In article ,
Peter Able wrote:
On 26/02/2021 17:14, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 26/02/2021 16:18, Peter Able wrote:
On 26/02/2021 15:23, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 26/02/2021 13:52, Peter Able wrote:
On 26/02/2021 08:31, Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote:
Yesk I believe somebody who knew him is still on the air from
Bletchley, the
town not the park or the national radio centre which is also there of
course.
Brian


Flowers may have been interested in amateur radio, but where is the
evidence of this - or of him being a licenced radio amateur?

PA

None that I have ever found. As I understand it he was really more
into switching circuit design with his background in this at the GPO.



Indeed. Mind you, in those days when amateur radio was a more
technical hobby, it might have appealed to such an active engineering
mind. That said, I can't find his name in either a 1937 or a 1952
amateur radio callbook.

As a professional engineer, once you have built a couple of radios as a
teenager that's really it. One moves on.

And I very much doubt we would have been hamming the airwaves in
wartime and working for a top secret establishment



You're at risk of falling into the trap of confusing the past with the
present - and so being a bit hard on the Old Timers. As I mentioned
Amateur Radio was quite a technical hobby at that time. Remember there
was a class of licence - and a fair number of such licensees - at that
time that permitted you to do as much as full licensees were permitted
other than feed the transmitter output into an aerial. This would
mystify the present generation of non-technical radio amateurs. What
was the point of buying their black-boxes under that sort of regime?

The past is - indeed - a foreign country. For the record, radio
amateurs were actively employed in government institutions and the
defence industry during (and since) WW2. Plus there were others used to,
in their spare time, take down particular axis transmissions of
(encoded) morse code and send them - via Box 25 - to, eventually,
Bletchley Park or the like.

But that was then.

PA

There is an RSGB site at Bletchley.

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England
"I'd rather die of exhaustion than die of boredom" Thomas Carlyle