A Bit of History

Since retiring from my job at BBC Radio nearly 9 years ago I have become quite a collector of ephemera, artifacts and books associated with the Corporation and its history, which now goes back over 100 years. I remember the first time I visited the BBC in London in 1972, to see an exhibition for its 50th anniversary at the Langham Hotel, which was then owned and occupied by the BBC. As we queued to get in, I looked across the road at Broadcasting House and wondered what it was like inside. Five years later I was back outside the Langham, having gone through a series of tests and an interview, this time with the offer of a job. Broadcasting House became my much-loved second home, where I spent many thousands of hours at all times of the day and night broadcasting live on air and pre-recording programmes of every kind for Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5Live and World Service. I spent a huge chunk of my life there, nearly four decades. It seems like another world now, completely different from my life today.

This is just a very small number of books by or about the BBC which I have acquired over the past few years. I have others which are quite rare, including every single BBC Year Book from the first one published in 1928 up to 1959, all in their original dust jackets, and books written in the early days of radio by its pioneering founders. I suspect it will take another huge chunk of my life to work my way through them all.