Chapter 5 Cardiff, London and Evesham 1961 to 1968
Cardiff University 1961 - 1964
I started my degree course for a B.Sc in electrical engineering in September 1961 at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire (as it was known then - later it became simply Cardiff University)
The family had left Tenby during the summer of 1961 and moved to Halesowen in the West Midlands. To the house that Percy had bought after Jeanne's death, which was where my grandmother, Marie had lived since 1950. David transferred to Halesowen Grammar School and I moved to Cardiff in September 1961 to 'digs' (shared bedroom and breakfast and dinner supplied for about £3 a week !) in Summerfield Avenue on the north side of the city centre. I can't say I was happy there, I missed Tenby and family life . I had also built quite a lot of audio equipment, such as amplifiers, loudspeakers etc which had been moved to Halesowen. My degree course was in Electrical Engineering, which involved a lot of work and was rather boring at times. I did little to get involved in university life though, which was my own fault.
Starting from the age of around fourteen in Tenby I had started to build several audio electronics projects, with help and encouragement from my Dad. I started with a fairly basic audio amplifier based on a 'Practical Wireless' (magazine) design. This was linked with a turntable and arm capable of playing the relatively new LP vinyl discs. I also constructed column loudspeakers which rather dominated the small living room, but which my mother tolerated remarkably well ! Later, more advanced projects included a reel to reel tape recorder and various other pieces of sound equipment . All of this pointed fairly obviously to a university course with electronics as the foundation. At this point in time and even throughout my degree course in electrical engineering, electronics was based on hot, rather dangerous valve technology, with solid state transistor developments very much in the future and initially sneered at by some in the field.
I did a lot of my construction work in a metal shed in the garden of Greengate in Tenby. This had a rather dodgy mains electricity feed from the house and I regularly had electric shocks from the Alternating current of the mains, but also Direct current from the power supplies for thermionic valves. By some miracle, I survived !
The first attempt at building a tape recorder was with an Aspden tape deck, costing £10 in 1959 (a lot of money then).
It was not a great success but taught me a lot about the technology and in particular the High Frequency bias used almost universally in magnetic recording at that time.
Here is a extract recorded in the Greengate shed in 1959 featuring my brother David and visiting friends Stephen and Hilary ,with the shed in the background of the picture, behind David.
My first really successful tape recorder had a Collaro tape deck and a home built Mullard designed tape pre amplifier. I took great delight in producing sound recordings of friends and family when they were not expecting it. This invasive practice delighted some but not surprisingly annoyed others !
One vintage short extract of my Great Aunt Nora Brown talking about the history of our Sternberg ancestors actually led to my Dad and myself developing an interest in genealogy. Listen here to Auntie Nora, recorded on Christmas Day 1961.
At the end of my first year I did six weeks 'work experience' at the GEC factory at Witton in Birmingham, working for part of the time on the construction of large power transformers for eventual installation in electricity substations. The experience confirmed my underlying instinct that I had little interest in that side of my subject, being much more interested in electronics and in particular, broadcast engineering, such as audio and television.
For my second 'long vacation' in 1963 I was fortunate enough to get a placement at the BBC in Birmingham in the face of strong competition for a limited number of vacancies. I experienced everything from audio tape editing (using a razor blade !) to sound outside broadcasts. I worked on the coverage of the 1963 by election at Stratford caused by for forced resignation of a government minister - the Profumo affair.
My room mate for the first year was a medical student who was very involved with student activity and whom I saw very infrequently. In my second year though I was joined by John Charles from Trimsaran, a Welsh speaking architecture student with whom I got on well and we went on to share a top floor flat closer to Cardiff city centre.
John's mother, who was a schoolteacher from Trimasaran was widowed and lived with her sister. The family would meet up regularly in Cardiff and it was thanks to their kindness that I had my first grilled steak ! A Berni Inn had opened up opposite Cardiff castle and the four of us went there to eat one weekend lunchtime.
John was an avid supporter of Welsh rugby and invariably attended the home internationals at the Arms Park. This was usually followed by drinking at one of the hotels in Queen Street where teams and fans gathered after the match. This kind of crowded boozy gathering did not appeal to me, nor has it in later life, so I opted out !
I found my final year at Cardiff much easier. A subject that had been added as a break from maths and engineering, was Industrial Relations lead by Campbell Balfour a lively Scot who introduced elements of social history and politics which led to vigorous debates within the class.
In my final few months, I saw a notice in the student's union asking for people interested in joining a choir to travel overland to Chandīgarh in India to participate in a Commonwealth Youth Festival. I applied, with little expectation on being accepted but was called by the organisers for an interview. I learned that they were looking for people with a variety of skills including driving, radio repair and automotive, since the participants were driving the coach themselves overland. I was accepted, despite my dubious ability to sing (but I could at least pronounce Welsh reasonably well - another requirement).
This was complicated slightly by the fact that I had been accepted by the BBC to start as direct entry engineer in September 1964.
My mother was furious when I opted to go to India !
I arranged with the BBC to delay my employment date for a couple of months and got involved in the planning of the rather hazardous overland trip to India. Since this involved driving through Iran and Afghanistan it was a serious project and would be virtually impossible today.
The whole event was suddenly halted by the death of the President of India Pandit Nehru on 27 May 1964. The festival was cancelled with no date set for a later date.
The BBC very generously agreed to reinstate my employment date and I proceeded with finals exams and graduation at Cardiff City Hall in August 1964.
Later that month I went on another European cycle trip, this time on my own, travelling from Dover to Ostend, Bruges, Brussels, the Ardennes to the River Rhine at Cologne. Then I followed the Rhine to Stuttgart, Heidelberg and to the borders with Switzerland and Austria at Lake Constance (or Bodensee)
I didn't cycle the whole way back to Ostend, but caught the train from Coblenz across Belgium.
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| The Grand Place in Brussels in 1964 In late September 1964 I joined the BBC Communications department in London. The department had several sections, all based in the annexe at the rear of Broadcasting House, (BH), which has now been rebuilt following the closure of Television Centre. I was initially on a three month probation period, which traditionally had been followed by a course at the BBC Engineering Training Department at Woodnorton near Evesham. This course for 'direct entry engineers' had however been scrapped just before I started, so it was two years before I eventually went to Woodnorton. I sent my two years in London in shared flats and houses, mainly with house - mates with Pembrokeshire connections. One flat was within site of Wembley Park Stadium and the last was in Ealing. For a while I cycled into Broadcasting house along Western Avenue, but after a few months the winter winds and London traffic persuaded me to revert to the Tube. I had a circle of friends in London during this time, based mainly around house mates and work colleagues, but none of them were particularly close. I stayed in touch with Heinz, who was in Bristol, studying to become a Merchant Navy Radio officer and we met up a few times, travelling by train between the two cities. Sadly, a tragic event occurred in 1963 at Luneburg where Heinz and I had been two years before. His mother, stepfather and brother Tony, who was ten years old, were staying in the town. Tony was taken by his father to the local swimming pool, where in a moments lack of concentration he drowned. The family was devastated and so was I since I had known them all for many years. Tony's body was brought back to Tenby, where he is buried next to the chapel in the Town cemetery. I was sent to Belfast in March of 1965 for three weeks to fill a temporary vacancy in the Comms Dept . Memorably this was my first commercial flight anywhere. In January 1965, I played a small part in the state funeral of Winston Churchill. The service took place in St Paul's Cathedral in London and I was given the job of equalising the sound lines from St Pauls to Broadcasting house. Later the same year I was part of the Comms crew at Television Centre in West London for the General Election. This was the final major political broadcast hosted by the veteran broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, who died of cancer in December 1965 I knew at an early stage in my time with the BBC that I did not want to stay in London. I applied for a regional posting and was offered a job within Communications Department at Cardiff, which I readily accepted. I returned to Cardiff in 1966. In between, I had my first course at Evesham, improving my rather sketchy knowledge of transistor theory and application, which at that time was the important future for practical electronics.  The BBC in Cardiff was a hotchpotch of locations around the city in 1966, with most of the sound department located around Park Place in the city centre, whilst the television operations were mainly in Broadway off Newport Road. Here a former chapel had been converted into a general purpose studio plus continuity and the TV switching centre for which Comms dept was responsible. I immediately took to the live atmosphere of this aspect of the BBC and it formed the basis of most of my next thirty years in broadcasting. Communications departments in the BBC regions had just undergone a merger of the former Lines departments and Radio Links. In Cardiff, this forced marriage had not resulted in a happy union and there was a lot of rivalry and bad feeling , made worse by a number of strong willed and abrasive personalities. All in all it was not a happy place to work !  BBC radio links vehicle at the National Eisteddfod at Aberavon 1966 One of the responsibilities of Comms Dept was outside broadcast (OB) lines equalisation. Sound lines for both radio and television OBs were rented from the Post Office (later BT), but were not normally suitable for broadcast quality before frequency equalisation was applied. Various other tests were necessary to to overcome inherent noise problems. At this time the BBC did its own equalisation, whereas ITV rented lines that were deemed acceptable for broadcast quality. Since a Comms engineer had to travel to the OB point about a week prior to broadcast, there was a lot of driving involved and time spent in hotels. This was particularly true in Wales, where a church service (often in Welsh) was broadcast every Sunday, alternating between South and North Wales. I got to know the roads and villages quite well during this period. One of the remotest locations was Aberdaron on the Lleyn Peninsula where I drove one winters day from Cardiff to carry out a lines equalisation at a tiny church near the coast. The telephone lines in that area were mainly bare wires on telegraph poles exposed to the ravages of moist salt laden air and strong wind. These conditions were a nightmare for sound signals since the damp penetrated the joints and added to the problems of audio noise. A trip like this could last two days and must have cost the BBC a fortune in travel and accommodation claims, when the audience was at most a few thousand people. It is not surprising that eventually the BBC began to rent pre equalised lines and ultimately reduce costs massively by using satellite and internet communications sub contracted to independent companies. But all of that was well into the future ! The part of my job that I enjoyed most at this time was being on operational shift duty in the television switching centre in Cardiff. This was the junction of all TV signals in and out of Wales and also where 'opt outs' were controlled for such things as regional continuity and news. It also involved responsibility for technical equipment, which in those days failed regularly and sometimes spectacularly . Some of the equipment was both temperamental and unreliable and you very often had to think quickly to get the station back on air. It also meant working closely with non engineering staff such as announcers and journalists. I met many interesting and entertaining people during that time. One of the most pleasant was the late lamented Ronnie Williams who was a continuity announcer and later comedy actor in the Welsh language series 'Ryan a Ronnie' with Ryan Davis. BBC staff in Cardiff were encouraged to take Welsh lessons, given in the BBC Club by a welsh speaking programme producer. They were based on a course of radio lessons running at the time. Even though I had never formally taken lessons, I had a very basic vocabulary and perhaps more importantly and ability to pronounce Welsh reasonably fluently. I never gained very much ability to converse, however. Welsh is not an easy language to take up beyond childhood, as countless surveys and census reports have found. The proportion of fluent Welsh speakers has remained at around 11 % despite a vigorous attempt to popularise and encourage by language enthusiasts and nationalist politicians. One very famous event in 1966 was the football World Cup. By that time I was staying in the house of Mrs Howell, a widow, who was a very friendly and tolerant landlady. I shared the rented part of her house with two former university friends who were both doing PhDs. Although I wasn't particularly interested in football, I, like many others became enthusiastic about the World Cup and watched England's games as the team progressed to the final. BBC television was still transmitting in black and white in 1966, but the electric atmosphere was infectious on the day when England beat Germany in the final. |
A few months later in January 1967, I met Rosalind Anderson, who lived close to my family in Halesowen. We quickly bonded and that autumn we took my Triumph Vitesse by ferry from Fishguard to Rosslare and on to Cork, where we collected a caravan to tow around the South West of Ireland.
That spring in 1967, I applied for an attachment as an assistant lecturer at the BBC Training School at Evesham , initially for six months, but with possible extension to a year or more if progress was satisfactory. In the event, I was there for a year until May 1968.
In October 1968 I was part of the communications team relaying television signals across the Atlantic from the Olympic Games in Mexico. I was based at a remote satellite relay station near Meopham in Kent with one other comms engineer. Our responsibility was to monitor and maintain the link carrying signals from the ground satellite station at Pleumeur-Bodou in Brittany
Ros and I married on 11 July 1968 and lived for a few months in a rented top floor flat in Penarth.
A few months later, I saw a recruitment advert for electronic engineers by the Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs, based in Dublin. Without very much thought, I applied, flew to Dublin for an interview and was offered a job.
The pay was reasonably good and after Ros and I had talked it over, I accepted.
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