BBC Engineering Division - Direction
Engineering Division's leaders, listed below, were members of the BBC's Board of Management.
 Captain Peter Eckersley |
1923 - 1929 | Chief Engineer |
 Sir Noel Ashbridge |
1929 - 1952 | Chief Engineer, renamed Controller (Engineering) by 1938, then renamed Director of Technical Services |
 Sir Harold Bishop |
1952 - 1963 | Director of Technical Services renamed Director of Engineering in 1956 |
 Sir Francis McLean |
1963 - 1968 | Director of Engineering |
 Sir James Redmond |
1968 - 1978 | Director of Engineering |
| Dr Bryce McCrirrick CBE | 1978 - 1987 | Director of Engineering |
 Dr Bill Dennay |
1987 - 1993 | Director of Engineering |
The nucleus of BBC Engineering was formed to a large extent by engineers who created the pioneering broadcast station 2MT. An excellent resource for more information is provided by the Radio Emma Toc website. The engineers can be seen in the first picture on this page. Among those shown, Maclarty went on to become, in the BBC, the first head of the equivalent of Planning and Installation Department, Kirke became Head (or Assistant Head?) of Research Department, Wynn became a Deputy Director of Engineering, Ashbridge became a Director of Engineering and uniquely, for a period during the war, was Deputy Director General, and Eckersley was of course the BBC's first Chief Engineer. So, quite a hot-house of talent!
Senior engineering posts can be seen in this list of Abbreviated Titles which covered the whole of the BBC in 1962.
Click here to see a brochure for the 1972 Engineers-in-Charge Annual Meeting, which marked 50 years of BBC engineering (10MB PDF file). The people who attended are pictured in the brochure, but you can also click the picture below to see a larger version.
Managing BBC Engineering - A paper presented to the I.E.E. in 1981.