What's the radio at the top of our forum title?

[Yorkie]

Hi David,
I was only kidding re:-DAC90a.
Any of the early Ekcos does it for me.

Regards

Rob

You're sure it's not a conspiracy between you and Joe to wind me up Rob!!?

The diatribe that follows might induce drowsiness, and Joe - in his role as moderator - has my full permission (not that he needs it!) to kill it as utterly irrelevant.

I think that most restorers who find the DAC90A attractive are probably younger, but people of my advanced years who grew up with a DAC90A on the sideboard may, as I do, see it as a harbinger of post-war austerity, scarcity, lacklustre British products, and lack of choice. In that regard, the DAC90A fits the bill perfectly. The poor old DAC90A did its best to be a radio and did have a long production run due to the rental market. It’s a tad unfair of me to heap the blame on Bush, who no doubt had to rush the DAC90A into production at a time when Britain was bankrupt and heavily indebted, particularly to America and to a lesser extent, Canada – debts that we didn’t pay off until the end of 2006, even though the loans were made at a knockdown interest rate of 2%.

At the start of the war Britain was already in a poor shape economically and in no fit state to fund the war effort. The war drastically reduced exports and sucked in imports. By 1941 Britain was in a terrible financial state and the Lend-Lease scheme was introduced, but was suddenly and unexpectedly terminated by America on 29 August 1945. The British economy had been heavily geared towards war production (more than half of total GDP) and had it not been for lend lease, we would literally have starved to death with no money for food.

Without wishing to sound political, the most likely reason for the termination was that America realised that whilst Churchill (in their view) won the war for Britain, he lost the government, and America was in no mood to channel vast sums into Britain to bolster unaffordable social experiments such as the creation of the welfare state and the National Health Service. Britain's lend-lease balance of $650 million was written off, (equating to US $8.3Bn in 2012), and such lend-lease equipment that we already had was sold to us at the knockdown price of 10 cents in the dollar.

The Anglo-American Loan Agreement - a post World War II loan - was then made to the UK by the US in 1946, and wasn’t paid off 29 Dec 2006, six years late, even though it was at an advantageous rate of 2%. (The British Government had suspended payments due in the years 1956, 1957, 1964, 1965, 1968 and 1976). Sterling was very weak after the war, we lost our dollar reserves and in 1949 (Think DAC90A on the sideboard!) sterling, was devalued in 1949 from $4.02 to $2.80. (Today, it sits at $1.60). Without that loan, there'd have been no welfare state and no NHS.

Germany was flat on its back at the end of the war - its factories and infra-structure suffered far more destruction than did the UK. Anything of value – plant, machinery etc, was taken by the Allies as ‘wartime reparation’. With nothing more to lose and everything to gain, the workforce, management and general population got behind re-building the country and channelled what money they had into regenerating industry - building factories, investing in modern plant and equipment, with collaborative rather than combative labour relations, to create wealth to later fund welfare reforms. Consider the car industry – the Germans had Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes. What did we have? British Leyland, using clapped our pre-war machinery and outdated labour relations.

BL went bankrupt in 1975 and was bailed out by the taxpayers. Then what happened? Remember ‘Red Robbo’ - (Derek Robinison, AEU Convener)? Between 1978 and 1979 was credited with causing 523 walk-outs at Longbridge, costing an estimated £200m in lost production? It’s just one example of British industry and the public sleep-walking towards losing our engineering base at a time when Japan, Germany, Korea, China were building up theirs, and it explains why – though we have a healthy car industry in the UK, it’s the likes of Nissan and Toyota – not Austin, Morris, Rover et al. Tata (India) owns Jaguar Land Rover, just as China now own Weetabix. In Germany, it wasn't just the car inductry getting back on its feet, but radio and optics etc. (Carl Zeiss, Leica). Consider what's happened to the UK shipbuilding industry too.

More relevant, it’s for the same basic reasons that whereas by the early 1950s, Germany had Telefunken, Grundig et al producing advanced designs of radios, and by the mid 1950s was exporting them to Britain, which had nothing to compare. Even the Czechs had the Tesla Taslisman, which I suppose is their equivalent of the DAC90A. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but alongside the DAC90A, the Tesla gets my vote.

http://antiqueradio.org/tesla308u.htm

Sorry if any of the above sounds political – it’s about economics rather than politics. It’s a lot of hot air about one radio. My take on things may seem a bit perverse – bizarre even, but the sight of that darned thing sat on the sideboard throughout my growing up years, evokes memories of ration books, queues, British Restaurants, cod liver oil, school dinners, squares of torn up newespaper on a nail in the outside loo, and Britain going down the tubes. (Rationing didn’t end until after I’d left school).

Maybe what I should do is to invert my logic and reflect on how much my life has improved in the ensuing years from the DAC90A, and to start loving it? I can't promise, but I'll try!