traded successfully until 1977. Financial difficulties resulted in the company being sold and relaunched with the name Hacker Sound which closed in 1979.
Dynatron Radio Ltd was the trade name used by H.Hacker & Sons for their wireless products. The firm started trading in 1927 and operated independently until being bought by Ekco in 1955. The rights to the Dynatron name are currently held by Roberts Radio. Dynatron was also a successful business with making record players; most of them were made in the sixties and seventies. Priced in the pro-sumer market sector, the average household would have had to save the equivalent of three weeks salary to buy one.
M-OV was a British manufacturer of thermionic valves. It was a subsidiary of the (British) General Electric Company Ltd. It was named after the Marconi Company and Osram, which were two major manufacturers of the tube.
Radar, Airborne Interception, Mark IV, produced by USA as SCR-540, was the world's first operational air-to-air radar system. Early Mk. III units appeared in July 1940 on converted Bristol Blenheim light bombers, while the definitive Mk. IV reached widespread availability on the Bristol Beaufighter heavy fighter by early 1941. On the Beaufighter, the Mk. IV arguably played a role in ending the Blitz, the Luftwaffe's night bombing campaign of late 1940 and early 1941.
Cowbridge House, 3⁄4 mile (1.2 km) southeast of Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England, was an 18th-century country house that was demolished in 2007.
Radar, Air-to-Surface Vessel, Mark II, or ASV Mk. II for short, was an airborne sea-surface search radar developed by the UK's Air Ministry immediately prior to the start of World War II. It was the first aircraft mounted radar of any sort to be used operationally. It was widely used by aircraft of the RAF Coastal Command, Fleet Air Arm and similar groups in the United States and Canada. A version was also developed for small ships, the Royal Navy's Type 286.
Red Steer, also known as ARI 5919 and ARI 5952 depending on the version, was a tail warning radar used on the British V bomber force. Built by EKCO, it was developed from the experimental AI.20 radar for the English Electric Lightning. The Lightning required its radar to be remotely installed in the nose of the aircraft, and this made the set equally suitable for remote mounting in the tail of the bombers.
Radar, Airborne Interception, Mark 20, AI.20 for short, also known by its rainbow codename Green Willow, was a prototype Airborne Interception radar developed by EKCO for the English Electric Lightning interceptor aircraft. It was ordered as a backup system in case the more advanced AIRPASS radar from Ferranti failed to develop, but when AIRPASS entered testing in 1955, AI.20 was dropped. The system was used, almost unchanged, as the basis for the Red Steer tail warning radar used in the Handley Page Victor and Avro Vulcan strategic bombers.
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