Leonard Plugge

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Captain Leonard Frank Plugge (21 September 1889 – 6 July 1988) was a British businessman and Conservative Party politician.

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 Normandie, Toulouse, Ljubljana, Juan les Pins, Paris, Post Parisien, Athlone, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome. IBC worked indirectly with Radio Luxembourg until 1936.

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 owner of the café what there was to see in the town and during the conversation the man mentioned a young member of the Le Grand family, that owned the Benedictine distillery in the town. He had a small radio transmitter that he kept behind a piano in his house. The man mentioned that in one broadcast the name of a local shoemender had been mentioned and that as a result the shop had much increased its custom.

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 broadcaster was a cashier from the National Provincial Bank in Le Havre that Plugge had met when drawing cash after leaving Le Grand. His name was William Evelyn Kingwell and he agreed to travel by motorcycle on a Sunday to introduce the records. Due to poor health he was replaced by Max Stanniforth and Stephen Willams and later on by Bob Danvers Walker. Many others joined during the life of Radio Normandy. The power of the transmitter was increased after Plugge convinced Gaumont British, the owners of the Sunday Referee who had helped sponsor him, of the huge potential. 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. He broadcast from Fécamp and later from the new transmitter and studio at Caudebec. Shortly after opening the war began and these transmitters were overrun by German troops as they advanced to the French coast and used for propaganda broadcasting to Britain before bombing by the RAF put Louvetot transmitter out of action. Plomley and his wife escaped from Fécamp when the Germans were only a short distance away.

Destruction of the transmitters meant that the British government was unable to accept Plugge's invitation to broadcast Allied propaganda from them, even if it had wanted to.

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. Before the final close-down, however, Radio Normandy had achieved a bigger audience in southern England on Sundays than the BBC. Under Lord Reith, the BBC broadcast began broadcasting only late on Sundays, to give people time to go to church, and then 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 the light music of Radio Normandy. 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 Hallum Street, neighbouring the BBC but later moved to 35/36 Portland Place. The Hallum Street building was later home to Radio 1, direct successor to the change in attitudes which Plugge had set in place. After the war IBC became a highly successful recording studios and most of the stars at time recorded there including Jimi Hendrix who made his first British recordings with IBC.

It has been suggested that Leonard Plugge was the inventor of the two-way car radiotelephone. 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.

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

Captain Plugge 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)

His daughter Gale Ann who had married Jonathon Benson and subsequently divorced was murdered in Trinidad, by supporters of Michael X, in January 1972, her twin brother died in a road accident in Morocco in 1973. The film Performance, starring Mick Jagger and Edward Fox, was filmed in Plugge's house in Lowndes Square. Leonard Plugge died in Los Angeles on the 19th February 1981 at the age of 91. His biography "And the World Listened" by Keith Wallis (Copyright)is to be published 2007 by Kelly Books.