"I must explain that these war-time broadcasts were carried out in the presence of a Switch Censor who sat on the other side of the news reader's desk and was able to turn off the microphone in a split second if it ever became necessary.During the three and a half years of the broadcasts this was done only on one special occasion and certainly not because the newsreader had gone berserk or something like that.The Chief Censor was Professor Eric Sloman who had been the first Director of the Police Academy in Kerkyra (Corfu).Then there were censors for the eleven languages used in these broadcasts.The censor for the Polish broadcasts was the Countess Walevska, grand-daughter of Napoleon's lady friend.The Countess was a rather large lumbering woman who always came into the studio carrying lots of parcels.One evening she came in and sat in an armchair on the other side of the studio to wait her turn for the Polish broadcast which followed the Greek.As I was reading the news bulletin I suddenly became conscious of a regular ticking noise in the headphones I was wearing.I made a sign to Mr Joly who was acting as switch censor at the time, and he got up and walked over to the Countess.He whispered inher ear and asked her what was in her hand bag.The Countess blushed and replied that she had just collected her alarm clock from the watchmaker.I don't know if any sharp-eared listener had heard the ticking and thought that we had a time bomb in the studio.
"Having mentioned my good friend Mr Norman Joly I must record that he was the technical supervisor for the foreign language broadcasts, handling such things as wavelengths for the short wave relays, training the newsreaders (of whom there must have been over 30) and acting as studio manager and switch censor for some of the languages which he knew.
"A regular broadcaster in our studio was Francis Noel-Baker who later became a Labour member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, like his father.The Noel-Baker family are well-known in Greece because for several generations they have owned a large property on the island of Euboea (Evia in Greek).Francis speaks fluent Greek, and his mother was related to Lord Byron.In recent years he has switched his allegiance to the Conservative Party led by his personal friend Margaret Thatcher.
"Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor the writer who had kidnapped Major- General Heinrich Kreipe in Crete and spirited him away to Allied headquarters in Cairo, came to our studio and described how this audacious operation had been carried out by him and Captain William Stanley Moss, ex-Coldstream Guards, with the considerable assistance of the Cretan resistance movement partisans.
"Purely by coincidence, it was the Greek news bulletin from Cairo which first announced to the world General Montgomery's victory over General Rommel at Alamein.I must explain that during a broadcast the two doors leading into the studio were kept closed and an armed officer of the Military Police sat outside (in civilian clothes) to prevent anyone from entering for any reason whatsoever.I was in the middle of reading the news when suddenly, without warning, the inner door opened and a young despatch-rider, still wearing his crash helmet, walked in waving a piece of paper.Mr Joly immediately switched off the microphone and asked the young man what he thought he was doing.'Most Immediate sir', he said.(This is the army's highest priority classification.) 'To be broadcast atonce.'
"Mr Joly handed the document to me and I saw it was written in English.Taking a deep breath I began translating the text into Greek, with some excitement and trepidation owing to the difference in syntax between the two languages.Forty-six years later Mr Joly gave me the identical sheet of paper, which he had kept as a souvenir.It is printed here in full.At the Editorial offices, where they were monitoring the newscast, they thought I had gone out of my mind, because the communique had not reached them yet.When they tuned in to the short wave service of theB.B.C.they heard the communique read out more than an hour after our Greek broadcast.A world scoop, if ever there was one.Years later when I returned to Athens, many of my friends told me they had heard the first broadcast of the thrilling bulletin and they could still remember the excitement in my voice.
"The Greek section was the first to inaugurate the transmission of personal messages.Many people were escaping from occupied Greece in sailing boats across to the shores of Asia Minor, ending up in the Middle East, mostly in Cairo.They had no means of advising their relatives and friends in Greece that they had survived the perilous journey.We used to broadcast pre-arranged messages like 'John informs Mary that he has arrived at the village'.
"As I mentioned above, George Papandreou came to our studio and spoke to the people in Greece about the formation of the government of National Unity, which had been agreed by all parties meeting in the Lebanon, including the representatives of the Partisans operating in the mountains of Greece.Papandreou and the government in exile moved to Naples in Italy for a short period and then returned to Athens on October 12th 1944 for the Liberation.
"Finally, I would like to say that in the dark days before Montgomery's breakthrough at Alamein, when it was quite on the cards that General Rommel might take Cairo, Mr Joly and I were sent to Jerusalem to make arrangements for the foreign language broadcasts to be continued from there.Fortunately the situation changed and we were recalled to Cairo, where we arrived just in time for me to broadcast thehistoric communique announcing the victory at Alamein, which marked the turning point of the war in the Middle East.
