Mr Stanley Everett remembers making crystal radio sets in the 1920s as a child in Liverpool, interviewed 1986

Mr Stanley Everett, born in 1909, was interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960' project. He remembers his childhood hobby of making crystal radio sets.
Transcript

STANLEY: When the Warwick Farm Hotel was in existence, the licensee's son and myself and another school friend called Bob Clyde, we were interested even then in making radios. I probably built the first radio set that was ever built in Liverpool, with the help of my two friends. And there was a great barn all around the perimeter of the back yard of the pub, and we had our laboratory, or whatever you like to call it, up where the horses used to have the haystack but there were no horses there then of course. And we had it all lit up with electric light from acid cells and things.

We used to go along the railway line of an afternoon and weekends and pick up all the lead-type battery cells that the signal people had thrown out as being useless. Well, we could still get a bit of use out of them, you see. We had this old place lit up with torch globes and batteries that the signal blokes used to throw away on the railway line, and we used to go and pick 'em up. Then we started making crystal sets there. I think Bob Clyde might've made the first one. Anyway, we went into production making these things.

INTERVIEWER: How old were you then?

STANLEY: I suppose I would have been about twelve or thirteen.