January 2026 Monthly Meeting

Tim Weeks.
“Gramophone Guru”.

Tim Weeks many of you will recognise as the gramophone expert from the Repair Shop.
Tim on his website describes the introduction to his trade. His grandfather gave him his first gramophone, purchased from a jumble sale. He was shown how to take it apart and put it together again. Like many of us growing up in the 50s and 60s learning how to use your hands and making something work again gave him tremendous euphoria.

Repairing them provided him with pocket money, encouraging him to collect the machines, and the 78 rpm records that went with them. By the 1980s many were regarding these machines as junk as increasingly nobody knew how to repair them. Dealers and traders realised a working machine was more valuable. Tim started his own shop at Alfie’s Antique Market in London under the name “The Gramophone and Wireless Shop”. In the 80s it was a golden age for buying, restoring and selling mechanical antiques and by 1992 Machines began to be more difficult to find in auction rooms. The Internet has enabled many collectors, as in the clock world, to bid directly for their treasured items. Like many in the antiques world, today antique dealers have had to close the shop and like Tim, work from home. Tim can be found in the village of East Dean under the South Downs near Chichester. He will bring as many machines as constraints allow and demonstrate to us his passion for the gramophone.