This bank holiday weekend has seen the Notting Hill Carnival in London. It has become the largest street celebration in Europe and, arguably, one of the first manifestations of London's post multicultural society (a subject that needs another diary). That's perhaps ironic as its founder promoters, Michael X, was a Black Power advocate imprisoned for advocating the murder of any white man "laying hands" on a black woman. Even more weird is that he provides a link back to the very start of pirate radio broadcasts to the UK in the 1930s.
Michael X helped found Carnival with the London Free School in 1967. That was intended to emulate the American free universities although Carnival was about its only achievement. Michael X was born Michael de Freitas in 1933 in Trinidad. His absent father was Portugese and his mother, who practiced Obeah -Trinidadian "voodoo", encouraged him to pass as white. He emigrated to Britain in 1957 and managed prostitutes, ran gambling houses, sold drugs and became a rent collector for a slum landlord, Peter Rachman. Rachman was so notorious for his exploitation and intimidation of his tenants that "Rachmanism" entered the dictionary. In the 1960s he became an exponent of Black Power. In 1965, using the name Abdul Malik, he founded Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS). Later in the year of Carnival's founding, he was convicted under the then new Race Relations Act for inciting racial violence, the first non-white person to be jailed under it. In 1969 he set himself up as the head of the "Black House", a Black Power commune in North London. This was chronically underfunded but supported by many in the counter-culture at the time. John Lennon and Yoko Ono donated hair to be auctioned. This is a video of them receiving a pair of Muhammed Ali's boxing shorts in return.
Eventually the situation was so desperate members of the group including Michael X enticed Jewish businessman Marvin Brown to the Black House. There he was imprisoned and intimidated, being forced to wear a spiked "slave" collar to extort money. By the end of 1970, the Black House had closed and burned down in mysterious circumstances. Michael X along with others was arrested for extortion, his bail was paid by John Lennon in January 1971.
Michael X fled to his native Trinidad to avoid prosecution the following month. During his time in London he had befriended an American, Hakim Jamal who was born Alan Donaldson. Wikipedia claim the two were cousins.
He was from a broken home in a black district of Boston, had started using heroin at 14, been committed to an asylum for two attempted murders, and then underwent a spiritual conversion.
Hakim Jamal was clever, fiery, passionate about his political ideals and kept impressive company.
He talked of attending functions alongside Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon and the broadcaster David Frost.
Jamal had a white English girlfriend who styled herself Hale Kimga. That was an anagram of Hakim and her forename, Gale. "Born with a silver spoon in her mouth", Gale had married a film director, Jonathan Benson in 1965 aged 20 in a "society wedding". Their best man was the actor Corin Redgrave (brother of Vanessa). That marriage had quickly broken down and by 1967 she had left for Argentina, returning to Britain shortly after. Before her marriage, Gale had worked as a fashion model and as a DJ for a French radio station.
Jamal was likely mentally unstable. Gale's brother describes one incident.
He laid her across two chairs, head on one, legs on another, and as I watched, she seemed to go into a sort of coma. She was quivering—and she wasn't acting. Hakim said that being able to do this was proof that he was God
In 1971, Jamal and Gale moved to Guyana and shortly after joined Michael X in a new commune he had set up in Trinidad, also called the Black House. In February 1972, that too burned down.
Police investigating the fire discovered two shallow graves. One of them contained the badly decomposed body of Gale. The details of her murder are known from the trial of Michael X and others. One morning about seven weeks earlier, she went along with a group of members of the commune to a small ravine near a clump of bamboo plants. Michael X had examined a small hole and had started to excavate it. He was joined by others. When the hole had reached about 4 feet deep, one turned to Gale to ask her what she thought it was for. She shrugged her shoulders to be told it was "a fresh hole for decomposed bodies". Two others started to lash out at her with cutlasses. Badly wounded she had passed out and was buried alive. It's believed Michael X had become increasingly concerned about Hakim Jamal and blamed Jane for his mental state. A 2008 movie, the Bank Job, suggests an alternative motive and that Jane was working deep undercover for the security services to infiltrate the Black Power movement. Another writer suggests she simply got on the nerves of the commune members with her adoption of African clothing.
Of those involved in her killing, one, Joseph Skerritt, a local barber was himself murdered. One mysteriously drowned at sea and one gave evidence at the trial. Two, Stanley Abbott and Edward Chadee, were eventually found guilty of her murder and given the death penalty although one had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Michael X had fled to Guyana but was captured and charged with the murders of Gale and Skerrett although he was only convicted of murdering the latter and never stood trial for killing Gale. He was executed by hanging in 1975. Hakim Jamal was not a suspect and had returned to the USA before the trials. On May 1, 1973; four black men burst into his apartment in Boston and shot him repeatedly. Police blamed this on a dispute with Elijah Mohammed of the Nation of Islam and claimed members of a gang known as De Mau Mau were responsible, five were later convicted.
Gale had a twin brother, Greville also died in 1973 in a car accident in Morocco. They had been born in London in 1944. Their father was a Conservative MP and is the final link in the chain. His name was Leonard Plugge and is possible the most extra-ordinary character in the story. Until his first election campaign, he insisted his name be pronounced with a J sound at the end on the grounds that it was of Belgian origin. This is on somewhat shaky ground as family research claims descent from Jan Janz Plug, born 1591 in Noordwijk aan Zee.
Plugge was born in September 1889 and served in the RAF during WWI, and was usually addressed as Captain. He was an inventor, railway consultant engineer and to merely state he was a radio enthusiast is like claiming the characters in The Big Bang Theory have a mild interest in science fiction. In a review of Plugge's biography Malcolm Baird, the son of John Logie Baird, the inventor of television wrote:
Plugge had an engineering background but it was in civil engineering and not electrical engineering. His first encounter with radio came in 1922 when he was shown a home-made receiver, and it was love at first sight. He saw the potential of the new medium and he was intrigued by the opportunities for British listeners to tune in to “foreign” stations. He also met my father J.L.Baird who was struggling to develop an even newer medium, television. Plugge and Baird were kindred spirits in that they resented the prevalent high-minded official attitude on the control of broadcasting. Established circles were afraid that it might fall into the hands of commercial companies which might lead to “vulgarity”. John Reith, the first Director General of the B.B.C., was a staunch opponent of anything which could remotely be considered vulgar. The mind boggles at what Reith might have thought of modern B.B.C. programmes if he had lived today.
He is credited with inventing a two way car radio telephone and is believed to have been the first person to have a car radio. Such was the size of the equipment at the time, his very large car was almost weighed down with the batteries. The loudspeaker hung from the roof rather like a lampshade. When he parked it in central London with the radio playing, he drew such a crowd he was charged with causing an obstruction.
The first scheduled (in that the date, time and frequency had been published) is claimed to have been by Steringa Idzerda from the Hague on November 6, 1919 from 8 to 11 pm. It was sponsored by the Dutch firm Philips. By 1922 radio owners in Britain were known to be listening and were featured in the Illustrated London News. By 1924, complaints about the broadcasts not being in Dutch and lack of money brought those transmissions to a close. In Britain, several radio stations owned by set manufacturers were brought together to form the British Broadcasting Company. Shows were sponsored rather than including advertising. A parliamentary committee investigated how radio should be funded and at the end of 1926 the Company became the Corporation that survives today, established by Royal Charter and funded by a licence system.
Plugge would tour continental Europe to listen to the radio transmissions and collecting their schedules for publication in the UK. Various sponsored programmes were broadcast in English by continental stations including one from the Eiffel Tower sponsored by the London department store Selfridges in 1925 and organized by Plugge. This was a talk on fashion but without advance publicity, it gained few listeners. In 1931 Plugge was on his travels in northern France when he discovered a radio station in the fishing town of Fecamp. It was owned by the proprietor of the local distillery, Fernand Le Grand, whose grandfather "invented" the Benedictine liqueur. He had started Radio Fecamp in 1926, later changing the name to Radio Normandie to broaden its appeal, after the local radio club lost members due to the size of the town and them not wanting to attend meetings in the cold winter months. The radio station was started as a way of keeping them in touch.
Plugge established the International Broadcasting Company and started broadcasts to the UK during the breaks in the French language programming, anglicizing the name to Radio Normandy. Finding his first announcer was as accidental as finding the station itself, Plugge had mentioned the project to the teller at the local branch of the British bank National Provincial who immediately volunteered to cycle to the studios to present the records.
What Plugge plugged into was a gap in BBC broadcasts. The first Director General was a dour Scot called John Reith. He firmly believed that it was inappropriate to broadcast anything other that serious programming on a Sunday. That meant, for example no popular or dance music. Radio Normandy would do that. In the early days the studio facilities were rudimentary. In one the announcer was in a room above the engineer and their only connection was a metal column. After naming the piece of music, he would strike the metal signalling the engineer to put the record on. Apparently listeners were expected to believe the intermittent gong like sounds were part of France's radio requirements like the occasional brief news broadcast in French.
As the station developed, programming was made in the UK on records which were then sent to Fecamp. Listeners were expected to believe that this was actually a live transmission from London but the Post Office had refused to supply the company with the necessary high quality telephone lines. Plays would be recorded in the theater and presented as live. This system fell down on occasions. One play supposedly came from a theater that had burned down a couple of weeks before transmission. One presenter recalls introducing a recording only to hear clicks every few seconds as the needle hit the scratch in the record. Plugge realised that these recordings were of poor quality and hit on using the sound track from movies as a way of recording audio in high quality for his stations.
Selling advertising slots was also a challenge at the start. To convince his potential advertisers he and a colleague made up some face cream from a family recipe and put it in jars. Listeners were invited to send two shillings and sixpence to the RN offices - opposite those of the BBC - for a sample of this new luxury product. Such was the demand that Pugge eventually turned over production to an industrial chemist.
Such was the wealth generated by Radio Normandy and his other stations, Pugge was able to purchase a luxury motor yacht to travel between London and his studios. In 1935 he stood for the constituency of Chatham in Kent using the slogan "Plugge in for Chatham". Three weeks before he had married. This could well have been to keep his private life from public attention. In his biography of Stephen Ward (a victim of the Profumo scandals in the 1960s) Douglas Thompson describes Plugge as a
connoisseur of beautiful women and would engage an assortment of them to cater for his every need, his only prerequisite being that they were completely naked while doing so...
Thompson quotes Kim Waterfield as calling him "Dirty Lenny" and revealing
He kept a couple of mistresses in Dolphin Square and had what in the Deep South of America they call "wierd ways"
These would appear to extend to his parenting. He insisted on his children being educated in French and kept them in a home separate from where he resided.
The money dried up at the outbreak of WWII. Plugge hoped that his radio expertise could be used for broadcasting to the armed forces. In the end, his only skills to be exploited was his being unique in the sitting MPs in speaking perfect French. After the war De Gaulle had a less laissez faire attitude to broadcasting regulation and Radio Normandy remained silent. Another country, Luxembourg, did not have the same regard for the International Broadcasting Union regulations and continued to allow Radio Luxembourg, a station Plugge had co-operated with, to continue high power broadcasts in English.
Plugge continued to be a host and socialite. His circle included Princess Margaret. One of the reasons put forward for Gale becoming involved with Hakim was that he was supposed to have naked pictures of Margaret that he used to blackmail his way out of trouble. Plugge died in Los Angeles on February 19, 1981 leaving an estate worth a mere £1100.
Plugge's radio stations led in part to the resignation of Reith as Director General of the BBC. His hostility to having popular programming on Sundays meant he became an increasing liability for the Corporation. Plugge's successor pirate radio stations - based offshore in transmitting ships - also broke the BBC's established practices and meant they introduced their own pop music station, Radio 1. And to bring the story back full circle, in the digital age the BBC have a popular additional station concentrating on urban music and music of black origin, Radio 1 extra. They also made a documentary about Plugge which some of the information in this diary draws on. It can be heard using the link below the fold.
Radio Normandy - Captain Plugge story by Chelmsford Calling Network on Mixcloud