Memories of Wakefield's wartime 'wireless' service - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 6 August 2011

According to RAJAR audience figures for the 2nd quarter of 2011 just released, radio is regaining some of its lost popularity thanks partly to DAB receivers installed as standard in many new cars and partly to increasing use of Internet facilities such as the BBC iPlayer. I am, and always have been, an avid radio listener but when I was a child in wartime Wakefield we didn't own a proper wireless (as radios were commonly called). We had something called Radio Relay and this was the sole source of music and entertainment in our house from late-1939 until 1946.

For several hours of every day during the war both BBC domestic radio stations transmitted the same programme simultaneously, possibly as an economy measure but perhaps because of a shortage of material.
At set hours they jointly relayed some English-language news broadcasts from either the BBC European Service or the BBC General Overseas Service. In between programmes a recording of Bow Bells was used as  an interval signal, sometimes playing for several minutes on end.

The dedicated identification signal for the European Service was a recording of four soft drum taps repeated over and over again. Many people reckoned this signal was based on the opening of Beethoven's 5th Symphony but more likely it was simply a representation of the Morse signal for V, which represented Victory. Even though some programmes ended early, the next programme always, without fail, started at exactly the scheduled time – an art the BBC seems to have lost nowadays.

News broadcasts on the General Overseas Service were always preceded by an 18-second stirring, military band rendition of Lillibulero with lots of side drums. Listeners overseas needed those few seconds to search the short waves for the BBC signal and accurately tune in their temperamental receivers.

When an air raid in the Wakefield area was imminent, an announcer in the Radio Relay studio used to break into the BBC programme to transmit the local air raid warning message over both channels. When the all clear was received he, it was always a he, used to broadcast that as well. It was all ery reassuring.

Whenever I was 'up town', I used to peer through the doorway into the back room where I could see a bank of wireless equipment with lots of red lights and huge, glowing thermionic valves. There was a large sign on one of the receivers stating '1500 metres', that being the wavelength then used by the BBC's long wave transmitter at Droitwich, equivalent to a frequency 200 kilocycles per second. At that early age I couldn't see how there could  possibly be a direct relationship between metres and kilocycles per second and no-one I asked could explain it to me. I’m not even sure in the 1940s that I knew what exactly a metre was! Many years later, when I became a wireless fitter in the RAF, I learned that the frequency of a radio signal in kilocycles per second multiplied by its wavelength in metres equals the speed of light in metres per second – or as we rather succinctly said it – "f lambda equals c".  That, of course, explained everything as I am sure you will agree! (In those days the speed of light was 300,000 metres per second; it’s slowed down a bit in recent years!)