Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio

The first time I met Pat Herbert, he asked if I was a collector. I told him no, just a hoarder without no sense of purpose, but he treated me like a kindred spirit. Pat’s private collection of radios makes up Ye Olde Hurdy Gurdy Museum of Vintage Radio, and his definition of radio memorabilia is loosely defined. Shelves heave with gramophones, old wooden transistors, crystal sets, and a real gem – in my eyes, anyway – two large blue china parrots, old radio speakers from 1927 that crown a stack of radios near the door. He spent forty years looking for them, and why not? They are magnificent.

A doohickey on a windowsill looks like a copper knapsack. It was used for spraying potatoes with copper sulfate to prevent blight. “But the little blue stone that the farmers used to get to spray the potatoes,” says Pat, “that made a great crystal for the radio. And I didn’t know that, but I had a guy in here one day and he told me”. It is a combination of Pat’s passion and his appreciation for even those things with an oblique relationship with radio that makes the museum one of the most entertaining in Dublin. And Pat, white haired and with an irrepressible grin, is a human museum of stories, and like his assemblage of artefacts, the past and the present collide.

He shows us a Morse lantern used in World War I. “I had a man in here two years ago and he was shipwrecked off Africa in the second world war and he had used them, and he broke down when he saw it.” The collection is an anthology of the self, but also a place where all experiences are welcome, whether they are the weighty recollections of a war veteran or the curious contemporary observations of a child.

He takes out an old seventy-eight, “My porcelain CD,” he calls it, in homage to a friend’s grandchild, who coined the term to describe her granddad’s old records as he played them for her on his old gramophone. “I heard it and I thought it was a beautiful name for them.”

The place is less a shrine to radio technology and more a three-dimensional map of the inside of Pat’s brain. Small museums want to preserve for posterity, sure, but they are as much about the people who run them as about the objects themselves. If the National Museum is a timeline with occasional tangents, the Museum of Vintage Radio is a starburst. Some objects are donated, but most he has collected himself. He used to frequent the market on Cumberland Street. “Twenty or thirty years ago, I’d be out there at three o’clock in the morning.”

Pat doesn’t limit his collection to the rarest or most arcane, and in cases and on shelves, antique crystal sets sit happily beside plastic novelty radios, as if they were always meant to be together. One of the most exciting pieces is not a gramophone nor a Marconi-era Morse contraption, but a green plastic toy in the shape of a Volkswagen bus with a needle underneath. He winds it and it drives in circles, playing a record about the history of RTE. It chronicles 1949, reporters at a country dance. A voice on the record, in halting speech, says, “What’s the name of that thing there?” “It’s a microphone,” says Seamus Ennis.

On the way into basement room, he points to two slips of paper. “Those are the rarest objects in the museum.” A dry pause. “Fianna Fail receipts for money. Have you any of those?” Pause again. “Neither does Bertie.” Pat’s museum is full to the brink of bleeding with radios, but there’s always room for objects placed only to set up a joke. This is the third time I’ve heard it.

The first radio came into Pat’s small Mayo town in 1947. “Neighbours of ours owned it. One of my earliest memories of it was when the all-Ireland of that year was played in the Polo Grounds in New York, and it was broadcast. Nine or ten o’clock that night and it was dark, and there were people crowded in and outside the house, listening to this from across the world. Somebody like me who was ten years old at the time, this did something to my brain which I haven’t recovered from.” With no electricity, the radio was pure magic. “A radio coming into the village, and it lit up the kitchen of the house. I thought this was a marvelous thing.”

Now he collects radios for the beauty of their design, sometimes for their rarity, or for small aspects that interest him. He speaks warmly of his children and grandchildren as he shows us objects they’ve given him. Memorabilia from his daughter, a postcard-sized modern crystal set from his nine-year old granddaughter. He is not fetishising radios as a way of escaping the world, rather radio is – fittingly – a conduit for his relationships with other people.

He points to a 1950s Pye radio, made out in Dundrum. “The valve radio. You get a great sound from it.” He raises the volume, and out screeches the ultimate destiny of the wireless, a sad reality to confront, “I’ll tell ye, I’m driving a taxi twenty years and yer man hasn’t a clue what he’s on about.” And lo, how far we have fallen.

(From August 2007, Totally Dublin)