Leonard Plugge

 ( 1889 Births ) 

Plugge was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Chatham in 1935, defeating the Labour candidate Hugh Gaitskell by a majority of 5,897 votes. He lost in 1945 to Arthur Bottomley, a future Minister of Overseas Development in Harold Wilson's first government.

Plugge, a radio enthusiast, would collect the schedules of radio stations he visited during long motoring holidays on the European continent and sell them to the BBC to publish in Radio Times and other magazines such as Wireless World. On one such journey, Plugge asked the café owner at the Café Colonne, located in the coastal village of Fécamp, Normandy, what there was to see in the town. He 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 his name was mentioned during a broadcast.

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 named William Evelyn Kingwell, whom Plugge had met when drawing cash after leaving Le Grand. Kingwell agreed to motorcycle over on Sundays to introduce records.

Kingwell fell ill and Plugge brought in new announcers, including Max Staniforth 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. LMRadio.org.Accessed 17 August 2007. 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, owner of the Sunday Referee, an entertainment-based Sunday newspaper to sponsor him and print Radio Normandy's schedule. Sunday Referee Newspaper Advertisement,1939, British Film Institute. Accessed 17 August 2007. 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.

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 without reference to factors of national security. It is hoped that the French Service view will shortly prevail. Publicity In Enemy Countries. Accessed 17 August 2007.

It appears the British government was not interested in Plugge's invitation to broadcast Allied propaganda from Radio Normandy 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.

It has been suggested that Leonard Plugge was the inventor of the two-way car radiotelephone. The Early Days of Radio Normandy, Brian Carroll, IBC Studio/Homegrown Music, undated .Accessed 17 August 2007. 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.

The film Performance, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, was filmed in Plugge's house in Lowndes Square. Plugge moved to Hollywood, California in 1972, and died there on 19 February 1981 at the age of 91.