The Dawn of Amateur Radio in the U.K. and Greece: A Personal ViewJoly, Norman F.
History
The Dawn of Amateur Radio in the U.K. and Greece: A Personal View
Joly, Norman F.
Radio broadcasting
When I returned to Athens in October 1944 on H.H.M.S. AVEROF I
had been appointed Radio Monitoring Officer of the Anglo-Greek
Information Service (A.G.I.S.) with a staff of about 25 W/T operators
and typists to assist me. My unit was a section of the Press
Department of the British Embassy. I think the choice of title was a
rather unfortunate mistake. The English words 'information' and
'intelligence' have only one equivalent word in Greek pliroforiesq.
And most Greeks hold peculiar views about the C.I.A. and the British
Intelligence Service. So here I was strutting about in the uniform of
a war correspondent bearing the flashes 'I.S.', the butt of many a
joke from my friends who accused me of being a master spy. My boss,
Colonel Johnson, who had been the British Council representative in
Greece prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, came to my office one
morning and told me that he had heard a rumour that King George of the
Hellenes, who was then in London, was going to broadcast in the Greek
service of the B.B.C. I replied I had heard nothing, but would try
and find out if the rumour was true. As he left my office I glanced
at my watch; it was 11 o'clock in the morning, 9 o'clock in London. I
telephoned the General Manager of Cable & Wireless, Mr Briggs, who was
a personal friend. I told him I wanted to make use of his facilities
to ask an urgent question of the B.B.C. in London. He replied, "Tell
McTaggert" (the engineer in charge of the Central Telegraph Office)
"that I said he should help you in any way possible."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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