Saucepan Special J SW only

There is a 35mm Colour Film with sound of the Saucepan Special made in 1949.

Lusaka Calling
(dir. Louis Nell), prod. Central African Film Unit, Zambia, 725 ft, colour, sound, 1949.

The Australian National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra is the only place I know outside Zimbabwe's archives which have a copy of the film.They have it on 16mm and DVD. Here are three of my efforts to snap stills from the DVD.

Information with thanks from Dr. Rosaleen Smyth.

She also writes:
 

The content of these films gives a good overview of key aspects of the post war mass
education/community development programs and campaigns. Nyono Gets A Letter,
Nyono’s wife is about to give birth to her first child at a time when Nyono has to leave
the village and go to work on road construction for the Northern Rhodesian Public Works
Department. A mass literacy instructor arrives in the village and Agnes learns to read
Mutende (the government newspaper for Africans) to the other patients and to write to
her worried husband to announce the birth of their child. Husbands and Wives describes a community development project –the area school at Katete in Northern Rhodesia –
where residential schools are given in carpentry, road- building and mass literacy
supervision; the wives had classes in beadwork, knitting and home craft. Lusaka Calling
(1950?)is a promotional film for the “Saucepan Special”, ‘the people’s radio of Central
Africa’. This radio once celebrated in a Ripley’s ‘Believe it or Not cartoon’ in the
Sunday Express was designed to enable the Africans of Northern Rhodesia, Southern
Rhodesia and Nyasaland to listen to Lusaka’s Central African Broadcasting Station
(CABS), the first radio station in Africa designed exclusively for Africans. The scheme
came about as a result of the initiative of Harry Franklin, Northern Rhodesian
Information Officer who obtained financial assistance from Colonial Development and
Welfare funds, technical advice from the BBC and the cooperation of Ever Ready in
Britain to research and develop the idea of a cheap, short - wave, dry cell battery
receiver. [45]

The CABS staff (bothEuropean and African) put together a series of
experimental programs designed to encourage African music and drama, as well as
engage in adult education and the promotion of government policy.
Lusaka Callingshows a mobile recording van arriving in the Tongan village of Chief
Shiamundu. The engineer recorded some local songs and played the record back to the
people, telling them that the record would soon be played over the CABS. The Chief
buys a radio and the film shows the people listening incredulously at first, as their music
is played over the radio.The film also shows Chief Shiamundu being shown around the
broadcasting station in Lusaka.
In 1950, inspired by the greatly enlarged radio audiences the Northern Rhodesian
Information Department using all the media at its disposal: newspapers, posters,
pamphlets, film and broadcasting, launched a five - year mass education campaign. The
campaign concentrated on six areas which included improved hygiene, education for girls and better agriculture. The CABS launched a women’s program in 1950 with an African woman announcer. “Know Your Own People” was devised to explain one ethnic group to another. The station broadcast in four local languages and in English with the most popular program being devoted to musical requests; other programs included quizzes, health programs, language lessons and radio plays (some improvised by African announcers) and serials carrying a social message. John Grenfell Williams, head of the BBC’s Colonial Service and author of the UNESCO survey, Radio in Fundamental Education in Undeveloped Areas(Paris, 1950) visited the station as did noted British broadcaster, Cyril Ray who wrote that Northern Rhodesia had ‘made one of the biggest contributions to the whole field of mass communications’. [46]

45: H. Franklin, Report on ‘The Saucepan Special’: the Poor Man’s Radio for Rural Populations (Lusaka,
Government Printer, 1950).
46: Cyril Ray, ‘The Saucepan Set’, The Times Educational Supplement, 10 March 1950, 176.

(quoted by permission)

Michael Watterson, 04.Feb.13

Weitere Posts (1) zu diesem Thema.

Central African Broadcasting Station, CABS was started on Short wave in 1941 in Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).

The "Saucepan Special" is mentioned in several books and memoirs:

"Harry Franklin who was in the Colonial Service was given the job of starting an Information Service in Northern Rhodesia. Lusaka Radio was part of that initiative, broadcasting at low power. But there were few African listeners. The cheapest radio available in Northern Rhodesia at the time cost £45 which was far too expensive for the mass audience the Government wished to reach.
In 1948, whilst on leave in the UK, Harry met the Chairman of Ever Ready, Magnus Goodfellow, and proposed that cheap radios could be sold at cost and profits could be made from the sale of batteries. The design of the radio was vetted by a BBC Engineer, Bill Varley, who coined the name 'Saucepan Radio' as the prototype had indeed been built in an aluminium saucepan. The NR Government backed the purchase of fifteen hundred radios which sold for £5, with the battery costing a further 25 shillings.
It was an instant success. The Queen of Tonga bought a hundred sets!
The radio gave good reception but required a fairly long aerial (quarter wave) and an effective earth. ( I never heard one perform carried around on someone's shoulder.)

The design might have been  the work of a staff member of the NR Radio Services in Lusaka.
This person went on to establish the famous Supersonic Radio Factory"

Memoirs by Fraenkel,

A refugee Jew from Nazi Germany wrote of it in his Memoirs. He was involved in North Rhodesian Colonial affairs before WWII.

"The development of the set was largely due to the dedicated work of Harry Franklin, the first administrator of CABS, who latter attained a position as Minister for African Education in Social Services in the colonial administration of Northern Rhodesia. I’ll quote extensively here.
Community receivers had not proved a success and Harry Franklin had started to search for a suitable set that Africans could afford to have in their homes… For three years he had inquired all over the Sterling Area[Empire], had circulated wiring-diagrams and had written letters even to faraway Australia, to explain his requirements. They were unusual. He needed a set that worked off a battery because only the larger towns in the Rhodesias have electricity, and even there most of the African ‘compounds’ are not connected. It had to be a dry battery set because charging accumulators is too difficult in a land of bad communications. It had to work on short-waves because only short-wave transmissions can cover the vast areas of Central Africa. It had to be sturdy enough to withstand days of jolting n the back of transport lorries. But above all, it had to be cheap. Such a set did not exist and manufacturers were not interested in producing one… Many of Franklin’s superiors looked upon his schemes with disapproval. They knew that African, they grumbled, and the African would never want such a set or understand what was broadcast, or if he did he would listen to Moscow. If there had to be wireless sets for Africans they should be pre-set to one station only.
Eventually through connections Franklin was able to convince the Ever Ready Company, a battery manufacturer later purchased by Energizer, to produce at cost what they would call interchangeably the “saucepan set” and the “Saucepan Special.” The initial trial run was such a resounding success, according to Fraenkel, that in 1949 Ever Ready began mass-producing the sets, which led to increased funding for and, really, the establishment of CABS, which would become the first major broadcasting service in sub-Saharan Africa."

"Tales of Zambia",

compiled by Dick Hobson and published by The Zambia Society Trust-London.

An extract

Broadcasting began in NR [Northern Rhodesia, now part of Zimbabwe] in 1941 with a small short-wave station housed in a single room at Lusaka airport. The aim was to keep people informed of the progress of the war but broadcasting hours were short, reception unreliable and few people had receiving sets. The programmes were written and broadcast by Kenneth Bradley, who was NR's first Information Officer. Receivers were hung from trees , nailed to poles etc at Mission Stations, Bomas, mines etc for communal listening.

When Bradley was transferred to the Falkland Islands in 1942, he was succeeded by Harry Franklin (then resident magistrate at Broken Hill), and it was at his instigation that, with the help of the British Government, the Central African Broadcasting Station was set up, broadcasting in 7 languages. This, however, didn't solve the problem of broadcasting to the masses, a problem which led, ultimately to the invention of the Saucepan Radio.

Blog post from No Event No History

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Oral Literacy in the Central African Broadcasting Service

"Oral Cultures and Aural Literacy

What does it mean that CABS [Central African Broadcasting Station] sought to foment a “literate orality,” in Walter Ong’s term, for an illiterate population? Through entirely acoustical means, Fraenkel and Kittermaster tried to engender and develop socio-cultural forms such as the archive for populations that previously had no conception of a quiescent body of knowledge, archived for perpetuity. The oral cultures to which CABS both broadcast and through its mobile recording units captured, had before this “stored” cultural and personal history through cultural forms such as the oral epic, proverb, and drumming - forms, that is, which are by definition dynamic, syncretic, and impermanent. In short, CABS sought to establish literate socio-cultural institutions without the intermediary stage of actual widespread literacy. This is a tricky project, as Ong’s work helps to show, because socio-cultural forms like the archive are very much a product of literacy’s impact and influence on a culture. Archives, for example, are hard to conceive of without paper, without In short, the introduction of acoustical technologies to societies without literary technologies cannot be understood in the same manner of such introductions to literate societies."

Conclusion

It seems that in part at least or perhaps entirely, the Saucepan Radio was an Africian project that Ever  Ready was persuaded to manufacture (You'll make money from the batteries). Though pictured on a B136, that was a Balanced combo for Dx96 25mA tubes, 125mA total. The Model J used 250mA on both versions (50mA types) yet the Every Ready history site* shows and discusses a B136. I think a mistake as it was released in 1953 for the Sky Queen, it would last about 150hrs on the Model "J". The AD3 and B103 (both existed in 1949) have the same four pin connector and are "balanced" for 250mA filaments (which is why the later Sky Emperor, Monarch etc use it as they have more valves). The quoted 300 hours suggest perhaps 8 x F cells in parallel for the LT. A B103 might be possible, but the higher capacity AD3 seems more likely, though it could have been a custom battery for that set with "BEREC" branding.

(Looks more B103 than B136 shaped, where is the plug?)

The London Aluminium Saucepan company did make the production cases according to Wolverhampton Historical society (the location of Ever Ready factory in Park Lane).

BEREC was as far as is known, just an Export Marketing "arm" of Ever Ready. All the BEREC sets were actually probably made in Park Lane, Wolverhampton, as were all Ever Ready sets after 1942 approximately and certainly all post war sets till the Sky Lark in 1963, except for the "Personal" B (Identical to Marconiphone P17B) made by Plessey. It's not clear if Plessey or Ever Ready made the B2 with added LW the next year.

The valves (tubes) in the MkII Model "J" (Saucpan Radio) which added MW (BC) to the original SW only argue for no later than 1953. Unfortunately a writer that used a "Saucepan" in 1952 at "Broken Hill" North Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) doesn't relate if it had MW or not.

Cosser actually produced a set for Africa in a Red Biscuit tin (rectangular tin for Cookies). Allegedly not successful due to being red!

[*Local History, Wolverhampton - Ever Ready Radios: The Early Years and Lissen]

Michael Watterson, 31.Jul.12

Weitere Posts (6) zu diesem Thema.