85 – AS BLOWN TO BITS BY MARTY HOPKIRK

Going, going... Kenneth Cope (later to find fame as ghostly Marty Hopkirk) and a
soon-to-be-deceased Broadway BWII, plugged into a Supersound Zenith combo.

This blog is only a week old and already the title is out of date: today saw the arrival of guitar No. 85. It's by no means a great guitar, but it's British, it's rare – exceedingly so – and it's a model that's been on my radar since, what, 1973...

Let's be more specific: this particular guitar is a model that first came to my attention on Tuesday 27 March of that same year. I'd only just had my first ever electric guitar bought for me, and I was beginning to notice others on TV, in magazines, books, wherever they might pop up. The whole world of guitars was still waiting to be discovered, and any sighting of a previously unknown brand was the equivalent of a train spotter or twitcher encountering one of their own species of rarity.

The guitar in question was a Brodway BWII – a fact which it took me many years to deduce; indeed, it would take until the age of the internet for me to make a positive identification. It appeared in a British comedy film called Father Came Too, shown on BBC1 that night as the last in a season of vintage comedies. Well, I say vintage... it was just a shade under ten years old. Father Came Too is an amiable, Eastmancolor romp wherein newlyweds Dexter and Juliet Munro (Stanley Baxter and Sally Smith) purchase a tumbledown country residence called Rose Cottage. What ensues is a typical slapstick farce, as every old DIY and wallpapering gag in the book is milked for all it's worth. For all this, it's still a very funny film, with memorable performances from Leslie Phillips (as a fawning estate agent-cum-thespian) and James Robertson Justice as the titular father.

In charge of renovation work at Rose Cottage is a workshy gang of labourers led by local builder Josh Wicks (Ronnie Barker), who double up as a skiffle outfit called The Scrubbers. When first encountered, they are busy practising a jaunty number with a catchy chorus: 'we're gonna scrub-a-scrub scrub scrub-a-scrub' (written for the film by the Shadows' producer Norrie Paramor). I took note at once of the instrument being played by the band's guitarist Ron (Kenneth Cope): it was a big f-holed archtop acoustic, entirely typical of the gear used by most skiffle bands (I later identified it as a Zenith, the same type of guitar that Paul McCartney had used during the Beatles' own skiffling days).

By the time Father Came Too was released to cinemas, in November of 1963, skiffle was pretty well dead and buried and Beatlemania had arrived. But the Scrubbers were no slouches, and in a later scene, strummer Ron shows up on site carrying an electric guitar and a small amplifier. Any sighting of an electric guitar on TV was of interest to me, and although there was no model name visible, I thought Ron's looked sort of cool with its sparkle scratchplate and huge controls like the ones on our old radiogram. Within seconds of appearing on the screen, the guitar was in bits: blown up when Ron unwittingly plugs into a 30amp-rated circuit. Amp and guitar go up in a puff of smoke, and a blackened and tattered Ron is left clutching the singed remains of his instrument.

Even at the age of twelve, I knew that such a thing would not have happened... the amp might well have blown a fuse, but for the overload to have caused the guitar itself to explode was clearly an exaggeration employed for comic effect. Nevertheless, the film makers had destroyed an electric guitar. I wondered if it had simply been a prop, mocked up for the movie: a reasonable assumption, given the instrument's fate. But as I later discovered, it was a bona fide production model, a Broadway BWII with a gold sparkle scratchplate. Close inspection of the film (recently restored and released on blu-ray) shows that the Broadway guitar was already pretty battle-scarred, with scratches around the body and its plastic logo missing in action. No doubt the production company bought the cheapest instrument they could find. So what exactly had they blown up?

Broadway were some of the very first British-made electric guitars and this fact alone gives them a certain level of collectability. Like many other early UK models, they were of primitive construction, with solid wood bodies and glued-in necks. The shape was vaguely reminiscent of a Telecaster, albeit somewhat narrower both in depth and across the body. Pickups seem to be the same type employed on early Fenton and Dallas-branded instruments, and the gold-topped controls were also to be found on many amplifiers of the era. Strings were anchored to a trapese tailpiece (of varying design), and tuners were of the open-backed three-on-a-strip variety. Players plugged into a jack input on an oval metal plate, and aesthetic details included a variety of plastic sparkle or pearloid pickguards with matching headstock plate: the latter served only as a decorative item, as there was no truss rod. The Broadway logo was either a painted stencil or a plastic moulded item, and always appeared on the upper left of the body.

Despite having known of the model since 1973, I had not, until today, had a first-hand encounter with a Broadway guitar. The one seen above appeared on the instrument sales web platform Reverb, about a week ago, priced at what I thought a very reasonable £250. It ended up costing me £225 plus £25 delivery. I'd seen a clean example listed on Reverb in the USA for a frankly outrageous $1250. How it even got there is a mystery, as Broadway guitars were not, to my knowledge, sold outside of the UK where they catered to the emerging beat group market in an era when American instruments were still subject to an importation embargo. I'd passed on a single-pickup example that was offered on ebay five or six years ago, photos of which can be seen at the only website devoted to these obscure instruments: https://www.broadwayguitars.co.uk/broadway-bw1-and-bw2

My own example is the first I've seen with a blue sparkle pickguard: as you can see above, Kenneth Cope trashed one with a gold guard, and all other online images show either gold or pearloid guards. The blue sparkle is, however, original, along with all the other parts on the guitar. You can't tell from the photos, but the logo is of the moulded plastic variety, which is rather a nice touch. Everything still works: the pickups function, albeit they're not going to give Gibson any sleepless nights, and all the controls do whatever it was they were supposed to do (it's hard to tell which are volume and which are tone). It sounds fairly unremarkable, as one might expect, although a new set of strings may inject some fresh life into the old thing... but I bought it for what it is rather than how it sounds. The guitar was strung with very old tapewound strings, with a wound third. I strongly suspect these may be the strings that were on it at the time it was bought. I imagine it was put away early in its life – probably in an attic, where the fluctuations in temperature and humidity caused the paintwork to become crazed. It came in a very tatty old vinyl case, which is probably also original.

The BWII was the superior sibling to the single-pickup BWI, and retailed for the archaic sum of 19 guineas, with the BWI correspondingly cheaper. Both appear to have been produced from the late 50s up to around 1961, when the Broadway brand name (along with the same moulded badge) was reassigned to a brace of Japanese-made solidbodies, built at the Guyatone factory, the single and dual pickup Plectric 1921 and 1922.

The original Broadway guitars are aesthetically similar to those sold under the Dallas brand, an example of which is seen below in the hands of David Hemmings in the 1962 film Some People. And if you want to see either of those film appearances in full, you can get them both here: https://networkonair.com/all-products/3125-father-came-too-blu-ray-  https://networkonair.com/all-products/3157-some-people-blu-ray-

The BWII may be a primitive instrument, but it has earned its place in the Rock & Roll hall of fame. Who can tell how many young players 'went electric' with a model like this? Examples are extremely scarce, albeit sought after by no more than a coterie of clued-up collectors. A thousand dollars is an outrageous price to pay, but even so, there can be no more than a handful of such instruments still in existence, most of them already accounted for online.

There's a nice little twist in this particular tale of an old guitar, though: Rose Cottage, you'll remember, was the name of the 'des res' in the film Father Came Too, where Kenneth Cope's BWII bit the dust. And, on the shipping documentation for the surviving example that arrived today, I noted the address from which it had been shipped: Rose Cottage. Cue the music from The Twilight Zone...