E.M.G Special Cambridge Models

The Special Cambridge Model plaque may have been added to gramophones sold through commission by Charles Kay Ogden.

C.K Ogden introduced the investor Herbert West to Michael Ginn; leading to Ginn losing his company and selling the E.M.G name for £1,000.

So far, there have been two documented Special Cambridge Models.

An E.M.G Mk VII in Oak at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. They very kindly sent me some pictures of the plaque.

The other is a Wilson Horn model just before a Mk VIII. Pictures kindly supplied by Graham Rankin.

Charles Kay Ogden sold EMG gramophones on commission. Photocopies of very revealing letters written to Mr. Ogden by Michael Ginn are compiled into two pdf documents..."from the horse's mouth".

Please point out any errors in the transcript.

Letters

Transcribed

---

Excerpt from Francis James’ book “The EMG Story”

“When Charles Kay Ogden came up the stairs at High Holborn to buy his Mark VII cabinet model he may have looked ordinary enough, but his purchase was to have consequences beyond anyone's wildest dreams, or in Ginn's case most ghastly nightmares. Perhaps if they had delivered it to his Cambridge home they might have concluded that he was in no sense ordinary, though it is doubtful if they could have prevented the disaster from overtaking them.

They would have been greeted at the door by Ogden, himself probably 'smoking' a cigarette which sported a glowing red electric bulb at its tip. Entering the house, they would have had to squeeze past his coffin which he kept in the hall, in case of need. Clambering over his collection of eighty two family bibles, and forty two pairs of shoes, they might at last have gained access to his living room. Here, even on the hottest days of summer the windows would be tightly closed, while an ozone machine quietly puffed away in the corner giving a stream of purified air. He was a true eccentric, an ideal frame of mind perhaps for a psychology don, and a man of extraordinary dynamism.

He already enjoyed a modest fame for having invented in 1926 BASIC English (British, American Scientific, International Commercial) a language consisting of only eight hundred and fifty words. This was a successor to that invented by Ogden's hero, Jeremy Bentham. He was not so much a crazy man, as a man of crazes.

When he bought his E.M.G. Mark VII, he was suddenly filled with a missionary zeal for it, and immediately set about proselytising the musical heathen in Cambridge and indeed, anywhere he had friends.

His perpetual poverty, which he described as 'Hand to Mouth Disease' coupled to his new found enthusiasm for his E.M.G. caused him to appoint himself as Ginn's ex officio salesman. Ginn only sold direct to the public, but he was not averse to using one customer to introduce another. When this happened, he paid a commission, hence the attraction to Ogden. He was a first class salesman too, and Cambridge dons bought very many of these machines as a result. This was to be of inestimable value to E.M.G. in the future too, for students, seeing these wonders of science in the ownership of their dons, came to regard them as the most desirable of gramophones, and in their turn bought one for themselves.”