Is there anything this 90 year old gadget can’t do?
Sold as the ultimate household tool, it’s still used daily by its proud owners. An awestruck JANE FRYER gives it a whirl
MY VACUUM cleaner is three years old, cost nearly £200, and is already failing. The last one managed just four years before spluttering off to a dusty grave. My blender shattered after just two uses and our power saw has never worked properly.
Mary and Ivor Waite, from Halesowen near Birmingham, are faring rather better. Their vacuum cleaner is more than 90 years old, but still has the suction of a thousand hungry limpets.
It also doubles as a floor scrubber, polisher and buffer, shampoos carpets and upholstery to a lovely finish, waters the plants with the power of a mini tsunami, grinds coffee beans in seconds, minces meat, juices, shreds, grates, mixes, whisks, chops and promises to help prepare ‘dainty dishes with leftovers’.
And that — according to the extremely detailed 43-page laminated instruction manual, complete with fetching photographs of a lacquered and pinnied lady busy about the domicile — is just to help with the housewife’s daily chores.
For the man of the house, it is also a drill, power saw, sander and polisher and even has a special adapter to paint and varnish doors and windows. It can put up shelves, cut through marble, turn wood and polish your car. The Piccolo Household Motor was advertised as the world’s first ‘completely motorised housekeeping unit’ and the ‘symbol of the modern kitchen’. In 1925.
Earlier this week, there was quite a stir when it was revealed — 39 years after they were given it as a second-hand wedding present by Mary’s aunt, Cicely Phipps — that Mary and Ivor still use theirs all the time.
‘of course it still works!’ says Ivor, a retired electrician who uses it mostly for sanding furniture, vacuuming his car and filing off old nails — and can’t understand what all the fuss is about. ‘It was built to last. And it has.’
Today, they have kindly invited me into their home to try out the antique yet weirdly state-ofthe-art gadget. It is solid, heavy, pleasingly industrial to the touch and beautifully made by a German (naturally) manufacturing company called Hammelmann-Werk (Hammelmann Works). There is one central motor to which all the appliances attach and endless weighty parts made of steel, iron, rubber, ball bearings, plastic and reinforced glass.
I pop on my pinny, turn on the plug switch at the wall, screw in the vacuum attachment and flick the switch.
You can feel the power throbbing through it and the noise is deafening. This is not the sort of equipment you can talk over. or even shout over — it sounds as if a small plane is taking off in the Waites’ sitting room.
And you need a strong arm to hold it. But the suction is superb. And there are none of those fiddly bags you have to keep buying from robert Dyas — just the original material dust bag which doubles as a filter that you shake into the bin when it’s full.
So far, so good. So long as you can bear the noise. The floor polisher (attached to the end of the vacuum nozzle) is a bit more troublesome. The minute I turn it on, it’s off, whizzing about the floor like a rabid dog.
Mary, 63, and Ivor, 65, chortle happily as I chase it about.
‘You need to get the knack. Hold on! Show it who’s boss! I use it all the time to clean the lino,’ says Mary. ‘It does a lovely job.’ rather her then me. Next we try the mincer — Mary’s favourite attachment. ‘It’s a brilliant mincer — and I worked on a deli counter for years, so I know a thing or two about butchery!’ she says. ‘I use it every week for the leftover roast — a nice bit of meat, a few onions, a bit of garlic and, hey presto, a lovely cottage pie or a meat loaf.’
We feed meat into a metal hole and prod it towards the terrifying-looking blades with a smooth wooden peg.
‘Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure the blade’s too far down to get your fingers minced,’ she says.
It works a treat. Within seconds, pink wiggly worms of meat are curling into a bowl. A few land on the floor but we can vacuum them up later — before we shampoo the carpet and vacuum the sofas and put up a couple of shelves and water the plants.
Ivor and Mary are a good team. They met when he was 15 and she was just 13.
‘He was getting ready for Scouts and couldn’t take his eyes off me,’ says Mary. ‘He was my only boyfriend.’
They married 12 years later with a reception, fittingly, in the local Scout hut. There was no honeymoon and they were not awash with money, so Aunty Cicely’s Piccolo (which cost 20 guineas, or £21, when new) was like manna from Heaven.
‘Even though it wasn’t brand new, it was a great wedding present and came in a huge leather case. We couldn’t believe our luck.’
Neighbours popped round to admire it. Everyone wanted a go. The Waites don’t like a fuss and are reluctant show-offs. ‘But I suppose it wasn’t just a vacuum,’ says Ivor.
Although large parts of the instructions were, according to Ivor, ‘in foreign’, most of it was common sense.
It is a brilliantly simple piece of kit. There are no unnecessary parts or endless settings — just one black switch. ‘It’s either on or it’s off,’ says Ivor.
Mary has used it constantly — vacuuming, juicing, shredding, liquidising, mixing and mincing.
For years, every Christmas Eve she mixed up the turkey stuffing for lunch with their two children and now two grandchildren. And every Boxing Day she minced the leftover meat and vacuumed up the mess. The manual promised: ‘Look after your Piccolo and it will reward you with years of faithful service.’
And they clearly did, because it never went wrong, never fused and was never temperamental. It needed no maintenance — ‘other than a quick wipe’ — and no spare parts.
‘It’s been dropped a few times, but it’s never broken,’ says Mary.
‘The only thing I had to do was put a new mains cable on the motor, but that’s all,’ says Ivor.
Which, given it has been around since Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister, George V was King and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was published, is quite something.
‘Things used to be made to last,’ says Ivor. ‘Today, they’re made to break. They put a silicon chip in everything and you can tell a silicon chip to do anything you like, can’t you? But we don’t like throwing things away, do we Mary?’
‘It makes me laugh when I see these flashy TV adverts for vacuums and kitchen appliances. Who needs all this modern stuff?’ she says. ‘Modern appliances are just not as strong.’ So do they have any other ancient gadgets tucked away that still work? ‘only the wife!’ says Ivor. ‘Seriously, we never chuck anything away.’
This time, he’s not joking. They still own slow cookers dating back decades; not one, but two, giant knitting machines dating from the Sixties; and a pressure cooker from the Stone Age.
‘We’ve got everything — you name it, we could probably find you one.’ How about a Teasmade? ‘ooh, we did have one. What did we do with it? We’ve definitely got one somewhere,’ says Mary.
‘It’s in the garage with one of those old tape-to-tape recorders.’
Do they all work? ‘of course! — we don’t like things that don’t work properly.’
Which is why when the Piccolo juicer and slicer attachments disappointed years ago, Mary binned them without ceremony. ‘They were the only weak link.’ The beautiful leather bag went, too, when it cracked up and perished. other attachments have never even been used.
‘I like fresh coffee, but Mary doesn’t, so we’ve never used the bean grinder,’ says Ivor. We give it an inaugural whizz and the beans are dust in exactly one-and-a-half seconds. ‘Wow!’ says Ivor. Wow indeed. Next we try the plant spray. Which is not for faint-hearted foliage. A pipe from the machine runs into a handheld pot of water, which is sucked up and fired out. As the leaves are blasted, the plant bends as if in a wind tunnel.
The mixing bowl, however, is a bit of a letdown — the blades are clumsy and the mixture slops messily.
‘We never thought much of that bit,’ says Mary tartly. ‘I’m surprised I haven’t chucked it out before.’ The drill, though, is a (terrifying) mar-
vel — powering straight through two pieces of wood and nearly spearing the table.
The sander and buffer have the power of 20 men. And Ivor bans me from using the saw. ‘I wouldn’t. There’s no safety guard. It’ll probably take your fingers off.’ And the one thing the Piccolo won’t do is stick them back on. Though it could probably sand off what’s left into nice smooth stumps and then varnish them.
The best bit of all though is the paint spray — again, never used. It works in the same way as the water spray. I press the button and out comes the finest mist of scarlet paint. The coverage is superb, the quality brilliant. You could paint an entire room in minutes. ‘I can’t believe I’ve never used it,’ says Ivor.
After an hour or so, we’re coming to the end of the Piccolo’s myriad talents. Is there anything else they would have liked it to do?
‘Well, we’ve got a perfectly good kettle and a toaster, so we don’t need it to do that,’ says Ivor.
‘If it somehow made money, that would be nice,’ says Mary. ‘That would be very nice. But I’m rather fond of it as it is.’ I’m not surprised. The Piccolo is a 90-year-old space age marvel. Simple, effective, occasionally worryingly powerful and so noisy no one could bother you while you’re chopping, sawing, varnishing, buffing or grinding your morning coffee.