English Bay camp, home for 18 months

One group who did not take kindly to living in tents were the Marconi engineers installing the transmitters.  Their solution was to take the enormous packing cases the sender units had been shipped in and turn them into their own little village.  One of their number doubled as the camp barber, so he had his own little patio set up as a barber shop.  If I remember right Joe would charge one shilling and sixpence (about 7.5p for the younger) for a trim, but you’d probably have a least three bottles of beer pressed upon you during the operation, presumably as an anaesthetic. 

The Transmitter Site   

The Tx complex, 1968

When we arrived the main transmitter building was still being finished, although work had already started on installing the transmitters.  The admin block was barely started, and the centre of operations was the P. & I.D, hut, which stood in a hollow below one end of the main building.  Here John Rowe, The project engineer and first R.E. watched over progress, surrounded by critical path analysis charts and other paraphernalia. Although we were the first operational staff, we were by no means the first BBC staff on site.  Jim Gray, Ralph Williams and Cathol McClean were setting up the aerial field and training the newly recruited St Helenian riggers at the same time, while Tony Preedy was overseeing the sender installation and Dave Driver was controlling the installation of the P.I.E. and sender control gear, as well as the receiving station. 

The main building vaguely resembled an aircraft hanger, a long pitched roof building with enormous sliding doors at each end to allow the transmitters access.  Above and alongside these doors were enormous glass windows, some twenty feet wide and thirty feet high at the ridge.  They were made from very thick corrugated glass panels, and must have weighed an enormous amount.  The senders were all arranged along one side of the hall, whilst on the opposite side the control room, in the centre of the building, was flanked by workshops, stores, mess rooms and toilets, etc.  One peculiar feature of the design was that the battery room was situated above the H.V.switch room, and was only accessible from this room by a vertical ladder.  This made transporting carboys of acid up to it an interesting operation!  Some years later an external staircase was installed.  Another feature worthy of note is that the building was designed to be positively pressurised.  The environment was known to be very dusty, so three large fans were installed in the roof space to ensure that the air pressure inside the building was higher than ambient, thus preventing the ingress of dust.  It never worked.  When the doors were all closed the heat build-up in the building was unbearable.  The only way to survive was to open the sliding doors and let the wind blow through.  The fans lay idle for years, and were eventually removed. 

When completed the admin block was to comprise of two small offices, for the R.E. and the P.A.O. (The Presentation and Administration Officer, Maurice Turner), A large office intended for the A.R.E and admin. Assistant(s), a dining room and a kitchen.  Some distance from the main building stood a small shack, shown on the drawings as “The link hut”, and ostensibly the home of the standby VHF link to the receiving station.  In practise the VHF gear was housed in the main building, and the hut was to be home to the two 250W RCAs providing the MF feed of World Service to the Island, the mast supporting the VHF antennas doing double duty as an MF radiator.

Transmitting station control desk, Sept '67 (If you believe the calendar) 

One other major feature of the transmitter site at the time of our arrival perhaps deserves a mention.  At the time the site had no fresh water or drainage.  Creature comforts were provided by a row of about a dozen ‘thunderboxes’ situated behind the main building, on a ridge overlooking English Bay and the ocean.  What they lacked in comfort they more than made up in outlook. The two boxes at one end were fitted with locked modesty doors, the keys to which were only handed to “supervisory” (i.e. white) staff.  The remainder were open to inspection, so that the foreman in charge of the labourers could walk round and check that none of his staff were taking too long in enjoying the view.  

With no transmitters to operate the newly arrived staff were assigned to various tasks helping the installers.  I spent a couple of months helping to construct and position the dozens of scaffold tube frames that were to support the RF switches and groundwork of the arrays.  I also remember a white knuckle afternoon or two helping Jim Gray set up dummy load krause arrays from the dizzy heights of a cherry picker. 

While the main building was a hive of activity with contract wiremen, electricians, bricklayers, painters and yes, eventually, plumbers  all beavering away, the aerial field, as it was then called, was equally busy.  The site was surrounded by, and partly occupied, a lava flow (now cooled!).  A considerable amount of explosive had been used to excavate the holes for mast bases and stay blocks.  Apparently the nature of the rock was extremely variable, and the effect of the blasting was not always predictable.  I was told that on one occasion after the charges had all been carefully placed there was a loud bang and a single, very large chunk of rock went straight up into the air and fell back into the hole it had just left.  By the time of our arrival Marconi riggers were erecting the masts.  I have to admit that these guys worried me.  It was standard practise for everyone to leave site and return to the camp for lunch.  After lunch the riggers, and some others, would spend half an hour or so replenishing their liquid levels in the bar, then it was back to work.  In my experience, when you’ve consumed a few cans of beer the time eventually comes when you need to get rid of it, and I reasoned that if you are at the top of a three hundred foot mast you probably wouldn’t bother climbing down to visit the appropriate facility.  I therefore made a point of staying well away from and upwind of any mast under construction in the afternoon! 

Sometime during this period we were informed that henceforth the station would no longer be called “The South Atlantic Relay Station”, but would become simply  “The Atlantic Relay Station” or A.R.S.  Dave Hoyle took great glee in informing Al Malcolm, the Assistant Resident Engineer, that this now made him A.R.E.A.R.S., or “‘airy arse” .  Al accepted it philosophically. 

Eventually transmissions began.  With all due pomp and ceremony the Island Administrator’s wife, Mrs Wainwright, pushed a button at English Bay which started up a tape machine at Butt Crater, the receiving site, and Sender 304 was radiating Bow Bells.  Ascension was on the air.  At the appropriate moment Clive Atkin and I, down at Butt Crater, faded down the tape machine (Studio Ops eat your hearts out!) and switched the feed of programme to that coming from one of our receivers!  Initially we only radiated during the evening period, so at the end of transmission after everything was shut down we would lock the doors of both buildings and literally leave the keys under the doormat for the day staff. 

Ascension was chosen as a site for a relay station because of its' geographical position.  In the words of Henry Hatch, the resident expert on the World Service programme "Short Wave Listener's Corner", "When everyone in Africa has gone to bed, the engineers on Ascension turn the transmitters round and point them at South America".  In actual fact, by using reversible aerial systems we were able to cover a large chunk of Western Africa as well as much of Brazil, Argentina, Latin America  and the Carribean. 

There were one or two areas where operating on Ascension differed from the same job in the U.K.  It took me a long time to get used to having to ask the Power House to start up another generator each time a sender was due on, or to tell them “finished with engines” at the end of the evening.  At the time the Power House was run by M.P.B.W (Ministry of Public Buildings and Works), and liason was not always at it’s best.  Although some of the staff were extremely helpful, and soon learned to anticipate our needs, others adopted a ‘jobsworth’ approach.  If you forgot to ask for extra power before starting a routine transmission, then it wouldn’t be there.  Wavechanges needed to be approached with caution.  Shorts and flip-flops were ‘rig of the day’ every day, so there was a lot of exposed skin in close proximity to hot coils.

Butt Crater during installation, only three of the five Racal receiver bays are fitted.
The far bay is for the search receivers

A somewhat alien environment to most of us, the receiving station at Butt Crater must rank as one of Tx Ops loneliest outposts.  After the initial ‘bedding in’ period it was staffed by a solitary engineer, responsible for selecting the best feeds of the many incoming frequencies being radiated from UK sites and routing them to the appropriate senders.   In addition there were reel-to-reel tape machines to be cued up, started and stopped at the correct times with pre-shipped tapes of non-topical programmes, (Plays, comedy shows etc were much in demand after transmission for home consumption before the tapes were returned for re-cycling).  We also occasionally had to record a program off air to be replayed a few hours later.  Then there were Maurice Turner’s locally produced ‘signposting’ announcements, of anything from 10 seconds to 5 minutes duration, which were played on some horrid RCA continuous loop cassette players.  These suffered from those dread diseases ‘Wow’ and ‘Flutter’ to an excessive degree.  No amount of tweaking would cure them, until Dave Dunmall discovered that the effects could be greatly reduced if the cassettes were kept in the fridge until just before they were needed.  The instruction therefore went out; “Play Kool Kassettes!”. 

As originally conceived, the design and layout of the station left a lot to be desired, but this only became apparent once we started to operate it.  The search receivers, essential for deciding which were the best feed frequencies to be set up on the main diversity receivers, were situated at the far end of the room from the control desk.  The only faders by which the play-out music at the end of a tape could be faded down before rejoining the main programme were on the tape machines themselves, some distance from the desk where, simultaneously, program switches had to be made.  The biggest problem of all was the A.S.U., the automatic switching unit.  This was two racks of relays, uniselectors and miniature jackfields.  The entire unit crashed and clattered as it counted the seconds.  On first seeing it in operation John Rowe suggested that it should be equipped with one of the continuous loop cassette machines so that it could go “Cuckoo” every fifteen minutes.  Only after several years, and a great deal of modification and re-wiring of the station, was it finally able to do some of the tasks it was intended for.

Night shift was always memorable.  The building was over half a mile from the nearest habitation, with no passing traffic and only one or two lights visible in any direction. Almost everybody ensured that the door was locked as  soon as the evening shift engineer had left.  The shift ran from 2245 until 0915.  The first half of the night was usually fairly quiet, reception conditions were pretty stable, and very few switching ops were required.  Every half hour the ‘one-man’ alarm would sound, and had to be cancelled to reassure the staff at the Tx that you were still alive, but little else disturbed the peace.  One or two SMEs devised an ‘entertainment’ to brighten these long hours.  By dint of teamwork the staff at the Tx could arrange for all four Sender carrier alarms, plus their programme fail alarms, to sound simultaneously with the one-man alarm, the control line alarm and both the internal and external telephones.  The resultant adrenaline rush would keep the poor Rx engineer on his toes for the rest of the night. 

In 1980 or '81 Butt Crater was re-equipped with remotely operated receivers, the tape machines were moved down to English Bay Tx and all operations were conducted from the Tx control room.  Such was the pace of change that only five years later, with the construction of the earth station at English Bay, the new receivers as well as the tape machines became redundant.  In 1996 the building was in use as a domestic furniture store, but I don’t know it’s current state.   

Building exterior, February 1993

 The Klinka Klub

The first incarnation

The story of the BBC on Ascension would not be complete without a mention of The Klinka Klub.  Ascension was the only Tx station then built which did not have an official BBC club.  The reason for this was that the three UK based organisations running the project had agreed to finance a joint clubhouse in Two Boats Village.  At the time of our arrival completion of this building was expected to take some two years.  We felt that we’d rather not wait that long, and were lucky to be given a small, derelict fishing hut on a beach not far from English Bay.  With commendable accuracy but not much imagination this was christened “The BBC Beach Hut”.  The name “Klinka Klub” came along later.   Initially all supplies, beer and soft drinks, ice, glasses, generator and everything needed for a party had to be carried over the rocks, but as time went on by dint of scrounging, wheedling, swapping and even at times paying people to work, the hut acquired a graded and tarred road, a patio area, steps to the beach, it’s own permanent generator and importantly, a ladies powder room.  This was a large packing crate, suitably decorated and fitted out with the necessary furniture. On the wall someone had painted a (tasteful) male nude, with a hinged fig leaf covering the non-tasteful area.  Needless to say, anyone lifting the fig leaf operated a micro-switch connected to a bell in the main bar. 

Since those early days the tradition of scrounging and improvising has continued.  The entire building has been demolished and re-built on at least two occasions, and by 1996 featured mains water and electricity, flushing toilets for both men and women, and (thanks to Bill Mason) the most palatial barbeque area in the southern hemisphere. 

The success of the club prompted other organisations to follow suit, and beach huts sprang up all over the Island.  Some are still in existence, or were in 1996, others are long gone.  C.S.O. built theirs just along the coast from the Klinka Klub, but for some reason it did not take off.  The only reminder of it is that the area it occupied is now officially known as “Ladies’ Loo”, in commemoration of one of it’s essential features.