Picking music out of the air
QUESTION What is known about the first DJ, P. P. Eckersley?
Peter Pendleton ‘P. P.’ eckersley was a pioneering radio engineer who was probably the first person to play records over the airwaves, hence the claim that he was the first DJ.
He was born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1892. His elder brother was the physicist thomas eckersley and his cousin was the writer Aldous Huxley. He attended Bedales school and, in 1912, Manchester Municipal College of technology.
eckersley joined the royal Flying Corps as a wireless equipment officer in 1915, rising to the rank of captain.
During World War I, he served in egypt and was later stationed at the Wireless experimental Station at Biggin Hill, where he conducted tests on aircraft.
After the war, he joined Marconi’s Wireless telegraph Company as head of the experimental section, aircraft department, where he designed the Croydon Airport ground station transmitter.
By 1920, eckersley had become an announcer, broadcaster and engineer for 2Mt, the first licensed radio station in Britain. It was in Writtle, near Chelmsford, essex, where Guglielmo Marconi had built his wireless telegraphy factories.
As a broadcaster, he was noted for his easy style and ability to present complex information in an accessible way.
He played gramophone records and was involved in the live broadcast of the Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba, an event sponsored by the Daily Mail.
Of that exciting time, he wrote: ‘More and more people became interested in the possession of an apparatus which, fantastically, picked music out of the air.’
eckersley joined the BBC in 1923 as its first chief engineer. He established the BBC’s first London transmitter in Marylebone. However, he had a difficult relationship with the broadcaster, which he summed up thus: ‘[the BBC] is such a feeble thing compared with what it might be. It is a great bore, dull and hackneyed and pompously self- conscious . . . issues are dodged which even a commercial press has no fear to expose.
‘the BBC stands, either remote and dictatorial or pawky, oblivious of opportunity, hopeless in its timidity.’
Despite establishing a team of several hundred engineers, eckersley was forced to resign by the morally unbending director-general John reith after it became known that he was having an affair with Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Clark, the estranged wife of BBC conductor and programme organiser edward Clark.
eckersley then saw a troubled period in his life. After Dolly, whom he married, met Hitler through Unity Mitford, he became entangled with Oswald Mosley’s Fascists. the eckersleys took holidays in Germany and attended the Nuremberg rallies of 1937 and 1938. By the time war broke out, he had realised the error of his ways and the couple had separated.
Dolly went to work in the Nazi regime’s english-language propaganda broadcasting, where she recruited William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw.
eckersley, tarnished by his wife’s Nazism and his own dubious loyalties, was turned down for war work. He died in London in 1963, aged 71.
Matt Davies, Cardiff.
QUESTION Was Frank Zappa censured for his song Jewish Princess?
FRANK ZAPPA was an avant-garde musician who released 62 albums between 1966 and his death in 1993.
Never afraid of controversy, he released Jewish Princess on his 1979 album Sheik Yerbouti. the song took an unsubtle swipe at the pejorative Jewish-American princess (JAP) stereotype that portrays some Jewish women as spoiled brats.
the Jewish Anti-Defamation League asked the Federal Communications Commission to ban the record from being played on the air.
this gave the song the oxygen it needed — Zappa’s records rarely received much airplay, anyway. It was never banned.
the musician brushed off the criticism with this typically bizarre statement: ‘Unlike the unicorn, such creatures do exist and deserve to be “commemorated” with their own special opus.’
Zappa was an equal opportunity offender: other controversial records in the same vein were Catholic Girls and Valley Girl (about rich California kids).
His most outrageous songs were collected posthumously on the 1997 album Have I Offended Someone?
Kim Proudfoot, Market Rasen, Lincs.
QUESTION During World War II, did the U.S. supply the USSR via Alaska?
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the U.S. offered aid to the Soviets under the Lend-Lease Act. tanks and heavy machinery were delivered via Arctic convoy to the Soviet Union’s ports Archangel and Murmansk.
From August 1941, U.S. fighter planes were dispatched via two main routes. One began in Florida and went via North Africa and Iraq to Moscow, a 13,000-mile route. the second began in Montana and went through western Canada to Alaska, Siberia and finally Moscow, a shorter route of 7,900 miles known as the ALSIB (Alaska-Siberian air road).
Because Stalin did not want U.S. forces flying into his airfields, Soviet pilots were stationed on U.S. soil and officially took ownership of the aircraft in Alaska. the planes were inspected and painted with the Soviet symbol of a red star.
Wartime censorship meant that the presence of the Soviet soldiers was not public knowledge until 1944.
the Soviet pilots stayed in Alaska until the end of World War II.
In this way, the U.S. delivered almost 8,000 planes to the Soviet Union.
Martin Bennett, Portishead, Somerset.
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