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Village Web Site Forum
Robin Longbottom
Oakworth
Wednesday, July 17, 2019 01:20 |
Ramsbottom's Television Relay
Older villagers may recall that back in the 1950's TV coverage in the village was very poor. Our house in Low Fold had to have an enormous 'H' pattern television aerial strapped to a chimney stack for us to receive a signal. In high winds it shook violently and my mother feared it would bring down the stack. If the aerial had moved direction in the wind we had to have an engineer to re-align it. Relief came when J S Rambottom's of Keighley brought television relay to the village. For a fee you could link into their television transmission network which was conducted from house to house by overhead wire. We had a bracket on the corner of the house for which we received a wayleave payment of a shilling a year. By around the late 1960's TV signal coverage to the village was improved and the relay system became unprofitable and Ramsbottom's withdrew it. We then returned to a much smaller aerial on the stack.
Scaife Ramsbottom (J S Ramsbottom) had originally set up a radio relay system in Keighley back in the 1930's. They had an electrical shop in the old Keighley bus station and following the town centre redevelopment moved to the High Street by the roundabout.
Huge aerials are now a thing of the past and we now have a small satellite dish - not without its own problems. When we lost signal several nights running we eventually discovered the problem was not high winds but a large tawny owl sitting on the antennae!
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Julian Hide
Sutton
Wednesday, July 17, 2019 02:01 |
What a hoot! |
Andrew Monkhouse
Hanoi, Vietnam
Thursday, July 18, 2019 09:08 |
Robin, after Ramsbottom's folded at the end of the 60s, the houses on Harper Grove at the top of Park Ave were just out of range of the new antenna up West Lane. So they couldn't pick up local ITV Calendar News from Leeds. For several years during the 1970s, the only 'local' ITV news we could watch was Tyne Tees News from the antenna on the tops of Silsden. |
Robin Longbottom
Oakworth
Saturday, July 20, 2019 02:18 |
Thanks for that, Andrew. I had forgotten that we too could only received Tyne Tees on Low Fold. I also recall great excitement when BBC 2 came on air in 1967, Lord Clark's series 'Civilisation' was one of the early programmes that we were glued to every week. We didn't get a colour TV until about 1970 by which time the quality of the picture had improved considerably. Shortly after we got our colour TV I ran all the way home from Crosshills, after going to see a film at Charlie's, to see High Noon in colour. I arrived home breathless only to find that it had been filmed in black and white! Nevertheless it still remains one of my favourite Westerns. |
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