[Arran]

I have made it a habit to be distrustful about the bidding of many fleabay auctions, it's just too easy for a seller to setup another account and bid up his own auction, or have friends or relatives do it for them. British Philco sets aside, I tend to be leery about buying many pre war (as well as some post war) British and European sets, unless they use either American RMA standard, or Phillips standard type tubes, you can be up a creek without a paddle. I see some Eastern European sets on there from the 1940s that use German style stahl (steel) tubes, and many have the whole set missing, some of those you can find easily, others you can't, I wonder if the tubes were yanked out to fabricate counterfeit replacements for that one used in Neumann microphones?
  The British tube system was a mess, they had like four base systems of tubes going at the same time, Mullard made and marketed Phillips tubes, Marconi-Osram had their own idea, Ediswan another, Mazda made octal tubes but with 4 volt heaters, S.T.C made American tubes under the Brimar name. The scary part is that they couldn't even agree on a numbering system, even if they made the same tube, each company seemed to have their own idea. Getting back to Marconi-Osram I once ran into an HMV radio-phono combo, it was from 1949-50 and it had seven pin minatures tubes, much like 6AV6, 6BE6, etc., what scared me away from it was the fact that whilst one or two had the same pinout as a North American tube, there were others that had a completely different one for really no reason at all that I could think of. Also the rectifier was like a pre-war four pin type like an #80, but with a 4 volt heater and a lower current rating, like 80 ma.
Regards
Arran