Looking Back, with Eric Lever

GIANT-SCREEN TV is a big draw in many pubs today, but how many viewers, I wonder, are aware that king-size telly was flickering to life here in East Lancashire as long ago as the early 1950s - on some extraordinary sets made in Accrington?

Back then, most homes, if they were able to afford TV at all, had only black and white sets with 9-inch or 12-inch screens.

Imagine, then, what a novel leap forward it was to be able to see a TV "as big as this page". That and having "for the first time in your home the sort of picture you have been used to all your life on the cinema screen" was what giant manufacturers Philips claimed for their Projection Television Receiver - though it gave only a 16-inch image.

Yet, in 1952, a young pair of East Lancashire electronics wizards tweaked the Philips principle of magnifying the image from a tiny two-inch TV tube and projecting it on to the screen to increase the picture to what was, for home viewing then, a staggering 21 inches - and gave birth to the Griffin TV set.

It was named after the engineering works in Clement Street, Accrington, run by businessman Arthur Bradshaw who was impressed by the set developed by Allan Wallwork and Ken Talbot in their town-centre workshop.

"He saw it and thought it was great and offered to put the money up to put it into production at his works," recalls 79-year-old Allan, who now lives at Sidmouth in Devon. "He believed there would be a terrific interest in it."

Trouble was, as 78-year-old Ken, of Wellfield Road, Blackburn, recalls, Bradshaw's money did not match his belief in their set. "He had none," he laughs.

"One hundred cabinets were ordered from a fellow at Padiham and he never got a penny for them."

So it was that the Griffin venture was soon over, making the sets a real rarity even in their own brief lifetime.

"I can't remember now how many were sold - ten, 20 or 30 perhaps. The Griffin was only on the market for two or three years, but a few were sold in Accrington, Padiham, Burnley and Samlesbury," adds Allan. "Anyone who saw them was really impressed by the size of the picture. But the principle they worked on was basically the same as that of the giant-screen sets of today."

Ken recalls that the Griffin was a really "posh" set. "There were two types - both console models. On one, the cabinet had a flat top and Queen Anne-style legs while, for some unknown reason, the other had a bowed top," he says.

And posh you had to be to buy one. For at £200 each in 1952, when a good wage was less than £10 a week, they were worth the equivalent of £3,192 today.

Still got one somewhere? It would, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television tells me, be worth a bit to a collector of old-time TVs...around £100.

Chances are, anyway, that, like the brief 1950s era of projection TV sets, the tube fizzled out after a couple of years - as that was their big and expensive drawback. But if yours is still going, don't dare turn it on or tinker with the works - for the sets ran off a staggering 30,000 volts and gave off X-rays strong enough to fog film inside any camera put on top of them!

Just as well, then, that Ken, partner in the creation of Griffin, never owned one himself. But veteran Accrington TV engineer and dealer, 77-year-old Ken Clegg, who recalls selling an odd one, tells me the Griffin was not the first TV made in town.

That honour, he says, goes to the set built around 1934 by amateur radio enthusiast Vic Booth at his home at Rose Place in Bullough Park - even before the BBC began transmitting the world's first TV programmes.

It was a version with a spinning disc inside it - on the principle devised by John Logie Baird, the inventor of television - and gave a pink picture the size of a large postage stamp.

"At the time, after their normal radio programmes had finished for the night, the BBC put out experimental TV signals on the Medium Wave from their London and Midland regional stations - one transmitting those for the picture; the other, those for the sound," says Ken.

"It was a great novelty at the time, but I'm not sure that it was entertainment!"

Jumbo mystery

AFTER unearthing the story of the lion that was buried in Blackburn, Looking Back now receives the tale of the circus beast that ended its days in Accrington - and, yet, "lived on" for generations afterwards.

For an archive-digger belonging to the town's Historical Society tells us of an elephant named "Chimey" which died after coming to Accrington with Wombwell's travelling circus in May, 1845.

Records in the town's library say the jinxed jumbo was 11ft 4in in height and weighed five tons - which makes my informant wonder how it was disposed of. Any clues?

But as many new streets were then being built in Accrington, the unfortunate animal had the distinction of having one named after it - Elephant Street which, many will remember, once stood in the Plantation Street area of the town

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.