Web Page 3107 2nd March First Picture: X shaped TV aerial

Second Picture; H shaped TV aerial

Third Picture: Indoor aerial

Fourth Picture; Terry Thomas

Television Aerials I do not know about you but we did not have television at home until 1954 which meant that we all had to go over the road to the Hill’s home to see the Coronation with their family. One Saturday a year or so later my father must have gone into the Radio Rentals shop in Cosham High Street to arrange to hire a TV set. He said that as television was still new so would not buy a set so decided to rent one. Needless to say we were all excited as the deliver date approached and eventually the new 17” Sobell set was delivered and was installed in a corner by the fireplace. The downside was that we were told that the aerial installers were so overworked that they would not get to us for about three weeks. So, there was the set sat in the corner but unusable. My father was trained as a radio engineer, in fact he did his apprenticeship in Martins electrical shop in Cosham High street just past the level crossing before moving on the His Masters Voice in Newbury and eventually taking a position in Portsmouth Dockyard . However, he had no experience of television but on hearing of the delay erecting the aerial he disappeared into the shed and came out with an old brass curtain rail with a length wire soldered to the end. He placed the curtain rail behind the TV set and fixed the wire into the aerial input socket with a spent match, and believe it or not he managed to get us a fuzzy ghostly picture. All this had to be dismantled a couple weeks later when the aerial erection team arrived to put up the St Andrews cross aerial on our chimney stack with the coaxial cable running down the roof and through a special drilled hole in the front room window frame into the living room. Ours was a large X shaped aerial but there were also those in the shape of an H. (Do you remember that the actor Terry Thomass sported a cigarette holder in the shape of a H shaped aerial enabling him to smoke four cigarettes at once). This situation stayed in place until my parents moved out of the house 20 years later. When Pam and I first moved to Gosport in the late 1960’s we suffered with an indoor aerial until one lunchtime whilst I was wandering through the undergrowth surrounding Knowle Hospital I found an outdoor aerial and yards of cable dumped in a thorn bush. I extracted the aerial and cable took it home and put it into a downstairs gutter sprout, took the cable through the house to the TV set and it worked perfectly and there it stayed until we went onto cable many years later. Stay in touch Peter gsseditor@gmail.com