Mr Jolly makes a wartime contribution

[old man emu]

Remember jolly Mr Jolly the Electrolux Man? 

 

Well, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door was the job he got after he was demobbed from the Army in the late 1940's, but, during the War, Electrolux was a small arms manufacturer. Electrolux built a factory in Orange, NSW in 1942 and operated as a small arms manufacturer until 1945. You've heard of the Owen sub-machine gun which was designed by an amateur in Lithgow NSW and subsequently manufactured by the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, bur have you heard of the Electrolux Charlton?

 

 

 

At the end of the War, there was concern the hundreds of people employed at the small arms factory would be unemployed. The mayor led a parade of people through Orange as a sort of protest saying 'We want jobs', and luckily Email Limited which had purchased  did a deal with the prime minister, Ben Chifley, to have a decentralised industry because the Orange factory was the ideal place.  The whitegoods factory was first known as Emmco, and then around 1960s it was named Email. At its peak workforce in the 1970s, it employed more than 2,000 people. As with all Australian manufacturing, the Email plant could not compete with import and closed in 2017.

[spacesailor]

Too many getting their sticky fingers in the till .

Including the tax man. 

spacesailor

[red750]

My father sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners at one stage. As an advertising ploy, all Electrolux salesmen were known as "Mr Jolly". They were Jolly Fine Fellows.

[willedoo]

Emmco (Electricity Meter Manufacturing Co. Ltd.) merged with New Systems Telephone Pty. Ltd. in 1934 and then became known as Electricity Meter and Allied Industries Limited. The Email acronym was adopted in 1951. They still built radios under the Emmco name until 1936.