Yes, Stanley, it was Alwyn Plunkett. I haven't much on this although I do recall that when we moved into the brand new council houses on Oaklands (1954) the house was connected to the relay via a large brown bakelite box containing a coaxial socket. We payed Plunketts weekly for this service.

As a lad I remember Plunketts shop had a number of large L & S wave aerials out the back, they progressed into TV rentals and had the upper floor of Berry's Mill no.1 shed (above Riddiough's Caravan works) for a repair workshop. This upper floor was linked to Berry's (now Talbot Plating) via a 40 foot high gantry/ bridge that had long been dissused. One Sunday morning in about 1960 Nandy and his mates (who were 5 years older than us) made Spud and myself 'walk the plank' across this bridge which, by then, only consisted of  two  girders about a yard apart. Only absolute terror (after all we were only about 7 years old) stopped me and Spud from freezing half way across, besides which the Barrowford Mafia were prodding us with sticks to keep us going.

When we reached Plunkett's workshop we found that the door was open and so Nandy suggested that we could use the lift down into the loading bay instead of chancing our arm back over the girders. However, fate intervened in the form of Polish Alec who worked for the Plunketts. Alec had been a Spitfire pilot during the war and brought his Polish wife over to England to settle in Barrowford afterwards. Unknown to us Alec was working overtime that Sunday morning and the sight of him appearing from among the stacked TV and radio sets caused mass panic. "Leg It" shouts Nandy and pushed me back out of the door onto the bridge, a stampede followed and, with me and Spud again at the front of proceedings, we flew back over the girders ten times faster than our first attempt. To this day I think of running full pelt along a 10 inch wide girder, 40 feet above ground, for about 50 feet, at the age of 7, and wonder how we survived. We got our own back though, Nandy's mob decided to have a ride in the lift (of course they wouldn't let me and Spud in and left us on the ground) so we pressed the emergency stop button when they were between floors, ran to nearby Jackson & Hanson's garage and told them there was an emergency as Riddiough's lift had blown up -and could they call the fire brigade? This they did and all the services appeared on the scene just as the Mafia had managed to extracate themselves from the lift.  Me and Spud were tittering our heads off at this stage ( from a safe distance) .

There had to be a follow up, of course, the Mafia's revenge was to put me and Spud on a scaffold pipe outside the top floor of the half-built flats in Fountain Square. They took away the ladders and legged it, leaving us high and dry.

Anyway, after that major digression, back to radios -  here is a short excerpt from "In Those Days" by  Albert Morris (mine and Nandy's late uncle):

 1930s......
As kids, we knew the use of carbide chips for, after school we would go to Sam
o' Nicks, the welding and engineering works at the bottom of Church Street.
Lee Jackson and his son Nicholas, generated their own acetylene gas from
chunks of calcium carbide in a large generator. Up the hillside, above the
workshop, were large piles of spent carbide lime which, over the years, had
hardened into hillocks. Their workshop machinery was powered by a
paraffin-gas engine which had to be started by throwing a powerful flywheel
round and many's the time Nicholas or Lee himself had been thrown against the
wall by hanging on too long when it started unexpectedly.

A generator charged accumulators for battery radios, the accumulators being
similar to car batteries but smaller and with glass cases. These were used to
supply the valve filament with a low voltage, while 120 volt dry batteries
supplied the high voltage. Radios, in those days, also had a third power source,
a nine volt battery which supplied what was known as 'grid bias' voltage to the
valves. As many as twenty accumulators at a time could be charged and a large
number of lamps were used to drop the voltage. This set-up looked like something
out of science fiction.

I wondered what the big black cable was that runs over my roof......

I used to have "cable" tv in the early 80's in south east London, I paid £4 a month for it and it included the tv, bargain....

No rush BJ, just wondered how you were doing with it.  I couldn't make head or tail of it.