List of years in British radio (table)
In British television
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
In British music
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
+...

This is a list of events from British radio in 1939.

Events

January to May

  • No events.

June

July

  • No events.

August

  • August – The BBC Monitoring service is established at Wood Norton Hall in Worcestershire, acquired earlier in the year as a standby location in case of the need to evacuate facilities from London.

September

  • 1 September – At 18.55 local time BBC engineers receive the order to begin closing down all transmitters in preparation for wartime broadcasting: this marks the end of the National and Regional Programmes of the BBC. At 20.15 the BBC's Home Service begins transmission: this will be the corporation's only domestic radio channel for the first four months of World War II (BBC Television has been shut down until 1946). There will be a daily Welsh language bulletin of world news at 5 pm.[1] Programming is initially limited to news, announcements, gramophone records and live music played by a limited pool of staff musicians, with extensive use of cinema organist Sandy MacPherson.[2]
  • 3 September
  • 6 September – William Joyce makes his first broadcast for German radio, reading the news in English.[5]
  • 18 September – English-language propaganda radio programme Germany Calling is first broadcast to the United Kingdom on medium wave nominally from Reichssender Hamburg station Bremen (via the coastal Norddeich radio station). In today's Daily Express, pseudonymous radio critic Jonah Barrington nicknames the station's English-speaking broadcaster "Lord Haw-Haw". He is probably referring to German playboy journalist Wolf Mittler, who makes a few such broadcasts, but the name transfers to cashiered British Army officer Norman Baillie-Stewart (dismissed in December) and then to American-born William Joyce, with whom it is most associated. Baillie-Stewart and Joyce hold U.K. passports at this time, rendering themselves liable to prosecution for treason.[5]
  • 19 September – Popular radio comedy show It's That Man Again with Tommy Handley is first broadcast on the BBC Home service, following trial broadcasts from 12 July.[6][7] Known as "ITMA", and also featuring Jack Train and many others, it runs until Handley’s death in 1949;[8] the performers have initially been evacuated to Bristol.

October

  • No events.

November

  • No events.

December

Station debut

Debuts

Continuing radio programmes

1930s

Births

Deaths

  • 20 July – Sir Dan Godfrey, orchestral conductor, 71[11]
  • 19 December – Eric Fogg, composer and conductor, 36 (killed by Underground train)[12]

See also

References

  1. "Literature Wales: Encyclopedia – Broadcasting". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 5 January 2013.
  2. Baade, Christina (26 March 2020). "During the Second World War, BBC listeners kept calm and listened to an unlikely star". The Conversation. UK. Retrieved 10 July 2021.
  3. McDonough, Frank (1998). Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War. Manchester University Press. p. 89. ISBN 978-0-7190-4832-6.
  4. Chignell, Hugh (2011). Public Issue Radio: Talks, News and Current Affairs in the Twentieth Century. Springer. p. 50. ISBN 978-0-230-34645-1.
  5. 1 2 Kenny, Mary (2003). Germany Calling. Dublin: New Island.
  6. Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 385–386. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
  7. "The BBC Story – 1930s" (PDF). Retrieved 31 May 2010.
  8. Wilmut, Roger (1985). Kindly Leave the Stage!: Story of Variety, 1919–1960. Methuen. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-413-48960-9.
  9. The Eternal Vision: The Ultimate Collection of Spiritual Quotations. Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd. 2002. p. 516. ISBN 978-1-85311-495-3.
  10. "The Thirty-Nine Steps". BBC Genome. 23 July 1939. Retrieved 4 December 2023.
  11. Sterling, Christopher H. (2003). Encyclopedia of Radio. Routledge. p. 344. ISBN 978-1-135-45649-8.
  12. The Listener, British Broadcasting Corporation, July 1939, p. 1270.
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