The Crazy World of 1930's Irish Radio

Radio Normandie's Headquarters near Felcamps France,

According to a January 1933 edition of the Irish Radio News magazine, a new entity The International Broadcasting Company was formed ‘to handle the advertisement side of the station’s activities’. The then Irish Minister for Posts and Telegraphs signed the contract with The IBC on August 23rd 1933.

The IBC was the brainchild of entrepreneur and British Conservative MP Leonard Plugge. He had identified a new radio market with programmes aimed at the British audiences from transmitters located outside that jurisdiction. His first venture was Radio Normandie which was initially a small low powered private radio station located in the North of France. Under his direction, a high powered transmitter was installed and broadcasts were aimed at London and the South of England. Lord Reith who ran BBC Radio at that time, believed that Sunday broadcasts from the Corporation should be of a sedate, religious nature and this opened up an opportunity for Plugge to launch a commercial alternative broadcasting the most popular music of the day and selling advertising. He even created and sold a face cream for women to prove the worth of radio advertising to prospective clients. 

Normandie was extremely popular with both listeners and advertisers. The station proved to be a major challenge for the BBC and it was only the intervention of the Second World War that curbed the private broadcasting boom. A second station opened to broadcast into London and that was Radio Luxembourg located in the Grand Duchy which would continue on its famous 208 frequency into the 1980s.

Plugge increased the availability of his sponsored programmes into the western half of Britain especially to cities like Manchester and Liverpool by utilising the new powerful Athlone transmitter. He rented airtime in the evenings from 9 – 11pm and to sweeten the pot for the capitalistic Plugge, Radio Eireann extended the available hours from November 1933 to include 1-4pm on Sunday afternoons. There were however many complaints within Ireland about the programming especially both the music being played and the products being advertised and as the contract expired on May 22nd 1934 it was not renewed by the Government. The sponsored programmes ceased except for one who did a direct deal with the Irish Government it being the infamous Irish Hospital’s sweepstakes. They knew from their research that the broadcasts were working in the UK as sales of their tickets continued to soar and so continued to sponsor a half hour show each night from ten o’clock. 

Generating finance was at the heart of these broadcasts into Britain as both Plugge and his IBC were selling advertising and Radio Eireann was making money from selling the airtime. The cost for Plugge’s sponsorship was listed as £120 per hour, £70 for a half hour, £55 for 20mins or £45 for 15minutes. The Irish Government’s decision to sell airtime meant that from earning £220 in advertising revenue in 1932, a year later the station had earned £22,000, a lifeline for the cash strapped station. Unfortunately for the station itself this new found wealth came at a price as the Government reduced the percentage of the licence fee paid to the station to finance its operations. 

In July 1938, Robert Silvey who had been hired by the BBC to analyse listener research, secretly reported to his bosses at Portland Place, BBC Headquarters that Radio Athlone’s largest proportion of listeners was not in Ireland but in the North West of England in Liverpool and Manchester this was attributed to the sponsored programmes and the ex-pat community in those areas. As a result of these findings and to compete with the success of Radio Athlone, the BBC’s Northern Regional transmitter network and finances were significantly expanded.

But at times Plugge liked to poke a stick at the authorities on both sides of the Irish Sea who ran radio at the time. In a BBC documentary on Plugge broadcast in August 2014, which included interviews with his the son, the documentary alluded to the fact that even in naming his company as 'The International Broadcasting Company' (later also known as The Industrial Broadcasting Company) the initials for the station I.B.C. when said quickly sounded like B.B.C.. He even based his company's London headquarters on Portland Place just yards from BBC Broadcasting House. 

And in using Radio Eireann's Athlone transmitter and frequency to beam his programmes into the West coast of Britain, he cheekily used the 'Come Back To Erin' song as his signature theme tune. The song had already been attributed to the first incarnation of Radio Eireann when it was launched in 1926 as 2RN (To Erin).

The Radio Pictorial January 1935

Radio Pictorial September 1938

Plugge also purchased airtime from other European stations to broadcast popular Irish music and to sell advertising allowing even Irish listeners to find an alternative on the dial for traditional Irish music and more current Irish music than was being played by Radio Eireann. Even Radio Luxembourg, then broadcasting on their pre-war frequency of 230m were broadcasting programmes specifically aimed at the 'Irish Free State' and selling advertising to the companies and products that while being sold in Ireland were denied airtime by the authoritarian management at Radio Eireann.