My earliest memories associated with EKCO are watching dad play cricket on the sports ground adjacent to the main factory in Priory Crescent.
EKCO provided employees with not just jobs but a social life involving the whole family. Christmas parties each year were a particular treat eagerly looked forward to.
Thankfully, the only remnant of the EKCO empire is the social and sports club with its club house and sports field
Eric Kirkham Cole: EKCO
and Me!
Before your SONY's, your LG's Your Samsungs and Panasonics, was the pioneering electronics company EKCO.
In 1922, the Marconi company began the first regular entertainment radio broadcasts in England. 100 hundred years later it is hard to imagine a world without electronic communication.
Between 1926 and 1966, the contribution Eric Cole and his company made in bringing about such communication is considerable. But mass producing radios and later TVs is only a part of the story. EKCO also led the way in developing airborne radar systems that significantly helped defeat the Nazi's, weather radar systems that made commercial flying safer, numerous domestic products from toilet seats to Hostess trolleys, plastic crockery to electric blankets and industrial systems including, radiation measuring instrumentation, crane safe-load monitors and control systems used in the manufacture of paper.
But my relationship with the EKCO company is a deeply personal one. The working and social life it enveloped involved both my immediate as well as my extended family throughout my early years and my apprenticeship gave me the foundation to my livelihood throughout my working life.
My mum, dad and uncles Stan and Dennis Kirk were employed for most of their working lives at EKCO as well as Terry, Stan's son.
EKCO Social and Sports Club - Club House
Cyril Andrews resident club house band >>>
My first work experience with EKCO was when just 12 years old my dad brought home simple assembly jobs like soldering the anode cap on a short length of wire. I was paid for how many I did. Later, before leaving school I worked in EKCO Plastics, trimming flash of injection moulded interior car panels. When I left school in 1964 I was taken on full time as a 'shop boy' in the printed circuit plant, degreasing, etching and punching printed circuit boards.
