The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

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Lord Reith
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The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by Lord Reith »

And you thought YOU were drowning in tapes, magazines and cds?

Think again!

Here is the incredible tale of a wealthy Australian man who for 50+ years hoarded every imaginable aspect of everyday culture, from cereal boxes to magazines to records and... tv and radio shows!

This is a man so obsessive that at the end of each day he would write down the day's events on a sheet of paper and put it in a manilla folder along with any bits of paraphernalia he had acquired that day: leaflets, labels... all sorts of stuff! He would buy records and keep them in their original shop bags, and while at it collect a copy of every flyer relating to the current bands in the store and keep those too. He collected magazines, toys, and even food labels and tins of soup!

The big news though is that - being wealthy - he had a massive collection of video and audio recording equipment going back to the early 70s and beyond. After his death they found literally tens of thousands of umatic, betamax and every other imaginable format of recording tape stacked to the rafters in his rambling home. He taped complete runs of science fiction series going back to the early 1970s, plus radio, movies, music shows and everything else under the sun. The guy was a one-man equivalent of The British Library.

Now the horrible part! :(

It seems that when the gent went into a decline (apparently he'd been sleeping on the floor because his home was so overdcrowded with stuff) the family sent him to respite, and while he was there they went through his precious hoarded treasures and binned 27 tonnes worth of it! And no, that isn't a typo. Apparently there was a line of trucks down the street there was so much of it. And with it went literally thousands of umatic tapes that probably contained tons of lost tv not just from Australia but Britain too. By the time the right people found out what was going on, a huge amount of material was lost, but even so there were still tens of thousands of betamax and other formats of tape in the house.

It turns out that when his will was finally read, he specifically stated he didn't want his stuff to go into public archives, but to his "friends". And then we get into the shadowy world of hoarders and collectors... but I won't spoil it. Listen for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

There may be a silver lining in that there were also found thousands of hard drives and dvdrs, plus literature on how to digitise material. So did he at some point transfer some of the tapes to digital? Or did he just keep recording off the tv but use hard drives instead? He apparently was a big Dr Who fan so would have been fully aware of the 1970s purges at the BBC, but had no desire to share his hoard with anyone else. Did he just tape and tape and never ever even watch the stuff? Or did he occasionally find time in the middle of all this to actually sit down and enjoy it. Only time will tell. They say that even with what remains of the collection, it will take 10 years to go through completely.

There were times when I almost wept listening to this, not just for the possible loss of precious cultural material but for the misunderstanding of what this man had accomplished among his family members. They just saw a load of rubbish to be cleared. In fact it was a pricless cultural archive that would have filled a museum. So much of his life's work destroyed.

Surely one of the most interesting stories you will ever hear!

Listen here:

http://tinyurl.com/ozhoarder
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zaval80
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by zaval80 »

LOL. I get 100 kg of music books and mags a year, if I did this for 50 years that would be 5 tons :lol: and I don't expect having about $600 a month to continue feeding the hobby in the advanced age :shock:
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by Lemonhead »

There's the somewhat similar case of the British comedian Bob Monkhouse, who had acquired a home video recorder as early as 1966 and obsessively taped shows. He also built up a huge archive of 16mm films, and some unique items amongst those went permanently missing when he was investigated and then acquitted on a nonsensical charge relating to copyright infringement. The video tapes were professionally archived, catalogued and digitised after his death in 2003. It seems odd, though, that (as far as I'm aware) nothing significant has so far emerged relating to the Beatles or, indeed, Dr Who, despite the large number of episodes missing from the late 1960s. Maybe he wasn't a fan.

Monkhouse was also famous for compiling a gigantic collection of jokes. He is the guy who said, 'They all laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now.'
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Lord Reith
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by Lord Reith »

I'm still very upset about this story. That his relatives mistook him for one of those people who hoardes actual rubbish, and binned decades worth of precious cultural artefacts. I can really relate to this guy, for while I am not insanely (or even remotely) wealthy, I too have spent much of my life consumed by a desire to preserve tv, radio and other stuff. For a time in the late 90s/early 2000s I had accumulated shelves and shelves worth of vhs tapes and would not have stopped there if I hadn't run out of room. My family too thought I was utterly mad. When recordable dvd came along I immediately started collecting those too and embarked on a three-year project to transfer all the tapes to disc. When digital tv started i also began saving tv shows to hard drive, and then when streaming took off I began to fill up hard drives with streams. So I know exactly where this guy was coming from, and the only difference was that he had unlimited finances and so could indulge in his obsession without limits.

Here's hoping that like me he actually transferred the rarest material to digital. He sounds like he was an extremely adept and technically savvy guy, not just some nutter who hoarded cereal boxes. He would have known that his earliest reel to reel and umatic recordings would have contained lost material. But did he care enough to actually migrate it to another format?

Geez I would have loved to have met this guy.
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by kontroller »

There are many Doctor Who fans who are devastated about what might have been a 'near miss' at getting hold of some of those precious missing 60s episodes. But we can't know for sure what was junked. At least efforts are underway to catalogue the vast amount of recordings that were not disposed of.
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by harrythebannister »

Bob Monkhouse recorded radio from as far back as the late 40s plus loads of variety which he studied. I always hoped that some of the missing Beatles appearances on Big Night Out May have materialised, but nothing so far. I believe Kaleidoscope are cataloguing everything.
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by bobzilla »

Seems like if 27 tonnes got pitched at roughly the same time, there's probably a distinct spot at the local landfill where his stuff is. Could they not just go and collect what got thrown away?
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by greyratfromBZ »

I guess when you keep and retain soooo much that it gives the appearance of squalor, and in this case this fellow seems to have been living in actual squalor. His immediate family and friends probably viewed his situation with frustration and sympathy - not as archivists. So "we need to clean this up" - was obviously top of mind. I think if he was more narrow in his hoarding tastes - he'd of been fine but the mental state of a hoarder to keep everything is their own worse enemy and leads to the trash bin from outsiders who are just looking to clean up and bring order.
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by greyratfromBZ »

Thx for sharing that tho - that was a fascinating listen.
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Re: The Hoarder House Of Camberwell

Post by greyratfromBZ »

bobzilla wrote: Wed Nov 23, 2022 1:20 pm Seems like if 27 tonnes got pitched at roughly the same time, there's probably a distinct spot at the local landfill where his stuff is. Could they not just go and collect what got thrown away?
In the podcast they say that the trucks that took away the 27 tons - was a "compress/compactor" that crushed and compacted the stuff on the spot so it could be transported away easier. So pretty much demolished on site.
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