A Resounding Ekco: E.K.Cole Ltd.
The origins of this famous enterprise
Tom Going

'We have been informed' said a rather stuffy little note, ‘that a Leigh-on-Sea manufacturer of wireless apparatus has decided to produce his receiving sets in plastic materials in colours, and we welcome this advance over the drab efforts of this trade in the past.' (British Plastics & Moulded Products Trader 17 Oct 1930) A muted note of welcome for the E.K.Cole company - EKCO. But not for long, for Ekco was to become one of the most innovative and brave firms in the field of plastics, and continue to this day as a division of Lin Pac Mouldings Ltd.

Eric Kirkham Cole, like many young men, tried his hand at making wireless sets in lulls in his house-wiring and accumulator charging business. He was helped by a young lad, Stan Clements, and soon one of his customers, William Streatfield Verrells joined, bringing a welcome £50 with him. They took rooms above a sweet shop and tailors in Southend, and in 1926, with 5 employees, they became a limited company. It was an extraordinary time; the wireless was the wonder of the age, and firms sprang up like mushrooms. Business burgeoned and by 1930 they were ready to move into a new 80,000 sq.ft. factory at Prittlewell, and increased their payroll to 1000! As luck would have it, in 1930 Michael Lipman, a sales engineer representing the giant German AEG firm, called in about some insulating material. He also chanced to show them a cabinet moulded for the Telefunken company which he had unsuccessfully been hawking around. Radiolympia. the vast exhibition of new radio developments, was barely 20 weeks away yet here, the Ekco directors knew, was a winner, and Lipman left with an enquiry for 30,000 cabinets in two types. So for the 1930-31 season Ekco's wireless sets were for the first time housed in phenolic moulded cabinets - Models 312 and 313. They were available, the ad tells us, in three tones of ‘Tenacit bakelite’ - dark jade, dark mahogany and medium oak, and required a separate loudspeaker in a matching cabinet, the Ekcone LS1 or the Ekcoil LS2. The cabinets were designed by L.Smithers, and for the following year the well-known RS3 and RS2 were designed by J.K.White, the head of the design studio.

These cabinets were made for Ekco by AEG in Germany, and at this point there was no thought of Ekco entering the plastics field themselves. However, in the autumn of 1931, Ramsay McDonald's National Government imposed stiff import taxes to save the pound sterling, which was a serious blow to the company. Nothing daunted, they negotiated to have erected, initially under AEG control, a factory at Southend where production could continue on an annual fee and royalty basis. It was an onerous deal and perhaps AEG should have been beaten down a bit, for certainly the British GEC could have moulded the cabinets at their Birmingham Witton Works. The presses themselves were made by Niederrheinisches Maschinenfabrik Becker and van Hullen AG, Krefeld, and depending on your source of reference had presses of 1000, 1600 or 2000 tons, and in addition there were smaller presses for making accessories.

Then in Feb 1932 disaster struck - fire destroyed the research labs, offices and canteen. For this reason, the M23 and SH25 duly appeared in the cabinets of the previous year’s models, the RS2 and RS3. The trade was not thrilled by this move, and sales fell, and although the new plastics works had been home-producing sets since August, by January the firm was in a crisis and staff were laid off wholesale.

An enormous some of money was tied up in the works and at the end of 1932 Cole and Verrells approached Serge Chermayeff and Raymond McGrath, whose work for the new Broadcasting House Studios had caused a stir earlier in the year, and asked them to produce some sketches for the new models. Without regard for any conventional forms available at that time on the market, one of Chermeyeff’s was selected for production, the AC64. It was refined to become the AC74, and these two sets for the 1933 - 34 season put the firm back on its feet. Wells Coates joined the roster for the 1934 - 35 season; his famous AD65 design - the Round Ekco - is now legendary. Coates’s other rectangular design was modified by the factory to become the AC85, and is not attributed to Coates in company letters. Chermayeff reworked this design to make the AC86 of 1935 - 36, an elegantly flowing design. In later years Jesse Collins, Misha Black and F.C. Ashford all contributed design, which will be covered more fully in another article.

The big presses at E.K. Cole were never idle, and by the mid-thirties were producing radio cabinets for other customers including Ferranti and Philips. However, since radio at this date was highly seasonal, to even things out a bit they added round table tops (for pubs and cafes), and in 1937 the Thermovent, in a Wells Coates casing. This electric heater, being based on convection, was revolutionary at the time and also popular. After the war the company added a best selling line in lavatory seats designed by J.K.White, offered in many pastel colours and with a characteristic wrap-around cover.

Throughout the 1930s Ekco grew; this was its heyday for styling and invention, and though the firm as a whole flourished through to the mid 1950s, signs of ossification became apparent, and the sudden end of the boom years with the arrival of television regrettably led to a merger with Pye of Cambridge. Though the plastics company continues successfully the main building ironically now houses Access, which lends us money to buy imported radio sets.