A radio with Flair – the Ferguson Flair from 1957

The Ferguson Flair is a four valve, two waveband battery portable radio set in the ‘suitcase’ style that was made by Ferguson in about 1957. It’s similar in construction to the Pye P114BQ, which also uses the same valve set, but the Flair uses a ferrite rod aerial rather than a loop.

My Ferguson Flair radio

My Ferguson Flair came from the same place all my vintage radios have come from – eBay, where there are a seemingly endless supply of similar models.

I have to admit that the title of this article is somewhat inaccurate – the radio doesn’t really have flair other than in its name. In fact, it’s a fairly plain, attaché case model in a rather muted light brown colour and I bought it because it was quite cheap. The idea is that it will either be relatively easy to get working and I can re-sell it, or I can use it for spares.

Having said that, at first glance my example looked to be in reasonable condition. All the knobs were present, the paintwork was fairly unblemished, and the case was in a reasonable state considering its age. On the downside however, the carrying handle has lost one of the grips that keeps the strap in place, and one of the plastic feet on the bottom of the case is missing.

It’s only when I opened the chassis up and had a proper look that I found there is an issue with the ferrite rod aerial, which seems to be common with old radios – it’s fractured and broken so will need to be glued back together – hopefully this won’t affect the radio’s reception, assuming I can get it working.

As I was looking at the ferrite rod aerial I realised that the reason it was broken is that the whole set has received some sort of trauma which had bent the chassis out of true, and distorted the main radio panel (I had an attempt at straightening that before I took the pictures below, but it’s still possible to see that it’s not straight).

At the moment I don’t know if this damage has broken any other components but when I power the set up and create the second part of this article I’ll find out.

Ferguson Flair Photos

The gallery below shows some images of the Ferguson Flair.

Description of the Ferguson Flair radio set.

The Flair is a design of radio that is often referred to as a suitcase or attaché case radio because that’s basically what the radio looks like. The design was very popular in the mid to late 1950s before transistors made it possible to make much smaller designs.

Although the radio has the name Flair written inside the lid, it full model number for this radio is actually the Ferguson 344B.

The characteristics of the design are that the case holds the electronics and batteries, and the lid would often contain a loop aerial to allow weaker stations to be picked up. As mentioned above, the Flair is slightly different in that it uses a ferrite rod aerial rather than a loop.

In terms of its electronic design, the Flair is a fairly standard 4 valve superhet design using the, at the time, modern 90V valve set which allowed the radio to run from a 90V high tension battery and a 1.5V low tension battery to power the valve’s filaments.

Because the valves consumed quite a low current (in the region of 10 mA), the expensive HT battery would have a fairly long life, although the LT filament battery would need to be replaced more often. The batteries were stored under the metal panel of the radio either side of the speaker.

The operation of this set is basically the same a hundreds of other set with the same attaché case design. The power is turned on when the lid is raised and the set can be tuned with a central tuning knob on the panel under the speaker grill.

Although the tuning dial is quite small, the plastic knob that sets the tuned frequency has a reduction gear which gives a bit more precise control that a direct knob would give.

Either side of the tuning knob is the band switch to change from Medium wave to Long wave, and the volume control used to set – well the volume.

Flair circuit diagram

I’ve included the circuit diagram of the Flair from the Radio & TV servicing manual below.

Ferguson Flair Specifications

• Ferguson Flair LW/MW AM radio from about 1957
• Full model number Ferguson 344B
• 182 – 557 m on medium wave
• 1090 – 1920 m on the Long wave
• Uses 90 V HT and 1.5 V LT batteries for power
• 4 Valve superhet design using the Dxx96 series of valves