Swedish Death Cleaning is the morbid yet important task of ridding yourself of personal belongings prior to your shuffling off this mortal coil. It helps the children. Lurking in our loft for around 30 years has been two boxes of 78rpm shellac records, the sum of my father’s early record collecting.

Before vinyl records came shellac records. Shellac is the secretion of the female lac bug that’s processed into flakes. The flakes are then mixed with alcohol and can be formed into many products including records. 78rpm records are heavy and fearfully brittle. For over 50 years it was the main material for recorded music and came in the configuration of playing at 78 revolutions per minute (rpm). In the late 1950s it was replaced with lighter and more flexible vinyl playing at either 33 or 45rpm depending on the size of the disc. Vinyl is now into its seventh decade.

So my father, as a teenager and beyond collected a large number of discs seemingly from a few shops in central Leeds. Being born in 1920 his collecting started in his later teens.

Obviously his collecting was interrupted when he went to help sort out Herr Hitler for a few years in the Royal Air Force. It could be that his collecting may have continued during the war as he was stationed around the Yorkshire airbases as an engineer repairing bombers that flew with their deadly cargoes to continental Europe. Bomber Command lost over 55,000 men on these missions and I wonder what he felt when all these young men never returned after an overnight sortee to Germany. I imagine he didn’t know many of the aircrew as they must have rotated around the bases but it must have made the atmosphere heartbreakingly sombre when several Halifax’s never reappeared in the misty early morning skies back over the East Riding of Yorkshire.

I’m sure he got home to his mother and father in Leeds on occasion. Eventually he ended up in India at the dizzying rank of Corporal before being demobbed.

The records could all have been put in the bin as I have no intention of playing them. They will play on a record turntable but you need one that has a setting for 78rpm: I don’t. Also in a world of high fidelity these records are lo-fi. My father also left me a lot of vinyl records. The condition of the vinyl is fine but most of his 78’s are in a terrible condition: in fact I had to throw away 27 records as they were broken or chipped!

The surface condition is parlous on most of the records and made me wonder how they got in such a bad way. Record players that played 78’s had metal styli rather than the diamond tipped you find on modern day record players. The arms that held the stylus were heavy and lots of plays no doubt marked and scarred the 78’s. Not least is the ease you can scratch a record when placing the stylus on or off the record. If you drag a nail across anything it leaves a scratch! All my father’s records were played and played, obviously much loved.

I rang a collector and auctioneer of 78’s and he directed me to his website to identify what records he wanted. He added, pithily, that he usually didn’t want ‘97%’ of what was offered. Sadly my father’s battered collection easily snuggles into the 97%. So what do you do with this record collection that captures my father’s youth and passion? All of the music is available digitally or on vinyl but for record collectors the ownership and feel of a ‘hard copy’ is the delight. Sadly when I get past the sentimentally then this blog might be all that remains.