大象传媒

This story has been written onto the 大象传媒 People鈥檚 War site by CSV Storygatherer Lucy Thomas and Valerie Walpole (U3A Callington) on behalf of Eileen Kingsley. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

大象传媒 WARTIME SOUND RECORDIST

Part 1 Working with Richard Dimbleby

My name is Eileen Kingsley, I joined the 大象传媒 in 1940 when I
was 17 years old. There were very few of us, there were 4000 men
and two lady engineers, so you can imagine we had quite a good
time.

When I first started, I worked a lot with Richard Dimbleby, he
was the man, he wrote to the 大象传媒 saying he ran a newspaper and he
had reporters, why didn't the 大象传媒 employ reporters and they wrote
back to him saying "No we won't employ them, you come and do it for
us"
So he was the first war correspondent and the others all
followed him. He was the first man into Belsen and he came back
and he said I can't get the smell out of my nostrils. He said the
smell was so atrocious.

Part 2 Wartime Conditions.

I went to London on my own because my family were all in
Northampton. My brothers were in the airforce.

We had very little personal life, because we had very little
clothes, very little money, very little coupons or anything.
The outstanding memory is that everywhere was dark, there was
nothing going on after dark, there were no lights. I remember
clearly we only had electricity for half the day and we used to
fight to get outside the bathroom door so that you could get a
bath sometimes. It was a very very stark life, very frightening,
very little personal life at all except when we were at work, we
sort of made friends with each other. We had to support each
other.

I remember clearly when the bomb dropped on Pemberly's near
Grosvenor Square and we had to try and get out and to climb out over
the debris to get to work, and it was always like that. From the
moment you set foot outside the door the sirens would go and you
didn't know whether to go on to work or go back for shelter.

I think young people these days just don't realise that we had
no teenage, we became grown-ups and adults with terrific
responsibilities straight away.

When we worked for the 大象传媒 we had to be absolutely secretive
about things we were recording, and I remember the day when we
were recording Slapton Sands, we'd brought the Americans over to
go onto the beach head and somehow a German submarine had got
wind of it and it came into Slapton Sands and thousands of
American soldiers were killed there and then. We could hear them
screaming and shouting as they were fired on and killed, hundreds
of these young men who had come over to help us. I think one
never forgets the sound of their voices as they died on Slapton
Sands. I remember the horror which I felt that so many young
men had come over to help and had been killed. We had to keep it
a secret, the world wasn't told until a long time after what had
happened.

Part 3 Recording General Montgomery

Recording from the Forces was very difficult with the guns
going and you'd sometimes be talking to a man and he'd be killed
and you'd have to find out what was going on. These were the
things we had to live with. We knew what was going on, we knew
all the secrets but we couldn't talk about it.

I think my worst day of recording was when I went in one morning
and got my schedule and at the top it said General Montgomery 10
o'clock and he wasn't known to be polite and he didn't like fools
so he was very difficult. We had a disc where we recorded 3
minutes and that was it but of course being who he was and he
was going on and on and so I was panicking, so I cut another disc
as well but I managed to get it all on. Afterwards I took it to
him and he listened to it and he said "Oh thank you that's going
round to all my men all over the world". He was quite pleased with
it but he didn't really know what I'd been through, recording,
terrified of him but he was very nice actually. You can't
imagine how I felt taking my recording to him for him to listen
to because you know that as you go towards the centre of the disc
the quality deteriorates. We told him we wanted 3 minutes but he
went on to 3mins. 20 secs. and got closer and closer but he said
the quality was OK and that disc went with him wherever he went.

It was a different set up to the 大象传媒 today and we used to have
a channel going, running all the time and you used to record
everything that was going on, everything that happened everywhere
and then it was all looked at and then thought about and acted
upon. But we weren't allowed to talk about it, so we knew
everythimg that was going on, it was quite a responsibility.

Part 4 Working with The Resistance.

We were really instrumental in setting up the French Resistance.
We used to have big 33 discs and we used to send them out with a
message in the middle, with certain tunes in certain places and
we sent them to France and they would pick it up and we would
send people out there afterwards. One of my friends, one of my
boyfriends went out because he was French and he was never heard
of again They used to go out afterwards and wait for these
messages from us. It used to be terrifying in the middle of the
night with the bombs dropping, with your hands shaking, trying to
get a message through, knowing it was life or death. In the
Channel Islands, we used to send messages there, but if anyone
listened to us they were shot and Hitler got so angry with us he
issued a directive to say that all of us had to be killed and
they kept sending bombers over to Broadcasting House because he
wanted rid of us. So it was quite a scary time.

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