History of wireless telegraphy and broadcasting in Australia/Topical/Biographies/Oswald Francis Mingay

Summary

• Mingay, Oswald Francis "Ossie" [1] - 1895(NSW)-1973(NSW) - Licences: 2XX Sydney (Turramurra, 1923-1926; Sydney, 1931-1933) - Qualifications: cc; Nil yet identified - amateur operator; amateur broadcaster; broadcast engineer; journalist; publisher; WW1; WW2 - Electoral Rolls: engineer (Collaroy, 1930); managing editor (Pymble, 1930-1932); radio engineer (Lindfield, 1933-1934); publisher (Lindfield, 1937-1963; St Ives, 1963-1968) - Comment: licensed operator of 2WV Burgin Electric Co. (1923) ADB; MacKinnon

Oswald Francis Mingay

A comprehensive biography of Oswald Francis "Ossie" Mingay has not yet been prepared for this Wikibook, however the following resources have been assembled in preparation:

• Research - Oswald Francis Mingay - Summary of research to date

• Transcriptions and Notes - Oswald Francis Mingay - More than 40 transcriptions

• Photos, QSL cards and other graphics - Oswald Francis Mingay - Nothing uploaded as yet, but many relevant QSLs held

• Incubator of Wikipedia Article on Oswald Francis Mingay - Coming real soon now!

Key internet links:

Australian Dictionary of Biography

Oswald Francis Mingay

Pending further progress on the foregoing, the following lovely article from has kindly been donated by Richard Begbie, long time president of the ACT Branch of the Historical Radio Society of Australia.

On the Circuit. MINGAY - THE MOVER AND SHAKER OF AUSTRALIAN RADIO. by Richard Begbie.

[Few names in the story of Australian radio resonate like Oswald Francis Mingay’s. Known universally as Ossie, he was indeed an Aussie we can all celebrate.] A year or two after his retirement I came to know him well. He was short and dapper, with the salt-and-pepper moustache of an old military man. Perhaps he had mellowed a little, but he was still fiery, quick with an opinion on most subjects, often provocative. He also had a great heart, a sense of obligation to the wider world, and firm confidence in the future. One thing you could be sure of with O.F. Mingay – he would never step back from a stoush.

Sir Arthur Warner, chairman of Electronic Industries, had long known this.  “There has always been some sort of barney going on in our field, and Os has always been right there in the thick of it,” said Sir Arthur, at one of the many farewell functions organised in 1964-5 to mark Mingay’s retirement. Or, as O.F. himself put it in an interview later still, “I was a rabble-rouser and a stirrer….. I stirred up a good deal of action. I got things done.”

The outspoken Mingay, like Nellie Melba, enjoyed farewells aplenty. But unlike the Dame, this dynamic and diminutive figure had a tough start in life. Born to 17-year-old Elizabeth Mingay in 1895, he was raised in Lithgow by his maternal grandmother. Leaving school at twelve, he became a telegraph messenger for the PMG in 1908. As for many of his generation who began in the PMG’s Department, his life course was to be shaped by the rapid advances of the new century.

By 1914 he was based in Sydney as a junior mechanic in the Department’s electrical engineers’ branch. The following year saw him enlisting for the war to end wars. He would serve with the 2^nd Division Signals in Egypt and on the Western Front, with the rank of corporal. Half a century on, at another of those long farewell luncheons, the words of his old CO were recalled:

“Of course we should have given Mingay a commission,” reported Major Stan Watson some years after the war, “but officers were two a penny then, while good competent technical corporals were damned hard to get. Therefore Mingay remained a corporal.”

Unlike another “little corporal” from that conflict, Corporal Mingay would direct his considerable energies towards building a better post-war world. After the Armistice he began by organising the reconstruction of the shattered telephone exchange in the Belgian town of Charleroi. The following year In London he worked with engineers of the GPO - and incidentally with compatriot Jim Malone, a future PMG Head of Wireless & Telegraphs. He came home with a keen interest in wireless, and was discharged from the AIF in January 1920.

While in England he had met Winifred Esdon. Such were the young man’s powers of persuasion that Winifred and the Esdon family followed him back to Sydney, where Os and Winifred were married in mid-1920. She had taken on a handful.

Although he resumed work as a PMG mechanic, the challenge of the new was never far off. The now Lieutenant Mingay (he was back in the CMF) became secretary of the Military Radio Association, while moonlighting as wireless columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was already combining the two interests that would drive his life – a boundless enthusiasm for the new medium, and the spread of its gospel through writing and publishing. By 1922 he had seen the future, and left the PMG to become Radio Manager of the Burgin Electric Co.

He embraced the world of radio and commerce with characteristic gusto. Having gained his own amateur licence, he started the Burgin Radio College at nights (O. Mingay, Principal), while on another front leading the push to open up broadcast radio. Independent retailers like Rowley Burgin had long feared that the cosy relationship between AWA and the Federal Government would see an AWA broadcasting monopoly. But `fear’ was a word unknown in the lexicon of O.F. Mingay.

Using his Telegraph connections, he announced “a full program” of experimental broadcast to be conducted from his Turramurra home, launched on the evening of March 23, 1923. On March 24, AWA responded to Mingay’s lone challenge with a legal sledgehammer, and in so doing was forced to show its hand. From that point on the radio giant was never able to gain the monopoly it had once fancied was in its grasp.

It comes as no surprise that as soon as the second Broadcast Conference in 1924 had decided on the division between A and B class stations, Mingay was pressing Burgin to finance a B class (commercial) station. “The hardest part,” he remembered decades later, “was getting Rowley to part with the £5 licence fee!”  

With the fee paid, Os Mingay had the station up and away. On November 7, 1924 station 2BE (Burgin Electric) would go to air, immortalised as Australia’s first ever B-class broadcast station. (The station lasted only until 1929, when the lack of advertising revenue – and perhaps the lack of Mingay - forced its closure. Its call sign ultimately went to the South Coast town of Bega.)

Meanwhile in 1925 the non-stop entrepreneur resigned from Burgin’s, and took work as Radio Manager of Harrington’s Electrical while setting up his own company in Alma Street, Darlington. Mingay’s Wireless Manufacturing Ltd, like every Mingay project, aimed high. The journals and weeklies of 1926 are peppered with advertisements for what was in truth a very basic five-valve TRF receiver. But this one was made by Mingay, and was headlined as THE MINGAY (UNIQUE) SUPER-FIVE  - `Altogether finer in appearance and more fascinating in its instant response’.

Alas, like so many bright radio enterprises of the day, it did not survive, though fortunately a few of its products do. Each is indeed “unique” in that it is likely to have yet another configuration of knobs, sockets and other components, depending on what was the best value available that week to MWM Ltd.  

By 1929 he had spotted another niche even better suited to his talents. Despite a plethora of weeklies for the amateur, there was no regular radio trade paper, so OFM approached his editor at the Telegraph, R.J.D. MacCallum. Yes, MacCallum agreed, he would employ Mingay as editor of a new magazine, the Radio Retailer of Australia.  

The first number appeared in early 1930, but within a few issues an irrepressible voice was editorialising on subjects far beyond the magazine’s remit – politics, education, economics & society – all were grist to the Mingay mill. Many in the industry were incensed, MacCallum pressured him to desist, and Mingay resigned.

“He told me that the advertisers thought I was too opinionated,” recalled Ossie years later, “so I went out and got my own advertising, and he sold me the magazine for 25 quid.” In less than a year the Mingay publishing empire had been launched. Eighty years on, vintage radio enthusiasts would be forever grateful.

For 65 years Mingay publications, in a bewildering succession of formats, would serve the radio, electrical and television industries. In 1931 Mingay began The Radio Review of Australia, reporting new models and offering technical information to the public. The print demands of his growing stable saw him set up the Radio Print Press the following year. In 1933 the Radio Retailer became the Radio and Electrical Merchant to cope with expansion into the wider electrical contracting field.

His umbrella company - Australian Radio Publications Ltd - covered not only these imprints, but also indispensable publications like Mingay’s Intermediate Frequency Index, his Technical Topics Radio Handbooks, and the Radio Trade Annual of Australia. Publications like Broadcasting Business, magazines, and one-off booklets too numerous to detail turned Mingay into the most prolific publisher of radio & electrical material of the era.

This wealth of detail has proved to be solid gold for the vintage radio community. In his widely read books John Stokes acknowledges the debt handsomely:  “Present day vintage radio enthusiasts owe a lot to Mr Mingay for recording almost every facet of Australia’s radio history in his encyclopaedic series of the Radio Trade Annual of Australia.” And in a 1996 letter HRSA founder Ray Kelly echoed the sentiment:  “…more than anybody else he recorded Australian radio manufacturing history and circuits for early 1930s radios. I am sure this was not done with us in mind, but . . . this does not lessen the debt we owe him.”

Was all of this enough for Oswald Mingay? Well, no. Extra-curricular activities for 1932 alone included setting up The Australian Radio College and (with Ernest Fisk) founding the Australian Institute of Radio Engineers. As principal and proprietor of the one, and long-term secretary of the other, he was closely involved in steering a healthy radio industry through the Depression years and beyond.

In 1925 he had organised the first great Wireless Exhibition in the Sydney Town Hall, handing over an £800 profit to the WIA. In 1938 he organised the even more ambitious World Radio Convention in Sydney as part of Australia’s sesquicentennial celebrations. He was indefatigable.

Enlisting again for World War II, he ended up as Australia’s representative in Washington where Lend Lease arrangements were being made. STC Managing Director Sam Jones once commented on the value of Mingay’s experience, pertinacity and irrepressible attitude in this role. “I can say now with complete certitude that had he not been there, the wartime radio industry of Australia would not have acquitted itself nearly so well as it did”.

And what of Winifred Esdon, who we last heard of in 1920? Behind most great men stands a great woman, and this was emphatically so in Mrs Mingay’s case. Calm, reserved and softly spoken, she was the opposite of (and complement to) her dynamo husband in many ways. Although a lady of grace and quiet charm, she had definite views, firmly expressed, which both softened and shaped her husband. And she was just as strong-willed.

When I knew them both they would play Scrabble on most nights. In play as in life he was a fierce competitor; she was equally determined. Just when he thought he had the game stitched up, she would produce a crushing seven-letter demoraliser. At one stage I had a lengthy correspondence with them, and it was Mrs Mingay who (in the kindest way possible) pointed out my defects in style. “The excessive use of the exclamation mark,” she once wrote, “is merely the sign of a poor vocabulary.” If their public face was any guide, she was surely as direct with him in private on issues far more significant than punctuation, leaving O.F. Mingay a better man for her influence.

To the end he remained engaged with the world around him, simultaneously critical and encouraging of all he observed. Certain views were fixed – he once told me that “90% of the world are followers, and 10% are leaders, and that 10% had better lead.” There was no doubting which category he believed O.F. Mingay to occupy. But he used his position wisely and well. Before ever “industrial democracy” had been invented, Mingay involved every level of his organisation in decisions great and small. Each employee was also initiated as a shareholder in Mingay’s Electrical Enterprises, “and so”, he told me, “you can see why we’ve never had a day’s industrial dispute in the Company’s history.”

He was generous to the underprivileged, as well as to his peers. In 1952 he organised a dinner at Sydney’s Trocadero to commemorate the 51^st anniversary of Marconi’s first signal across the Atlantic. The guest list was long, and read like a Who’s Who of early Australian radio, with revered names like Dave Wiles, Ray Allsopp, Bert Beaver, Lionel Hooke, Murray Stevenson, and a host of others. None had paid a penny:  the entire event was Os Mingay’s thank you to the industry.

Which brings us full circle to that chain of farewells on his 1964 retirement, when countless tributes and affectionate jokes flowed from key figures in our radio history. “You could always hear him,” said Mullard’s General Manager Maurie Brown at the Menzies Hotel, “even though you couldn’t see him.” Every speech was laced with acknowledgment of Mingay’s incalculable contributions to Australian radio and to the wider society.

For a final endearing word we should return to Sir Arthur Warner at the Hotel Australia in Melbourne. “He is a cheerful arguer;” commented Sir Arthur, “ you can argue with him and still keep smiling. . . He has been a great personality in our industry, and for this I have loved him.”

[Of all the resources used for this memoir, the majority come from the Mingay family’s private papers. Other details rely on a few vivid memories from R. Begbie’s youth.]

BILL – here are some picture caps, as numbered on the picture IDs:

1. Announcing the new MD of Mingay’s Wireless Manufacturing Ltd. - Wireless Weekly, 22/10/26.

1. The large ad in the same edition of Wireless Weekly.

1. The radio in question. Its only unique feature was the accessory – a thumping “portable” battery box.

1. The warranty makes interesting reading, as do the handwritten tuning calibrations.

1. A confident and content Mingay approaches retirement.

1. Mr & Mrs Mingay celebrate his 73^rd birthday with a youthful R. Begbie at Sydney’s newly opened Summit Restaurant – 1/7/68.