What did you have in the way of tools, if any, and how did you connect the components of the wireless without, presumably, a soldering iron?

No soldering iron, no solder of course, and no other system really available but to twist and wrap with some coconut oil paper, or cardboard or something, and very gently lift it. It was on a platen of wood we obtained somewhere; it was about a foot by a foot or something, so we just mounted the components on that. A meat skewer on the capacitor - oh, we had a capacitor too, a capacitor, a valve and a headphone, which were external to camp components we had. We didn't have any tools at all, except someone obtained the use of a sledge hammer - for what purpose I don't know because one of those would not be needed to escape; other than cutting up the soft iron of the fish plate which was about the only reason we needed anything, the rest were just twisted wires. We just wanted to get one usable because we didn't know whether it might be blown up or captured; we weren't worried, the main thing was initially a short term aim (as well as a long term aim) that it might last. Fortunately, it lasted for over a year - sixteen months until the arrests took place, but that's another story.

Back to: 'Creating the capacitors.'

The components for the low voltage battery cells that you produced, where did you get all the components from?

Well, zinc wasn't hard, there was some sheet zinc lying on the aerodrome and we pinched quite a bit of that because that would be eaten away during the use of the cells for the low voltage. I don't know what would have happened if that ran out. I think someone produced two lantern cells which did for a while, but it was mainly on this home-made cell system, which wasn't efficient but nowhere near as inefficient as the rectifier was. We must have been consuming... Ah Ping said he had to turn up a lot of power to keep the lights what they wanted. We were dispersing such an amount of power in this four test tube rectifier for the high tension.

Back to: 'The race for power.'

A variable capacitor was another component we had to bring in. We couldn't make a variable capacitor, it was impossible. We had to take two plates off the one we had to get a high enough frequency. Yes, I can't remember why we didn't go up a bit in inductance; it was largely a trial and error business really. Except that in a regenerative receiver you had some idea when you were near a station because the receiver was so sensitive as all regenerative receivers are. It had a piece of meat skewer type wood which I had a hole drilled in by a pen-knife, and we glued this in with some flour glue or something, into the capacitor shaft so that we could tune it by holding a little stick across it, fixing it at about six inches because one couldn't get one's hands any closer to the set because it was in a state of very near oscillation where the maximum sensitivity is, just before it bursts into oscillation. With a fairly clear HF band, it wasn't long before we knew roughly, by putting a couple of marks on the stick, where it was. We knew that the Voice of America was about a quarter of an inch away from the BBC - I don't think we ever knew the frequencies because the BBC didn't announce frequencies, they just came on the air and broadcast.

Back to: 'Creating the capacitor.'

What did you use for an aerial?

A clothes line. All the huts had a clothes line of some sort so we just took a thin wire from that and wrapped it round the edge, knowing that a normal sentry wouldn't take any notice of it, and we just dragged that across the side of the hut and brought it in, and odd people with our permission would put their loin cloths out and hang them over this when they washed them so it looked as if it was being used. The toilet in the sleeping block was a hole in the ground and it was verboten to be used by anybody except to put our radio set in when it wasn't in use; everybody respected our wishes in that regard!

I think the best thrill was, well two or three thrills, which were momentous I suppose and of great excitement, almost excitement of crying with excitement, and the first was I think when we heard a full news bulletin of something like 400 aircraft over Dresden or somewhere, pounding the place to pieces; we were very pleased about all this. But from the land point of view, from the beginning of '42 I think, I can't remember, but sometime just before the Battle of Alamein, and we heard some of the troop movements in preparation for that. The bulletins in those days were fairly long and gave a lot of detail.

Unfortunately the first lot of rectifiers blew up about 2 days after this so we were out of business for something like 5 or 6 weeks. Of course, the rumours started to flood in as to what was happening, what wasn't happening, the war would be over in 5 minutes and all these mainly optimistic things; but there were a few super-pessimists who said we would never get off the island, and would die there, and that sort of thing. But the thrill, I think, was when reception was restored again and we had to do another little bit of fine tuning because everything you changed seemed to affect something else; the whole thing was very sensitive and wouldn't have stood up to present day quality assurance bump tests!

So back there on the first night we missed the BBC for some reason, and the next thing was the Voice of America which had a headline which ran something like this: "The war is over in North Africa, Rommel is knocked to pieces, he's out of the Middle East and the Middle East is finished, the future for this and that ............" That was the end of the American news in about three sentences! No other detail, so I said we would go back at about 12.30, and hope that Ah Ping hadn't pulled the voltage down too far, to see what we could hear. Again, the BBC was a little low but it suddenly came quite bright and lifted in volume, and Big Ben chimed again and there was a voice in the wilderness calling. It was a lovely sensation to hear Big Ben playing in those days, and every time I hear it now I become excited. The announcement, initially in a most depressing vein, described all about the 8th Army's movements, and it was here that it did this, and this regiment drew up and did that, on and on this went for something like 15 to 20 minutes, and we tried not to follow it because we had our eyes on too many other things, look-outs and so on. But a lovely flow of English and if you had a tracing board you could have traced out exactly where everything was in situ, but of course that wasn't the aim of our exercise which was to get news. At the finish of the news the polite sentence said "It must be considered now that as all resistance in North Africa has been overcome the Allies victory must be assured" or something like that. And that was all he said, but he took a few minutes to describe everything that happened, so you had a clear picture. But the Americans seemed to be creating for a public that just wanted the headlines, three headlines and that was all; no other interest in anything else. That was one of the happy moments of the system.

We had the problem, of course, of writing the news because naturally a lot of people wanted to know it and a lot of people could be told it without its origin. This is why we used the piece of paper we took with us (Gordon Waite and the other officer who used to share some of the work), and as soon as we heard about 30 bombers over Dresden or something, you just put 30 BD, or B for Berlin, and feel the paper down when you felt it coming to the end, and pick up the next little bit of bend and write along that in the pitch dark, hoping that you've got something in the morning. Surprising how legible it was, just triggered a couple of words like that. Unfortunately, I was in deep custodianship with the Kempitai when the Atom Bombs were dropped and I didn't hear that news on the BBC; it was relayed to me. We didn't keep these things, of course.

Getting off the technical side now, the radio set didn't betray itself. Some criticism could be levelled at us I suppose. We trusted too many people; we had no intelligence training then, of course, or anything like that and we were inclined to trust every Asian we met who smiled at us and who said he was one of us. Anyway, while this was going on at the aerodrome and once the troops heard, we had to tell the troops the good news of course. We said we had heard from an unknown source that the war is getting better, or something like that - we had to give them a sanitised version. It was probably all they wanted but, naturally, two or three senior officers wanted to know as much as they could because they may be the ones who would have to take some decisions one day about it.

Back to: 'Receiving the signal.'

You talked a lot about the construction of the receiver and I would be very interested to know where the transmitter fitted in to this; were you developing that alongside?"

"No, the receiver first; we had that, and then we started the transmitter as a rather low priority of course, but one it would be nice to have. I had finished the two 6L6G's to make a push-pull amplifier that was the RF output to be, and the oscillator, and we had the capacitor but were missing a few more components and that was about where we were. In other words, in the course of events, had he been an expert with some sort of knowledge of electrical engineering, we would never have got away with two 6L6's sitting up on a block of wood with a few capacitors and things hanging on them, but obviously the Court Martial officers were normal, without disrespect to Infantry Officers, and they had no knowledge of telecommunications.

Back to: 'The raid.'

Again, the valves you used in the receiver were...?

Only one, that's all we had, which was brought in by Mr Mabey. He smuggled in a pipe to me, a smoking pipe, with some tobacco. Lovely gentleman. Unfortunately, I never had long with him, he died soon after being arrested. His widow lived at Hove with her sister; the two are deceased now