From bell systems to Blu-ray recorders, the story of E.B. Marsh is less about gadgets than the enduring relationship between people and the technology that reshapes their homes
If you have lived in North Dorset for any length of time, there is a fair chance there was once something electrical in your home that came from E.B. Marsh. There might have been a radio bought on hire purchase, or a television rented by the month or Christmas lights carefully unpacked each December.
Upstairs in the Sturminster Newton shop, tucked along shelves and in old boxes, is a dusty archive of those decades. Not museum pieces, just the objects people once saved because they were still useful, or had been an expensive purchase or were just too good to throw away. Together they tell a story of how domestic life has changed, one appliance at a time.
The earliest item on the shelves is a servant’s ‘room indicator board’ from the 1930s. Its small numbered windows would once have flickered to life when a bell was pressed elsewhere in a large country house. Costing £2/10/-, it formed part of an early servant’s bell system Marsh’s installed when electricity was just reaching rural Dorset. Today it looks ornamental, but at the time it represented the beginning of a different way of living.
Not far from it is a box of 1930s Mickey Mouse Christmas lights, bright, kitsch and impossibly cheerful. They originally sold for £2/18/-, a considerable sum then, around £106 in today’s money. These particular lights were rented out each December by Edward Marsh (current owner Sarah Palmer’s grandfather) to customers who wanted a little Christmas spectacle without the expense. The set opposite was discovered in a customer’s attic a few years ago and returned to the shop. The outstanding rental fee, it is noted, remains unpaid …
An expensive blow dry
By the 1950s, the Kenwood Chef arrived – this was a £19/10/10 investment that promised to transform the kitchen. It was a serious purchase — and, interestingly, roughly the same price in today’s money (£450) as a Kenwood Chef costs now.
It had a revolutionary impact on home cooking, was built to last and designed to do everything: it is not uncommon to find an original 75-year-old Kenwood still in good working order at the back of a kitchen cupboard.
A decade later, and Sarah has a Morphy Richards hair dryer from a decade later also tucked away. It cost £4 in 1965, when a young man bought it for his mother from his first pay packet. It was a lot of money – in 1965, the average weekly earnings for a male manual worker in the UK were approximately £18. The hairdryer cost him the equivalent of £70 today – and no doubt never got thrown away because it meant something special.
By the 1970s and 80s, most technology had begun to get cheaper. Radios and televisions moved from a luxury to a household essential. A Ferguson TV set from 1977 might have been rented for around £3 a month (£18 today). Roberts radios, still sold today, became common fixtures in kitchens and workshops alike – companions as much as appliances.
Then came the video recorder. Sarah digs out a 1983 Baird model, sold at the time for around £500, from a cupboard. For the first time, people could watch programmes when it suited them, rather than when they were broadcast. It is difficult for today’s younger generations to understand how significant that shift felt.
The same conversation
Each of these objects marks a shift in how people lived.Taken together they chart the steady integration of technology into everyday life, and also the role of a local shop in guiding that process.
Today’s products are thinner, lighter and infinitely more complex. But what has changed most, perhaps, is not the technology itself but the way it is bought and understood. Where once there were ledgers and stock rooms, there are now websites and integrated systems.
What has not changed, however, is the need for someone to explain it properly.
Electrical retail has become highly competitive, with price matching and national chains setting the pace. The response at E.B. Marsh has not been to retreat into the easily-found nostalgia of their upstairs store cupboards. Instead they have continued to adapt while holding onto the principles that made the business viable in the first place – clear advice, reliable delivery and the policy that every customer is known rather than processed.
Walk through E.B. Marsh today and the shelves are lined with sleek screens and digital recorders rather than bell boards and rented chunky televisions. But the conversation at the counter hasn’t altered much.
The modern descendant of that 1980s video recorder is Panasonic’s DMR-PWT550 — a Blu-ray/DVD player with HDD recorder and Freeview Play. For customers who prefer not to be slaves to expensive streaming subscriptions, but still want to record and watch on their own schedule, it offers a great new-tech version of some old-fashioned control.
At £300, it is a fraction of the real-terms cost of that 1983 video recorder, which would equate to around £1,700 today. That, perhaps, is the thread that runs through a century of stock. From a servant’s bell to a Kenwood Chef, from a rented television to a hard-drive recorder, each generation has wanted the same thing — technology that fits into real life, explained properly by someone who understands what they are selling. And that, more than any single appliance, is what has kept Marsh’s going for a hundred years.
ebmarsh.com
