Britain's oldest fridge is still working after 58 years.
The electrical food-cooler was first bought by Doris Stogdale in 1952 when she lived in Malaysia with her family.
Thought to be the oldest working fridge in Britain, it has been in continuous use since it was bought in 1952 and has never required any maintenance – nor a single replacement part aside from the odd light bulb.
The GE Refrigerator was purchased from the Universal Electric Engineering Company for 1,090 ringgits, or Malay dollars, which was around £135 at the time.
The Stogdales, who had three children, David, 59, Valerie, 55 and Annie, 52, and eight grandchildren, returned to the UK in 1959, settling in Oxford, and shipped the refrigerator with their belongings, without ever breaking down.
The 89-year-old retired piano teacher bough the General Electric fridge back in 1952 and has never had any problems with it.
She said: "It's kept going for pretty much an entire lifetime. It might not have any shelves inside for your eggs or any fancy lights or ice makers, but it has always worked for us."
Her husband, Vivian, who died in 1996, was 31 when the fridge was bought and had been sent abroad to work as an engineer.
Daughter Valerie said she had written to General Electric ‘because we thought they might like to know our old fridge was still going strong’.
What she did not realise was that just two months earlier the company had held a competition to find Britain’s oldest fridge that had been won by another General Electric appliance that had been going for only 56 years.
The final Curious © phrase:
“I have the body of an eighteen year old. I keep it in the fridge”
(Spike Milligan)
