After the war, I went to the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, a suburb of Reading. It was a big aerial system to listen to radio programmes all over the world.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.
In 1918, when I was 6 or 7 years old, radio was just coming into use in the Great War.
In 1941, the BBC was setting up local, low-powered transmitters that were switched off if there was an air raid so they couldn't be used by German planes to navigate. As a 'youth in training,' my job was to switch the transmitter on in the mornings and off at night, and to check that it, and the feeder land lines, were working.
That radio was very important for me. It meant I always knew what was going on in the world.
If you had a good radio - and everybody did in those days - you could find it.
Radio, newspapers, they were normal parts of my life. In those days, you had to go somewhere to watch television and leave something to see it.
Radio, which was a much better medium than television will ever be, was easy and pleasant to listen to. Your mind filled automatically with images.
I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.
I listen to XM radio because I can get so many overseas news stations.
Radio in England is nonexistent. It's very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.