“Broadcasting Begins,” proclaimed a small headline near the bottom of page four in the EDP of November 15, 1922. The previous evening, the brand new British Broadcasting Company had made its very first transmission on the 2LO station in London, with the first voice on-air, Arthur Burrows, reading a news bulletin twice – once normally, and then more slowly, so that “listeners-in” could write and advise which they preferred.
This historic transmission was picked up by radio amateurs in Brundall, the EDP reported: “The speech was clear, and items were heard distinctly, and appreciated. A meteorological weather report was given, also the afternoon’s billiard scores. Many items of political interest were heard.”
A century on and billiard scores are a rarity, but there are certainly still many items of political interest to relay. One big change, however, is that you no longer need to point your aerial towards London. The BBC has long had its own presence in Norfolk, these days based at The Forum in Norwich – but it took a little while to get going.
Almost immediately after opening on November 14, 1922, the BBC began leapfrogging across the country. Birmingham and Manchester operations opened the very next day, and others quickly followed. A network of local stations in the days before it was technically feasible to provide a nationwide programme, although many of these stations, as those listeners in Brundall found, could be picked up well beyond their regional bases.
East Anglia, however, remained a conspicuous gap. People here could listen to the BBC, certainly, especially as more powerful transmitters began broadcasting a national service. The BBC made visits here too, relaying services from Norwich Cathedral from the mid-1920s onwards, and popping up elsewhere for various other outside broadcasts. But these were occasional efforts, by teams coming in for particular events – there was no BBC base locally.
Into the 30s this increasingly became a source of frustration. In 1938, for example, a Mr Len Brighton of Norwich complained in a letter to Radio Pictorial magazine that: “It seems as if the East of England has been left out of the world of broadcasting altogether… We East Anglians are still waiting, waiting and waiting for the day when we can tune in to our own East of England programme.”
The BBC was, though, slowly but surely turning its eyes towards the east. Plans to build a local transmitter at Acle were halted by the outbreak of the Second World War, but that conflict did finally bring a permanent BBC presence to the area – one which has never yet left in the more than 80 years since.
With the BBC being a vital national service during wartime, the importance of boosting reception in and around a major centre like Norwich was recognised, and the city gained its own temporary transmitter. The BBC was able to form an agreement with the owners of the city’s Caley’s chocolate factory to erect an aerial attached to the great chimney there, with the BBC staff housed in a small wooden hut on a patch of open ground on the site. This set-up even survived the bombing of Caley’s, but after the war when the factory was rebuilt they wanted the space back. Now established locally, the BBC wanted to keep its presence; so the search was on for their first permanent East Anglian home.
The place they set up still exists, and part of it will be a familiar sight to the thousands of people who every day travel along the section of the A47 between Norwich and Brundall. Towering over the trees on the southern side of the dual carriageway there are the masts of the Postwick transmitting station – the BBC’s first proper, purpose-built Norfolk home, and still to this day beaming out the likes of Radio 5 Live.
These are not the same masts of the station as opened in 1949, but the squat brick building hidden behind the trees is the original. Its windows, though, have long-since been cemented-up, and flowers no longer neatly line the driveway. Kept in a store room on the site, however, is the sign which once stood at the end of that driveway proclaiming the presence of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Visiting in 2022 the place has an isolated, almost mysterious feel. When it was built the road outside linked up with the old Yarmouth Road, but now it’s a dead end. Despite the constant sound of traffic on the other side of the trees, it has the atmosphere of some far-flung, distant outpost.
Postwick hasn’t been staffed full-time for decades, but it is still maintained by the engineers based at Tacolneston. These days they work for a company called Arqiva, which has owned and run the transmitters since the BBC sold them in the 90s. When I visited it was with two former BBC engineers, Andy Keeble and Chris Edwards. Andy is still part of Arqiva’s Tacolneston team but Chris is retired – although when he started working for the BBC in the late 1970s, several of his older colleagues had been based at Postwick in its early days.
“They used to do shift work here, it was maintained 24 hours a day,” Chris told me as he showed me a perhaps unexpected feature for a transmitter building – the kitchen. “They reckoned they had a cook for each engineer! Whether that was true or not I don’t know, but they used to cook all their meals for them!”
Chris also explained how when he’d first visited the site, it had given him a real sense of its connection to the BBC’s history. “When you saw all the old stuff, all the cups and everything had ‘BBC’ on! Even the knives and forks had ‘BBC’! Also, when I first came here, there was a visitors’ book which had people like Arthur Askey in it!”
Askey would have been there because when it opened in 1949, Postwick brought a new aspect to the BBC’s life in Norfolk – a regular place from which people could broadcast. From then until the BBC’s first proper studios in Norwich opened at All Saints Green in 1956, if someone from or visiting East Anglia was required for a BBC programme, they would often come to this unlikely spot where a microphone in the engineer’s office could link contributors into the wider BBC.
A memento of this still exists in an unofficial museum at the Tacolneston transmitter, a piece of the BBC’s Norfolk history which Andy had brought back to Postwick for my visit.
“This is the original Marconi AXBT ribbon microphone which was used in the studio here,” Andy explained, as the microphone was placed on the current desk in the very room where it had sat some seventy years ago. Returned briefly to its original location, where people from across Norfolk had first broadcast on a regular basis. The BBC bringing the voices of county to the airwaves – as it still does now in its 100th anniversary year.
BBC 100: Auntie in Norfolk will be broadcast on BBC Radio Norfolk at 1pm on Sunday November 13, and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days afterwards
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here