The British Valve Factory Behind the Beatles and Marshall: The Mullard Story

In early 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, the factory that made the valves inside the Beatles' Vox amplifiers couldn't keep up. A few surviving AC30s from that winter contain Mullard EL84s made not in England but in Canada, shipped in to cover the shortfall at Blackburn, the biggest valve plant in Europe. Mullard was founded in 1920 by Captain Stanley Mullard, a lamp maker from Bermondsey who had built transmitting valves for the Royal Navy in the First World War. By 1927 the company was secretly owned by Philips of the Netherlands, though the name on the box stayed British for sixty years. In 1938 Mullard opened a factory in Blackburn, a cotton town that needed jobs, and by the end of that year it was turning out six and a half million valves a year. In June 1944 a V-1 flying bomb hit its Mitcham works. By 1962 Blackburn employed more than 6,200 people, and in 1974 it was still making 27 million valves a year. Before 1958, Mullard made valves for radios and hi-fi. By 1966, its valves were the chime of the Beatles' Vox amps and the roar of Marshall stacks. The EL84, the EL34 and the ECC83 (the European 12AX7) all came off Mullard's lines. In 1954 the company gave away a complete hi-fi amplifier design, the Mullard 5-10, that thousands of people built at home. Its name went on the Cambridge observatory where the first pulsar was discovered in 1967. In 1988 Philips dropped the Mullard name, and today it lives on, on valves made in Russia. Inside this documentary: * Captain Stanley Mullard: light bulbs, Ediswan and navy silica valves * The BBC boom and the quiet Dutch takeover * Gold-painted valves and valve-shaped vans * Blackburn, 1938: a valve factory for a cotton town * The V-1 flying bomb that hit Mitcham * The EL84, the EL34 and the ECC83 * The Mullard 5-10: the free amplifier Britain built at home * Vox, the Beatles and the Canadian EL84s * Marshall and the Dutch pentode with a British accent * The Mullard observatory and the first pulsar * How Mullard built the transistor that replaced its own valves * The name that vanished in 1988, and came back from Russia This episode includes your corrections and answers from the Leslie and KT66 episodes. Thank you, Geoff, HeatEngine, Marshall, Alex and John. Do you still have any original Mullard valves, and what are they in? Did you ever build a Mullard 5-10 or 5-20, or did someone in your family work at Blackburn or Mitcham? Old Blackburn Mullards or modern reissues: can you hear the difference? Tell us in the comments. If we got a date, a model or a name wrong, tell us there too. We read every comment and pin every correction. Sources - Mullard, Stanley Mullard, Mullard 5-10, EL84, EL34, Wikipedia - Mullard, Grace's Guide to British Industrial History: https://gracesguide.co.uk/Mullard - Mullard Limited 1925-1988, Science Museum Group: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp1121/mullard-limited - Mullard as a valve maker, r-type.org: https://r-type.org/static/makemull.htm - Engineering and Electronics in Blackburn, Cottontown: https://www.cottontown.org/Other%20Industry/Pages/Engineering-and-Electronics.aspx - Original valves in Vox AC30s, voxac30.org.uk: https://www.voxac30.org.uk/vox_ac30_original_valves.html More from this series: The Radio Tube That Gave the Beatles Their Sound: The EL84 Story → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxdjroZBwmc The Dutch Tube That Became the Sound of British Rock → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj0Wa16iZv8 The Tube Behind Clapton's Bluesbreaker Sound: The KT66 Story → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XzJt1LjTjY The Spinning Speaker Hammond Refused to Sell: The Leslie Story → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQXrvotCcP0 The Transistor That Almost Killed the Tube Amp → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJM5yy-pD0s The Day America Stopped Making Vacuum Tubes → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Il2Rula0LE