"Stranger Than Fiction"

Albert Richards of Heanor was one of the first radio 'Hams' in the district; here's his QSL Card. ‘A Little Relaxation’ It wasn’t hard work all the time at the ‘Empire’, there were special times which compensated for the extra time I worked, and didn’t get paid for, well, not in money that is. One of the times involved Michelle, that’s not her real name, but she reminded me of an actress from ‘Coronation Street’. She had gone through a separation with her husband, and was looking for someone who would give her some excitement in life. I was that person, and I’ll never know how I kept it secret for most of the time I was Manager of the Heanor ‘Empire’. Only one person knew of my association, and that was Harold Brown, who I trusted implicitly. Michele wasn’t special to me, but I think that she would have liked to have been, but after her divorce, marriage was the last thing on my mind. On several nights of the week, I would transport Harold Brown home, and be back at the cinema about 11.30pm; where Michele would be waiting. There was two good points about the ‘Empire’ office; it had good visibility of the foyer, and the front car park. I also rented a garage on a nearby street to park my car, I don’t know why, I was a free agent! The second point was a strong and substantial desk, just the right height for its intended use, and it got plenty of use! I recall one night one of the salesladies came to report to me that she was having problems with closing the fridge top, remarking that ‘Walls’ delivery man should stop putting heavy boxes on the top. I thought jokingly to myself, if only she knew the real reason! Cautiousness was the keyword over the years, remembering that others had access keys, and our ‘mobile’ service engineers might call in anytime on their way up north. I became a virtual mole, able to walk corridors in almost total darkness, so as not to put on lights which might attract police attention after closing time. Some time later the engineers were encounting problems travelling around to different cinemas, and if any of the site had problems, it was a long way to travel back home, if they had worked into the night. It was decided that the Heanor ‘Empire’ would have it’s own little ‘bed sit’, in an empty room created when the old lounge area between the two staircases had been boarded up. The area was directly over the foyer, giving a nice warm, draught free place, which was hard to find in the cinema. This was every Cinema Manager’s dream, and it was used often! 68 ‘Doctor Phibes – A Man of Mystery’: In the 1970s, like many other people in the United Kingdom, I became hooked on amateur, and citizens band radio. CB radio was at that time illegal in Britain, but it was possible to buy radios imported from Ireland, and the Isle of Man, and these in turn had originally come from The United States of America. I saw in a copy of ‘The Exchange and Mart’ that a shop in Lincoln, called ‘Castle Radio’, were advertising 40 channel radios for around £55.00 complete with all accessories. I drove over to Lincoln, and liked what I saw; so I brought a new boxed set back with me, which over the weekend I installed in my car, then a Fiat 127. All this was virtually so new, that I must have been one of the very first in the area to try this wonderful new invention. It was so new that I listened in whenever I went out in the car, but it was about four weeks, until I heard my first voice coming from the speaker. Living close to the M1 motorway I would go and sit in a lay-bye, listening to the truckers coming up from the south, and after a while, I gained enough experience to chat to them myself. Within six months, the CB radio had taken the country by storm, and shops opened on every street corner selling the radio sets and equipment. I didn’t like the Americanised lingo that went with the fad, but like millions of others I had to get myself a handle (a name). Due to it being illegal, I had to be careful, because if I was caught using one of these sets, I could be prosecuted, and this in turn would mean I would lose my job at that time. Vincent Price had just completed making a series of films, the first of which was ‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’, and so this was the handle I chose. Dr. Phibes was unusual, and a few stupid people, (and there were many on CB radio), assumed that I had picked this because I was in someway connected with the medical profession. ‘First Time Lucky’: I stayed on CB radio for several years, and alternated it with amateur radio, where like CB, I exchanged QSL Cards in the U.K. and also overseas. Sharing these experiences with me was Harold Brown, and each evening we would spend a couple of hours parked up in some car park, chatting away to the friends we were making, until we both became quite well known. Due to the illegality side, we couldn’t be recognised, anyway, nobody had ever seen us! Harold was known as ‘Lantern Man’, although he hardly spoke on the radio until some years later. 69 A favourite spot of ours was Junction 28 of the M1 motorway, that was until we discovered that the Post Office, then in charge of the frequency, and the Police, were doing spot checks on lorries and cars for the new sets, which meant prosecution, and confiscation of the equipment. Hidden behind a cloak of such secrecy, we transmitted this way until it was finally legalised, when the excitement went out of the hobby. Opposite the cinema was Soar’s the Hardware shop, where my niece worked full time, but she had no idea of anything untoward when she looked through an upstairs window one day, and saw me nailing co-axial cable across the roof of the Heanor ‘Empire’. I was in fact, making an ‘inverted V’ antenna, so we cold use the CB radio, along with a 200 watt amplifier, and beam out a strong radio signal to the North of England, and later the South, so we could talk to a greater number of people with a base, as opposed to a mobile station. Some six month’s later, after hundreds of successful transmissions, Joan Tolley informed me that a ‘Willy’ Clark, who had moved into the flat over the shop opposite wanted a word with me, and he came in one morning. He asked me if I had ever heard of CB Radio, which of course I hadn’t,(?), and could I possibly do him a great favour. As the cinema was somewhat higher than the shop and flat, would I let him put an antenna on the roof of the ‘Empire’, and run the wire from our roof to his? I said I would ask the partnership, and if they agreed, I would let him know (some hope!). I kept my mouth shut, and asked nothing, giving him ‘no’ as an answer; I certainly had no intentions of revealing my own set up. From that day to this, nobody has ever discovered the secret of the transmissions from our secret location, after all, who would even suspect that a cinema would make illegal transmissions; I had in fact become a ‘Pirate’ in the true sense of the word, although not in the same category as ‘Radio Caroline’ or ‘Radio Nordsee International’. We even had our own mailing address for QSL cards saying, simply send them to us at ‘Empire’, Heanor, Derbyshire, which even King Hussein of Jordan’s son Mohammed did, when I spoke to him in Germany, where he was at college, and over the years I became more and more interested in Citizens Band and Amateur radio, up to the point where radio and cinema ruled my life, and I found myself in the position where I was at the cinema during normal hours, and then on the radio throughout the night , leaving myself with about four hours for sleeping. The hobby also helped me in my search for old cinema and theatre buildings, as I would contact someone on the air who knew the places which were still standing, and then, after some inquiries, (if I was near), travel to get a photograph of the site, to include in my collection. 70 During the nights I mostly found myself high in the hills of Derbyshire, usually near to the town of Leek, on the boundary of my two favourite counties. From here I was able to speak to other stations around Manchester, Liverpool, North Wales, and if conditions were right, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. I did this on a weekly basis, and I became quite famous on the airwaves as station Oscar Romeo Charlie Five Zero, or November Mike Six Twenty Nine. I still have the card to prove it! ‘Sleepless Nights’: Over the years I became more and more interested in Citizens Band and Amateur radio, up to the point where radio and cinema ruled my life, and I found myself in the position where I was at the cinema during normal hours, and then on the radio throughout the night , leaving myself with about four hours for sleeping. The hobby also helped me in my search for old cinema and theatre buildings, as I would contact someone on the air who knew the places which were still standing, and then, after some inquiries, (if I was near), travel to get a photograph of the site, to include in my collection. During the nights I mostly found myself high in the hills of Derbyshire, usually near to the town of Leek, on the boundary of my two favourite counties. From here I was able to speak to other stations around Manchester, Liverpool, North Wales, and if conditions were right, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. I did this on a weekly basis, and I became quite famous on the airwaves as station Oscar Romeo Charlie Five Zero, or November Mike Six Twenty Nine. ‘It was after one of these night operations that I uncounted a most unusual occurrence, around 5.30am, on a beautiful spring morning. I was on my way home for breakfast, travelling on the road from Warslow to Hartington, in Derbyshire. Coming over the ridge of the hill, I noticed the valley was enveloped with an early morning fog, which looked like a giant lake, in the distance. I was doing about forty miles an hour, when I suddenly noticed in a field on my left, there was something burning. I stopped the car, and walked over to the hedge, to see what it was. The object, which was as large as a supermarket trolley, was silver in colour, and emitting flames through a hole in the side. 71 It was burning quite fiercely, and as I stood there, I suddenly realised that there was no bird sounds, cows mooing, or sheep bleating, as there usually was at this time in the morning. I hadn’t, until then realised the coldness of the morning air, and as my senses began to tell me that I shouldn’t be here, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck, slowly began to stand on end. I recall turning, running to my car, jumping in, and driving away. I was frightened by the experience, and I didn’t know why, or what I was frightened of. ‘A Mystery’: To this day I have never known what I had witnessed. Could it have been something fallen from an airplane? I was not far from the flight paths to both Manchester Airport, and East Midlands Airport. Could it have been a weather balloon? Sometimes they do burst and fall to earth. I was never to know the answer, but I do know that it was something ‘unusual’, and that my better judgement told me to get away from there as quickly as I could. It was one of those times in life when common sense had taken over. I had seen so many films with similar incidents, like Michael Rennie as the spaceman in ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, E.T. from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, or even the ‘Alien’ films. As I reached Hartington Village, the buildings emerged from the heavy mist, giving the place an eerie look; this really was Hartington, and not ‘Brigadoon’. For weeks later the event stayed in my mind, and I made it my policy never to go that way in the early morning again; it had been the most frightening experience of my life. ‘Here’s a little on the background of CB Radio’ Around the middle of 1979 there were a few CB’s brought over to the UK and it just basically grew from there. In those days CB wasn’t legal in the UK, and no one was to imagine the enormous impact that legalising CB was to have during the next two years. After much controversy the Government finally gave in, and legalised CB in 1981. Between 1979 and 1981, there were all sorts of rigs flooding into the country, Stalker 9, Ham International Concorde and Multimode, Cobras and many more. Originally the Breaker channel was channel 14, and within no time at all CB clubs were formed where we could all go and have a pint or three, and "eyeball" the person on the other end of the microphone, and have meetings. Some of the first radios in the country were the original American 23 channel sets, but these were few and far between, and after a short while everyone had a 40 channel set, and some of us had even more channels. 72 The breaker channel was moved to channel 19 for a reason I cannot recall, but I do remember the fun and the wind up we all did on each other in those days. I never expected the general public to get so worked up over the 27-megahertz radio frequency. But then, I never expected the truckers' strike of 1974, either. Protesting new government regulations, independent truckers blockaded bridges with their huge, honking semis, while TV news cameras churned away. Viewers noted how truckers could organize spontaneously into giant convoys, and how (in the days before radar detectors) they seemed to know, magically, when police were approaching. Wising up to the truckers' magic, hundreds of thousands of citizens bought CB’s, and they wanted to use them. The fad proper only ignited in early '76, with a Country & Western novelty tune called "Convoy." Written by C. W. McCall (advertising copywriter Bill Fries). "Convoy" describes the cross-country journey of an indestructible thousand-truck fleet. The song deployed a rich lingo of "Smokeys" (police), "hammer down" (driving fast), and the ubiquitous "10-4" (acknowledged, correct). Trucking is a hard life, but it has its romantic side: a brotherhood of independent loners in solidarity on the open road, using their wits and their CB radios to evade highway cops and bureaucratic regulation. "Convoy" conjured this romance, and the American public responded, making it a mammoth crossover pop hit. Then, of course, came the fad. Like a hundred other fads, CB mania gave us many more CB-inspired songs, such as "White Knight" (about a trucker perfidiously lured into a speed trap by a CB-wielding Smokey); movies like the “Smokey and the Bandit” series, and Sam Peckinpah's “Convoy”; trucker-hero TV shows like “Moving On”; and a flood of books listing hundreds of CB slang terms. Like a hundred other fads, CB mania quickly ran its course. All the CB books in my local libraries date from 1976, no later. Today stores still sell CB radios, mainly as emergency signals if your car breaks down. Cellular phones and radar detectors have made other CB functions obsolete. Meanwhile, the CB frequencies once more belong to their original users, the truckers, who are probably glad to have the airwaves to themselves again. ‘The Oldest ‘Ham’ in Town’: One of the oldest Amateur radio operator's in Heanor, was Albert Richards, who kept a small radio shop at the bottom of Ray Street. After serving in the forces, he ran a successful radio repair business, and taught electronics and radio at the local college. I own one of the last QSL cards he used to send out, 73 Please go to the next web page......