Seeing as I closed my valve collection website down and removed much of my personal stuff before it got archived (valvecollector.uk) I suppose I had better keep my story somewhere…

I started collecting when I was just a kid but only seriously from about 1999 when I set up my first collection website, initially on a bit of webspace at work. From there it moved about a few times, first to some commercial webspace provided free by a friend who owned an ISP, then to our house, then past three other ISPs to a dedicated physical server which I rented, and then on to a VPS where it stayed until closed down and archived at the beginning of 2024.

I used to collect just about everything but it got out of hand when the collection reached 3,000 types,some of which were huge beasts. From then I settled on just CV types and almost all of the non-CV valves – about 1,500 went to the National Valve Museum, which has a website almost as old as my own. 

I first became interested in valves, and electronics in general when I was about 8. My grandad drew a sine wave on the wall to try to explain the difference between ac and dc – I forget why but I can still picture that drawing. He had a few old radios including one he built himself, all laid out on a baseboard and looking like a well-made cupboard. He showed me the valves in an old radio he gave me and then told me off as I took each valve out and popped it on the concrete to see what was inside! This started my collection, and soon after I took a battery box out of my Lego set plus two 425PEN’s into school and showed the teacher as they lit up.

Myself and a friend often frequented the local TV repair shop, and after a number of years and many visits, the people running the shop retired. My friend phoned me, we were about 12 at the time, and told me they wanted to see us. So off we went. When we got there, all their remaining unsold stock was all on display in various boxes, and with words which have become immortalised we were told ‘take anything you want’. Being 12 I guess I didn’t really know what to make of this and hurriedly studied the boxes of valves for any that I might find useful, but it all became clear when I extracted a few and was told to take all the boxes of valves rather than one or two! There must have been a couple of hundred radio/TV valves there. There were a few other bits of kit we wanted and we took the first load back to our house in bags, went back with a wheelbarrow (imagine two 12 year olds carting old radios along the road in a wheelbarrow), and finally my grandad took us for the last trip in his car.

At secondary school I discovered three things. I forget how or in what order, but they were an electronics shop in the city centre that had loads of old test kit and all sorts of goodies, a TV repair shop near the school, and a house clearance dealer, also near the school. A number of old radios came from the house clearance shop, and were either pulled apart or sold. I also expanded my valve collection with about 20 old valves from this shop. The TV repair shop owner was a good source of generic white valve boxes, plus he had a small collection himself. The electronics shop was the source of several heavy items of test gear that left their marks on the city busses as I brought them home!

My grandad had made me a workshop in the basement and I could be seen regularly carrying heavy bits of test gear home on the bus after school. The workshop went through many phases as my interests changed between test kit, radios, radio teletype, and at one stage had a wall of test kit, plus Admiralty (Murphy) B40 and B41 receivers (and I could lift both at once back then – just!), a Creed 7E teletype, several readers and perforators, and associated kit. I went through a phase of buying scrap teleprinters, rebuilding them and selling them to local radio amateurs for some extra pocket money.

Since then in various orders I discovered motorsport, got married, got a house, had kids and everything else. The collection bubbled along with new additions added regularly. But enough is enough!

The collection used to live almost entirely in the loft, out of touch. It ended up in a more accessible location and into plastic storage boxes, all indexed so I can actually find everything. This ended up taking over one end of the workshop and I will be glad to get the space back as the collection is sold off or given away bit by bit.