DURING one of those gloriously sunny days we enjoyed recently, I climbed to the top of a small hill in Howth to reach the radio museum housed in a Martello tower. The view of Ireland's Eye, Lambay and the great strand at Portmarnock equalled anything you'd see around Sorrento. Rhododendrons in full bloom heightened the vista, writes Hugh Oram
Inside, the objects on view were equally astonishing. Ye Olde Hurdy-Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio has been open for four years now. It is the creation of Pat Herbert, whose knowledge of radio is encyclopedic. His small museum presents not just the history of radio over the last century, but a social history of the country.
Pat Herbert grew up in a small village outside Crossmolina, Co Mayo. He remembers vividly the impact on village life of the first local radio set, immediately after the Emergency days of the second World War. He has been hooked on radio ever since. During his working life, he was a supervisor in the construction industry, but now has been able to turn his hobby into a second career, the fruits of more than 40 years of collecting.
The Martello tower, which is up a steep path opposite the Abbey Tavern in the centre of Howth, dates from the early 19th century. When the first undersea cable was laid between Britain and Ireland late in that century, its Irish landfall was this selfsame tower. In 1903, Lee de Forest, the pioneer of American radio, ran transmissions from here to Holyhead, while two years later Marconi had a wireless station in the tower. So radio seems embedded in the very stones of the old tower, making it the perfect place for such a museum.
Pat Herbert has assembled a vast collection of old radio sets, all superbly restored and labelled. They begin with crystal sets, then move into the next generation of sets, which had external horn speakers. He has one very rare example of a set of "parrot" speakers, made in porcelain by Royal Doulton in 1927. From crystal sets, radios developed further into valve sets and the museum has some fine examples from the 1930s. In those days radios depended on wet and dry batteries, including those supplied by the old Exide factory at Portobello in Dublin.
All kinds of oddities are on show, such as the radios disguised as picture frames, used in occupied France during the second World War. Later, during the hippy days of the late 1960s, radios in the shape of spice-racks enjoyed a brief vogue; only about 1,000 were made and one of them is in the museum. Another eye-catching piece is an American car radio styled like a miniature juke-box.
Transistor radios flooded on to the market in the 1960s. Nowadays young women often go out equipped with a mobile phone and a bottle of water. Then, they often had a transistor radio shaped like a small handbag. On a recent trip to London Pat unearthed a contemporary equivalent of a handbag radio, one of the latest exhibits in the museum.
Some early TV sets, dating back up to 60 years, are on show. In those days, a 14-inch television cost around 60 guineas. Ireland once had a thriving industry assembling radio and TV sets, including the old Pye factory in Dundrum, close to the present-day Dundrum Town Centre.
Publicity material on the early stars of radio and television are featured, including a poster of a young Audrey Hepburn advertising Pilot portable radios and Eamonn Andrews promoting GEC television sets.
The museum also houses an amateur radio station, manned by Tony Breathnach - the Irish Radio Transmitters Society has been going for over 75 years. On most Sundays, the amateur radio station in the tower crackles into action, using wireless telegraphy, with its call sign EIOMAR. On the museum's website, the call sign is included, in Morse.
Radio recordings are included in the museum's inventory. When the US Columbia space shuttle passed over Ireland in 1983, a group of enthusiasts set up an amateur radio station in Dublin and communicated with it. You can listen to some of the conversations in the museum.
Other recordings include old 78rpm discs issued by the Gramophone Shop that used to be in Johnson's Court off Grafton Street. One features Eamon de Valera's famous 1943 speech about the comely maidens at the crossroads. Another 78rpm disc carries a recording by an actor of Pearse's celebrated oration at the grave of O'Donovan Rossa, also issued by the Gramophone Shop. The museum also has some old wind-up gramophones, which used needles to reproduce the sound.
Apart from all the radio, TV and recording memorabilia, Pat Herbert has packed many other items of social interest into just two small areas, the ground floor space and the basement. Items include a photograph of Foley's tourist bus outside Clerys in O'Connell Street in 1923; tourists were still coming to Dublin in the midst of the Civil War. He has some late 19th-century sugar bags that carried advertising for politicians such as Isaac Butt; many country households in those times didn't get daily newspapers, so sugar bags were a more effective advertising medium. He has a copy of the Irish telephone directory for 1940, just 12mm thick, covering the whole State.
Even though Pat Herbert himself is such a treasure-house of information on radio, there are always new stories and, as he says himself, he is always learning from the visitors from all over the world who come to visit and be intrigued by what lies within this old Martello tower.