The Irish Half Hour on the BBC 1941 -1943, Wartime Radio Diplomacy

During the so called ‘Emergency’ of World War 2 in Ireland, one of the most popular programmes on the radio saw some of the biggest names in Irish entertainment grace the airwaves but strangely the programme did not emanate from Radio Eireann but from the BBC in London. The BBC and the British information Ministry wanted to produce a programme that would appeal to the many thousands of Irish and Anglo-Irish troops serving on the battlefronts and they also wanted to improve to tense relationship between Britain and Ireland as a result of Ireland’s neutral stance.

Dublin born Jimmy O’Dea had given up his optometry profession to tread the boards of theatres including the Gaiety. In 1928, he had teamed up with writer Harry O’Donovan and they played to packed houses with their successful pantomimes and Summer variety shows. In 1940, O’Dea had starred in a BBC Radio variety show created by Vernon Harris and Eric Spear, titled ‘Melody & Co’ initially recorded at the Bristol studios. When the BBC in London decided on an Irish Show, they contacted Jimmy O’Dea who agreed to initially front the ‘Irish Half Hour’ every second week.

George Marshall who was the regional director of the BBC in Northern Ireland objected to the show’s broadcast on a number of grounds not least the name as it implied that it was including Northern Ireland who was ‘partitioned from Eire’. He also objected to the theme music ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and the fact that some of the introduction was conducted in the Irish language with a simple ‘Cead Mile Failte’. His objections were overruled although when asked later about the show he and the Northern Ireland Regional service referred to it as ‘Eire’s Half Hour’. One of the leading supporters of the show was John Betjeman, the poet and writer later to be knighted, who at the time was an attaché in the British embassy in Dublin.

Betjeman wrote,

‘The Germans at the moment broadcast two progammes a day to Eire, one on a medium wave and a Gaelic programme on Sunday evenings. The BBC would be most effective if broadcast simultaneously with one of the German broadcasts, or Haw Haw, preferably the latter and could thus diminish the Germans’ audience. There is a widespread impression in the country here that of the two BBC programmes, Home Service and Forces, the ‘Forces’ is the one to listen to as it is not the BBC and therefore not propaganda.’

The first show aired at 9.20pm on Tuesday November 11th 1941 and the first featured artist was the great Irish singer Count John McCormack who had been living in London at the time. The first show featured mostly music from McCormack and the BBC Men's Chorus and the BBC Orchestra, conducted by Leslie Woodgate. BBC. The show was compered by future celebrity author Leonard Strong, whose parents were Irish. The Half Hour was produced by Lesley Baily and Ronald Waldman.

The following week November 22nd, it was a different type of show now featuring Jimmy O’Dea as his famous incarnation as Biddy Mulligan, the Pride of the Coombe and sketches and skits featuring the fictional rural Irish town of Ballygobackward. In total up to the final episode on December 3rd 1943 which unusually was pre-recorded to accommodate O’Dea’s panto rehearsal at the Gaiety, eighty episodes were aired. The Radio Times advertised

‘The Irish Half Hour with Jimmy O’Dea and Barbara Mullen specially recorded for Irish men and women in the Forces. Compere, Joe Linnane. Singer, Robert Irwin. Writer, Harry O'Donovan. BBC Revue Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Charles Shadwell. Presented by Pat Hillyard and Francis Worsley

The show was aired on the BBC Forces service although some Irish regional newspapers were referring to it was the BBC Alternative Service avoiding the militaristic term of ‘forces’. The show made no mention of anything contentious in Ireland such as its neutrality or the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Not everyone was happy. One letter writer to the Belfast Telegraph who signed himself ‘Ulster Solider’ said that there no mention of Northern Ireland and that,

‘one would think that Dublin was the home to all the Irish servicemen and women, but actual facts show that there are four from Ulster for every one from Eire’.

By its second run that began in May 1942, John McCormack had departed and its was now solely O’Dea’s show. Its growing popularity was demonstrated as it was moved to primetime on a Friday evening and earned itself a midweek repeat for those who may have missed its live transmission. It starred the cream of Irish entertainment and variety who travelled by ship across the dangerous Irish Sea, dodging German U Boats. Others to appear on the bill along with Harry O’Donovan were Joe Linnane who was ‘loaned’ by Radio Eireann to the BBC as Linnane had been hosting the very popular ‘Question Time’ but left early to be replaced by Joe O’Neill. The Irish Times reported the departure but significantly did not mention the name of the BBC show despite it having first aired a year earlier. It wrote,

‘Listeners to Radio Eireann will regret, with me, that our old friend, Joseph Linnane, the   popular Irish Question Time Compere is to leave Ireland shortly to fulfil a contract with the B.B.C.

"Joe." as he is known to thousands of, Irish people, is certainly the best compere we have here, I am inclined to think, indeed, in these islands and the pep which he manages to infuse into his control of a studio full of people each Sunday night is remarkable.

Joe's B.B.C broadcasts will include a series of Irish programmes in which he will be associated with Jimmy O'Dea, Harry O'Donovan. and in which he will have vocal assistance from Robert Irwin and Barbara Mullen, the young Irish stage and film star, who will sing old Irish songs and maybe some new ones as well. The programme will alternate every Saturday with another Irish orgy of melody and mirth, in which Count John McCormack will star. This latter programme will be fathered by L. A. G Strong, who appears to be devoting most of his time these days to broadcasting instead of writing.’

Sean Ryan was a Clare born tenor who appeared from 1942 onwards and it provided a springboard for a tour around Ireland, with his shows being advertised for many years after as ‘coming directly from The Irish Half Hour’. Cyril Cusack, Noel Purcell, Peggy Dell and Cavan O’Connor were also regulars. A variety magazine at the time said that,

‘Cavan O'Connor, well known to listeners for his singing in 'Irish Half-Hour', is every bit as Irish as his name, although he has lived for many years in England. He started to sing at the age of nine, studied under Sir Hugh Allen at the Royal College of Music, since when he has appeared in opera and sung with choral societies and concert parties. He was a popular entertainer on the Western Front during the last war. O'Connor sings not only in English, but in French, German, and Spanish, and many will remember his contributions to the popular 'Cafe Colette' broadcasts.’

Barbara Mullen was another stalwart. Mullen, born in Boston, spent much of her teenage years back with her father on his native Aran Islands where he had starred in the popular film ‘The Man of Aran’. Mullen moved to London to study acting and found herself on the airwaves. She went onto a stellar career on the big screen and on the small screen as the popular Janet McPherson, the housekeeper on BBC Dr. Finlay’s Casebook TV show. Mullen was the star of Eamon Andrews This is Your Life in 1964.

Maye Tipple, who passed away in November 1993, played Biddy’s (O’Dea’s) on air daughter Bridget. She had been O’Dea’s leading lady at the Gaiety and when she departed for London, her role was taken by Maureen Potter who would have a long and successful career on stage and television. Tipple would marry Jack Fennell who worked at Pinewood Studios.

The popularity of the show on both sides of the Irish Sea cannot be underestimated and was a source of concern for Radio Eireann. When it finished in December 1943 a BBC Gallup poll put ‘Irish Half Hour’ as the second most listened to programme on BBC Radio. The show was available on medium wave and more importantly for overseas troops on short wave.

To capitalise on the goodwill created by the BBC’s Irish Half Hour during the war, just after the end of the war a rejuvenated Radio Luxembourg began a request show titled the Irish Half Hour from 1948.

German Wireless off the Galway Coast during WW2

In the last weeks of World War II, the censorship rules were relaxed in Ireland and some of the stories hidden from the Irish public began to appear and they demonstrated the fragility of our neutrality. As details were revealed in the newspapers, the use of wireless as a weapon of battle began to emerge.

As the Battle of the Atlantic raged between the Germans and the Allies, their common enemy was the weather, as both sides battled for supremacy. For both sides, if you had the best metrological reports, your forces had the upper hand. For the Germans, the leading manufacturer of wireless equipment Siemens was tasked with developing ‘wireless’ technologies that could remotely report the weather from the Atlantic. They were highly ambitious and in 1943, the Germans on board a submarine, landed on the coast of Canada’s province of Newfoundland at Martin Bay and established a weather station codenamed KURT, that transmitted coded weather forecast back to the German Navy who used it to identify storms which helped in both identifying merchant convoys and allowing their naval fleet to hide from their British pursuers. According to a Naval warfare historian,

‘KURT was comprised of a telemetry system; 150-watt short-wave antenna; a 10-meter (33-foot) tall antenna mast complete with an anemometer and wind vane on its own separate shorter mast; a 150-watt Lorenz 150FK-type radio transmitter; various meteorological measuring instruments; and ten 100-kilogram (220-pound) steel barrels that contained nickel-cadmium and dry-cell high voltage batteries—each measuring 1 meter (3.3 feet) high by 47 centimetres (1.5 feet) in diameter.’

The WFL-26 station had six-month’s worth of batteries and would collect and record atmospheric conditions—automatically broadcasting the information back to German receiving stations via radio signals. The transmissions were sent for no more than two minutes (one of these precious minutes being allotted for warming up the system) every three hours on a 3940-kHz band, in coded form no less.'

 Siemen's technician Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer aboard U-537 in the Labrador Sea listening to signals transmitted by Weather Station Kurt (named for Sommermeyer) broadcasting from Marin Bay, Newfoundland, 

24th October 1943.

But not only on land did the Germans establish secret weather stations on the continent of North America, Siemens developed sea-based stations. These German ‘robot wireless stations’ were either dropped into the sea from aircraft or launched by submarines and anchored along the Western Irish coast. The Atlantic was an unforgiving sea and the tethers for these ‘robot’ stations often broke loose. One of these was anchored off the coast of Galway near Slyne Head. A fishing trawler from Inishturk snared the device in their nets and hauled it ashore. The Belfast Telegraph reported when the censorship rules were relaxed that,

‘This ingenious apparatus was anchored under the sea and at certain fixed time regulated by an electric clock, pushed up an aerial over the surface and transmitted a report of the prevailing weather conditions in the locality.’

For some of the most technically minded locals in Galway and Mayo, they were able to intercept the signals and while in 1944 and early 1945 the signals from the wireless off the Galway coast was coded, the Germans had dispensed with some of the coding towards the end of the war and local fishermen were taking advantage of the German weather forecasting to assist their fishing, finding themselves forewarned of incoming storm fronts.

The captured German weather station was handed over to the Irish Army who paid the fishermen £ 200 for the salvage of the weapon. It was then transported to Dublin and the Army’s G2 intelligence headquarters. The fishermen all along the West coast not only netted German weather buoys but they also scooped up Allied equipment in their nets. The Allied weather stations were handed over to the Irish authorities who then repatriated them back to Britain who then paid the fishermen salvage recompense. The Examiner reported,

‘During the last two years of the war, a large number of robot weather indicators were either washed ashore on the West Coast of Ireland or caught by fishermen in their nets and brought to ports on the West Coast. The indicators, it was learned yesterday, all bore British Admiralty markings, and were handed over by the Irish authorities to the British Admiralty. Salvage was paid in all cases to the finders. It is believed that the indicators were dropped by planes in the Atlantic and were driven to the Irish coast by winds and currents. They were designed to send out from their delicate mechanism at pre-determined intervals wireless signals regarding the weather in the North Atlantic. So far as can be ascertained, all the indicators were of British origin.’

The importance of the weather off the Irish coast and how it was transmitted especially to the British forces had come to the fore in 1944. According to an article in the Irish Independent,

‘As he cranked the telephone and delivered his news over a crackly line from Co Mayo's most westerly point, Irish Coast Guardsman and lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney had no idea the lives of more than 150,000 Allied troops would hang on his words.

It was a fateful call. As he watched the barometer fall precipitously, Ted Sweeney's report from the Coast Guard station convinced General Dwight D Eisenhower to delay the D-Day invasion for 24 hours – a decision which averted a military catastrophe and changed the course of the Second World War.

This Friday, June 6, marks the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy – codenamed Operation Overlord. The assault on Hitler's 'Fortress Europe' signalled the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime in Europe with the German surrender less than a year later. Some 5,000 ships and over 11,000 aircraft carried approximately 156,000 Allied troops into battle on D-Day across a 60-mile front.’

The secret wireless station that the Germans based in Newfoundland in 1943 was not discovered until 1977.