Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age by Adrian Johns

Author:Adrian Johns [Johns, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780393341805
Google: r1656j5sqRAC
Amazon: 0393341801
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-11-08T20:48:32+00:00

REGINALD CALVERT CAME from a different generation from Smedley, and a very different culture. Born in 1928, his background lay far from high finance and politics, in that world of lay ingenuity that had spawned the wireless “amateurs” of the twenties in towns like Coventry. His parents were professional musicians, who often traveled abroad on concert tours. His father was a keen inventor as well, and his grandfather, who brought him up after the parents separated, was an engineer who spent the Depression years in the industrial city of Huddersfield, working first in the Morris car works and then in munitions. After work, he spent long hours in the cellar trying to build a perpetual motion machine. As a child, Reg (as he was always called) enjoyed working on experiments too. He attended an unprepossessing board school, but one that, unusually, had a chemical laboratory, and by the age of fourteen he was dominating chemistry lessons. Meanwhile his grandparents taught him the piano, saxophone, and clarinet. Reg began performing music publicly, and learned to compère big band events at the Huddersfield Baths on Wednesday evenings.

Calvert was not the type to relish military service, and he did his duty as an Army barber. He was still in uniform when he married at eighteen. His new wife, Dorothy, was the same age. Her father had died of tuberculosis, and her mother had done her best to bring Dorothy up in the new public housing to which the family was moved for fear of further infection. She had excelled at school, and her mother wanted her to go on to university, but marriage supplanted that prospect. In the short term the young couple faced tough times. The Calverts were typical of a generation that had great hopes for a new society, in which enlightened social policies would free people from the inequality and want of the Depression years. But for now their concerns were more pressing. Austerity was starting to bite; employment was hard to come by and even basic goods were rationed. The first and most pressing need was for a place to live. But where housing stock had not been flattened by the Luftwaffe, it was decrepit and dilapidated.3 Dorothy Calvert decided she was determined to get out of Huddersfield. So Reg bought an old bus, and the Calverts recruited some prisoners of war to help convert it into a trailer. Then they had it towed down to the south coast. In Southampton they rented a plot of land, parked their trailer on it, and moved into their makeshift home.4

Reg Calvert tried his luck at a series of enterprises in and around Southampton to make ends meet. He continued to compère dances. At one point he worked as a pianist in a hotel bar. At another, he bought Army surplus radio equipment and rented a shop to sell it from, taking time to experiment in transmitting. It is even said that he tried his hand at producing jam, encouraged by the

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