Leonard Plugge

Captain Leonard Frank Plugge (21 September1889 – 6 July 1981) was a British businessman and Conservative Party politician.

Plugge was Member of Parliament for Chatham from 1935 to 1945.

Captain Plugge had married Ann Muckleston (London 13 January 1909) in New York on 28 October 1935. They had three children: Leonard Frank (13 January 1937), Greville (4 November 1944 – 1973) and Gale Ann (4 November 1944 – 1972).

Offshore years

He created the International Broadcasting Company in 1931 as a commercial rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation by buying airtime from radio stations such as Normandy, Toulouse, Ljubljana, Juan les Pins, Paris, Poste Parisien, Athlone, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome. IBC worked indirectly with Radio Luxembourg until 1936. World War II silenced most of Plugge's stations between 1939 and 1945.

Leonard Plugge was a radio enthusiast and a pioneer of long motoring holidays on the European continent. There he would collect the schedules of radio stations he visited and sell them to the BBC to publish in Radio Times and other magazines such as Wireless World. It was on one such journey that he stopped for coffee at the Café Colonne in the Place Thiers (now the Place Général de Gaulle) in the Normandy coastal village of Fécamp.

There, he asked the café owner what there was to see in the town and, during the conversation the man mentioned a young member of the Le Grand family – which owned the town's Benedictine distillery – had a small radio transmitter that he kept behind a piano in his house. The man mentioned how a local cobbler's business had much increased after a broadcast had mentioned his name.

Plugge went to see Fernand Le Grand and offered to buy time to broadcast programmes in English. The man agreed and a studio was set up in the loft over the old stables in Rue George Cuvier, from which the programmes were broadcast by Plugge's employees. The first presenter was a cashier from the National Provincial Bank's Le Havre branch, whom Plugge had met when drawing cash after leaving Le Grand. Bank teller-turned-broadcaster William Evelyn Kingwell agreed to motorcycle over on a Sunday to introduce records.

Because Kingwell fell ill, Plugge brought in new announcers, including Max Stanniforth and Stephen Willams, and later Bob Danvers-Walker and general manager-cum-presenter David Davies, who, after the war, became station manager and managing director of English-language 'offshore' broadcaster LM Radio (Radio Lourenco Marques), Mozambique from 1947 to 1969. [ [http://www.lmradio.org/People01.htm LMRadio.org] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] Many others joined during the life of Radio Normandy (the station used this anglicised spelling of its name in its British literature and advertising).

The power of the transmitter was increased after Plugge convinced film studio and 280-strong cinema chain owner Gaumont British [ [http://www.gaumont-british.co.uk/ Gaumont British history snapshot, undated] Accessed on 17 August 2007.] [ [http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/448165/index.html/ "Gaumont-British Picture Corporation", British Film Institute, undated] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] owners of the Sunday Referee, an entertainment-based Sunday newspaper, which had sponsored him – and which printed Radio Normandy's schedule. [ [http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/734658 "Sunday Referee Newspaper Advertisement",1939, British Film Institute] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] A new studio was established in a house in the town.

Radio Normandy by now had a large audience as far north as the English Midlands, and many big names of the day. Among them was Roy Plomley, better known later for creating and presenting "Desert Island Discs" for BBC radio.

ilenced

He broadcast from Fécamp and later from the new transmitter and studio at Caudebec. Soon after the studio opened, World War II began and, according to some histories, as they advanced towards the French coast German troops had in 1940 overrun the transmitters, which were used for broadcasting propaganda to Britain until the RAF bombed the Louvetot transmitter to put them out of action. The French website "L'Histoire de Radio Normandie" remembers it differently: 'after the Louvetot transmitter closed in 1939 because of the war, IBC went on broadcasting under the name "Radio International Fécamp" from "Radio Normandie" 's first transmitter at Fécamp for "several weeks". On 10 June 1940 French troops sabotaged the transmitter on the eve of the German invasion.' [ [http://radionormandie.free.fr/david_newman.htm Announcer David Newman's letters] Accessed on 17 August 2007.]

A 22 October 1939 British War Cabinet memo marked 'SECRET: To Be Kept Under Lock And Key' notes that: 'It was learnt that an obsolete station at Fécamp, controlled by the International Broadcasting Company (of which Captain L. F. Plugge, MP, is the chairman), has been modernised, and had started to work with programmes in English, Czech and Austrian [sic] . The danger of allowing a station so near the Channel to work on its own...was felt by the Air Ministry to be grave...The French Service(s)...are in complete agreement with the British point of view... [and] have confessed that the private interests concerned have got the ear of the civil powers [in France] without reference to factors of national security. It is hoped that the French Service view will shortly prevail.' [ [http://www.psywar.org/psywar/reproductions/WarCabinetMemos.pdf "Publicity In Enemy Countries"] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] It would appear that the British government was not interested in accepting Plugge's invitation to broadcast Allied propaganda from Radio Normandie's transmitters, even if they had not been destroyed.

Plugge had hoped to restart transmissions from France after the war but changes in broadcasting regulations and a different attitude to radio listening meant it never happened – as did de Gaulle's attitude to the station. Before Radio Normandy finally closed, it had a bigger audience in southern England on Sundays than the BBC. Under Lord Reith, the BBC was off the air until late on Sundays – to give people time to go to church – and the fare it offered consisted of little but serious music and discussions. Broadcasting historians have said that Reith reluctantly agreed to lighten the BBC's programmes on Sundays after his audience deserted him for Radio Normandy's light music. That, some have said, was a principal reason that Reith left the BBC, feeling that his mission to educate, inform and entertain with what he judged to be programmes of high moral tone had been cut away by rank commercial entertainment driven by money.

The IBC's original London offices were in Hallam Street, near the BBC's Broadcasting House HQ but later moved to 35/36 Portland Place. The BBC's Radio 1, direct inheritor of the audiences that Plugge's offshore successors had built until the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act made them illegal later moved into the Hallam Street building. After the war IBC became a successful recording studio and many of the stars of that time, including The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix recorded there. [ [http://www.ibcstudio.co.uk/ IBC Studio/Homegrown Music, undated] ]

It has been suggested that Leonard Plugge was the inventor of the two-way car radiotelephone. [ [http://www.ibcstudio.co.uk/earlydaysindex.html "The Early Days of Radio Normandy", Brian Carroll, "IBC Studio/Homegrown Music", undated] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] The claim that the term of "plugging" something by advertising was derived from the name of Leonard Plugge is untrue. Plugge himself pronounced his name "Plooje", claiming Belgian/Dutch origins for his family. It was only when he stood in an election for the parliamentary seat of Chatham that he agreed to the slogan "Plugge in for Chatham" and thereby accepted the way that almost everybody else pronounced his name.

Later life

In the 1960s and 1970s, Plugge moved in a 'smart' set that included Princess Margaret, her then-husband photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, broadcaster Julian Pettifer and transsexual April Ashley. [ [http://www.antijen.org/Aprilv1/ "April Ashley's Odyssey" – Duncan Fallowell, April Ashley, Cape, 1982] .Accessed 17 August 2007. ]

His daughter Gale Ann, who had married and divorced Jonathan Benson, was in Trinidad with her partner American Black Power leader Hakim Jamal when she was stabbed and buried alive in January 1972 by Michael X and his supporters, whom Jamal also followed. [ [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7366 "Without Regret or Hope" (book review), New York Review of Books, 12 June 1980] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] [ [http://www.historytalk.org/Tom%20Vague%20Pop%20History/Chp%205.pdf "Underground, Overground" History Talk oral history project, undated] .Accessed on 17 August 2007.] Her twin brother, Greville, died in a road accident in Morocco a year later.

The film Performance, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, was filmed in Plugge's house in Lowndes Square. Plugge died in Los Angeles on 19 February 1981 at the age of 91.

External links

* [http://www.lmradio.org/Sounds/Radio_normandy_sign-off_Roy_Plumbleigh.mp3 Roy Plomley closes down a day's broadcasting by Plugge's Radio Normandy] (format: MP3)
* [http://www.offshoreechos.com/radionormandie/_private/radio_normandie.ra "Radio Normandy Calling" – Roy Plomley previews programmes] (format: Real audio)
* [http://www.kent.ac.uk/sdfva/sound-journal/Street19991.txt "Radio For Sale: Sponsored Programming in British Radio during the 1930s" – Sean Street, Bournemouth University]
* [http://www.psywar.org/psywar/reproductions/WarCabinetMemos.pdf British War Cabinet secret memo on Plugge's broadcasting, October 1939]
* [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,787951,00.html Time, "Pioneers", Monday, 21 January 1935]
* [http://www.ibcstudio.co.uk/earlydaysindex.html IBC Studio The early days of Radio Normandy] (includes pictures of Plugge and of one of Radio Normandy's mobile units)
* [http://radionormandie.free.fr/Radio_Normandy.htm Radio Normandy] (website in French)
*J. Plugge, "Uw naam is PLUG(GE)?", Quoad Fornam, Leende. ISBN 90–6851–003–7
* [http://www.elsevier.nl Elsevier] , 16 November 1991.

References

*Rayment