Part 1 of Burton Trent - Detective

I had intended to write this article in August, but if I had, it would have been short. As it is, the article is too long and probably boring to most people, so I have decided to split it into sections.  Part 1 will cover the discovery of the discs and the story as we knew it then.  Part 2 will be after I got them home and cleaned and recorded them as well as researching the series.  Over the last 4 months I have been researching the elusive Burton Trent and it has been tough.  He knows how to cover his tracks and he has had a lot of help.  This series and my involvement is full of twists and coincidences.  In the interests of easy spelling, I will refer to them as twists when I point them out to you during the story.

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Part 1 - The Discovery

In July 2014 I described a 16" Radio Transcription Disc to a local record collector, Paul Kelly, who specialises in Australian Country and Western.  He had never seen one before, nor even heard of one, like most people.  They are the extra large discs like an overgrown LP, used to transport Radio Shows from the Production House to the Radio Stations.  16" was used from the late 1930's until the 1950's,  They also come in 10" & 12" with 12" being the standard LP size most people collecting records recognise. 

Imagine my surprise when Paul returned in a couple of days and pulled a 16" acetate disc from his back pack and asked "is this one?"  Well it certainly was one.  It was filthy and it was covered in what looked like a white ants nest.  The label was handwritten and looked like it had been treated as roughly as the rest of the disc.  The Name on the Disc was "Burton Trent".  Never heard of him.  There was no sleeve, it was covered in muck, the disc was double sided with unbroken tracks, so it probably wasn't songs or advertising.  It wasn't commercially duplicated, no matrix information on the disc.  It was old, very old, but what was it?

(Twist 1. If I hadn't spoken to Paul about 16" discs 2 days earlier, I probably would never have encountered this series.  Twist 2.  Paul brought me one of only two discs that didn't have an episode title on at least one side of the disc.  I would have known it was a series immediately I saw an episode title)

I checked the Encyclopaedia of Australian Radio Shows database (EARSdb) Nothing mentioned.  I checked the National Film and Sound Archives online database, no listing.  I emailed my contact there and asked her to check their internal database to see if anything was known about Burton Trent, the answer was no, within a very short time.

I asked Paul what the background was on the disc and he said there were more of them, about a dozen.  He had been contacted by a fellow who had found them in the dirt under his Mother's house which he was clearing after she had passed away.  He had contacted a friend of his in Brisbane to find out what they were and he in turn told him to ring Paul.  Paul, thank goodness, recognised it from my description a couple of days before and told him he knew someone who could explain it.  The fellow agreed to let Paul take it to me.

Paul gave me the telephone number of the fellow who found them and I made an appointment to stop in and see him at the house on my way home after work.  I then  hit Google.  The only mention I found of a radio Show that included the name 'Burton Trent' was a small article of a play on 2SM by that name in January 1938.  I felt that the year was correct from the style of the disc.  It seemed Burton Trent was a detective, I love detective programs!

This surviving scrap of description, matches the storyline of 'The Alibi'.

Cases of Burton Trent  (courtesy of: The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate (Parramatta) Thursday 6th January 1938.

Philo Vance, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes and all the other great detectives of fiction now have a radio rival who is on the job at 8.30pm every Sunday from 2SM.  He is Burton Trent, central figure of the thrilling new detective series "The Cases of Burton Trent" and next Saturday he will tackle the problem of "The Bank Murder".  Craven, the bank manager, is found murdered; Alex Lloyd, a young farmer, was heard threatening his life on the day he was killed: the accountant of the bank has disappeared and there are a set of damning finger prints on a glass.  These are the clues that are offering, but are they enough for Burton Trent, who sees that justice is done and brings the murderer to book in an exciting surprise denouncement.  Burton Trent is John Dunne's newest radio character and listeners are sure to take his debonair charm, humor and incisiveness as he battles with clues and criminals.  The 2SM players appear in the other roles and the production each week is by Reg Hawthorne.

I stopped in on the way home and had a long talk to the owner.  He really had found them buried in the dirt under his Mother's house.  He found them by walking on them...more than once and the ground felt different so he dug around to see what he was walking on.  In all there were 14 of these discs.  Some were missing labels and those that remained had been eaten by insects, as were the paper sleeves they were in.  In fact the sleeves had been eaten into 16" circles.  Normally the sleeves are square.  I have included photos to show you the difference.  I even found a corner of a typewritten continuity description that had been typed on the old typewriter paper (onion sheet).  Not many words remained as you can see, but I have matched it to the right episode.  The finder explained that his Mother would never have owned the discs and his parents had built the house so there were no previous owners who could have left the discs there.  The only explanation is that his Father who passed away in the 1950's must have found/bought the discs and left them under the house.  Apparently he did enjoy buying interesting items and bringing them home.  

On the left a sleeve shaped by insects around the disc......... On the right a standard tatty sleeve and you can see a disc imprint.

I explained what he had found and what I suspected they contained.  To cut a long story short, I bought the discs on the spot, not knowing exactly what they were, but suspecting maybe a detective series from the brief article I found online.  I advised the other collectors of the find via email.  It turned out they had never heard of the series either and they had no examples of it.  The hard work then started.

The surfaces of the discs could have been a lot worse. Yes there were scratches, gouges, spots where the underlying metal corroded, but they survived.

Before being disturbed the paper sleeves fitted perfectly between the layers of discs.

Most of the muck was like concrete. Both sides of the discs. These labels are about the most intact. Many of the sides had partial or no surviving labels

Fortunately, all the discs had a label that survived on at least one side of the disc.

In part 2, I will bring you up to date in what I have discovered about the Burton Trent series.  You will see the labels for the other discs and a partial log.  I will also supply a couple of episodes and scans of print ads and program guides for the series.  I hope to post it here over the weekend.

December will be filled with Christmas related audio that I am recording off discs at the moment.

January will be the story of my recent project recording 140+ Armed Forces Radio Discs in my collection.  It will include some audio never in circulation before.