Leonard Plugge

Captain Leonard Frank Plugge (21 September 1889 – 19 February 1981) was a British businessman and Conservative Party politician.

Political life

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

Family

Captain Plugge married Ann Muckleston (b. 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 – 2 January 1972).

Offshore years

Plugge created the International Broadcasting Company in 1931 as a commercial rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation by buying airtime from radio stations such as those of 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.

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 was told that a young member of the Le Grand family – which owned the town's Benedictine distillery – had a small radio transmitter behind a piano in his house, and that a local cobbler's business had increased after a broadcast mentioned his name.

Plugge went to see Fernand Le Grand and offered to buy time to broadcast programmes in English. Le Grand 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 Sundays to introduce records.

Kingwell fell ill and Plugge brought in new announcers, including Max Stanniforth and Stephen Williams, and later Bob Danvers-Walker and general manager-cum-presenter David Davies, who, after the war, became station manager and managing director of the English-language 'offshore' broadcaster, LM Radio (Radio Lourenco Marques), Mozambique, from 1947 to 1969.[1] Many others joined during the life of Radio Normandy (the station used this anglicised spelling in its British literature and advertising).

The power of the transmitter increased after Plugge convinced film studio and 280-strong cinema chain owner Gaumont British,[2][3] owner of the Sunday Referee, an entertainment-based Sunday newspaper, which had sponsored him – and which printed Radio Normandy's schedule.[4] 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, later famous for creating and presenting Desert Island Discs for BBC radio.

Silenced

Plugge broadcast from Fécamp and later from a new transmitter and studio at Caudebec. World War II began soon after the studio opened and, according to some histories, German troops overran the transmitters in 1940, using them to broadcast propaganda to Britain until the RAF bombed the Louvetot transmitter 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.'[5]

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.[6]

It appears the British government was not interested in Plugge's invitation to broadcast Allied propaganda from Radio Normandie transmitters, even if they had not been destroyed.

Plugge hoped to restart transmissions from France after the war but changes in broadcasting regulations and a different attitude to radio listening meant that this never happened. The post-war president, Charles de Gaulle, also had a different attitude to the station.

Radio Normandy 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 offered 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 reason that Reith left the BBC, feeling 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, then moved to nearby 35-36 Portland Place. This was taken over by a British weapons development unit MRI(c) at the start of the war but later bombed. The BBC's Radio 1, inheritor of the audiences that Plugge's offshore successors had built until the 1967 Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act made them illegal, later moved into the Hallam Street building. After the war IBC became a recording studio and stars including The Who, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix recorded there.[7]

It has been suggested that Leonard Plugge was the inventor of the two-way car radiotelephone.[8] It is also claimed that the term of "plugging" something by advertising was derived from the name of Leonard Plugge. Plugge pronounced his name "Plooje", claiming Flemish origins. It was only when he stood for the parliamentary seat of Chatham that he agreed to the slogan "Plugge in for Chatham" and accepted the way everybody else pronounced his name.

Later life

In the 1960s and 1970s, Plugge moved in a social set that included Princess Margaret, her husband photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, broadcaster Julian Pettifer and transsexual April Ashley.[9]

His daughter Gale Ann, who had married and divorced Jonathan Benson, was in Trinidad with her partner, the American Black Power leader Hakim Jamal, when she was hacked to death with machetes and buried alive in January 1972 by Michael X and his supporters, whom Jamal also followed.[10][11] 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.

Etymology of "to plug"

In his book Red Herrings and White Elephants, the English language researcher Albert Jack writes that Plugge partially financed Radio Normandy by receiving payments to play and promote records, which is probably the origin of the verb to "plug" a record.[12] However, the Oxford English Dictionary contradicts this suggestion.

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ LMRadio.org.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  2. ↑ Gaumont British history snapshot, undated Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  3. ↑ Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, British Film Institute, undated.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  4. ↑ Sunday Referee Newspaper Advertisement,1939, British Film Institute.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  5. ↑ Announcer David Newman's letters Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  6. ↑ Publicity In Enemy Countries.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  7. ↑ IBC Studio/Homegrown Music, undated
  8. ↑ The Early Days of Radio Normandy, Brian Carroll, IBC Studio/Homegrown Music, undated.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  9. ↑ April Ashley's Odyssey – Duncan Fallowell, April Ashley, Cape, 1982.Accessed 17 August 2007.
  10. ↑ Without Regret or Hope (book review), New York Review of Books, 12 June 1980.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  11. ↑ Underground, Overground History Talk oral history project, undated.Accessed on 17 August 2007.
  12. ↑ Jack, Albert (2004), Red Herrings and White Elephants, Great Britain: Metro Publishing, p. 127, ISBN 1-84358-129-9
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by
Sir Park Goff		 Member of Parliament for Chatham
1935–1945 		Succeeded by
Arthur Bottomley
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