18-06-2024, 05:29 AM
From "Here's Looking At You", page 120.
The top of the mast looked rather like the spokes of an umbrella with two tiers of eight arms hinged and radiating and, between the arms, the wires of the aerials. The whole mast was designed to move in the wind several inches out of the perpendicular and was 'proof against the heaviest gale', except the gale in the winter of 1936-7 when the wind got under the arms of the umbrella and blew them shut. The wires were twisted together in an impossible tangle and transmission, until they were untangled, was impossible. Birkinshaw:
Now, normally, if you want to do something on the aerial, you must select a calm day. You don't do it in the dark in a gale. But the strong principle underlying BBC engineering is that the show must go on. So, I thought, I must go up and make my own impression as to whether it's safe and, if it is, I'll ask the riggers if they're willing to have a shot at repairing it. So that I could see what I was doing, I asked Campbell if he could mount a group of 8-kilowatt spotlights on the roof and illuminate the mast from top to bottom. Which he did. And there it was, standing out like a beacon all over north London. And I began to climb. Two hundred and fifteen feet with the wind clawing at me and the rain dashing against me. It was The most frightening experience I've ever had in my life and we lashed the aerials so that it could never happen again.
The top of the mast looked rather like the spokes of an umbrella with two tiers of eight arms hinged and radiating and, between the arms, the wires of the aerials. The whole mast was designed to move in the wind several inches out of the perpendicular and was 'proof against the heaviest gale', except the gale in the winter of 1936-7 when the wind got under the arms of the umbrella and blew them shut. The wires were twisted together in an impossible tangle and transmission, until they were untangled, was impossible. Birkinshaw:
Now, normally, if you want to do something on the aerial, you must select a calm day. You don't do it in the dark in a gale. But the strong principle underlying BBC engineering is that the show must go on. So, I thought, I must go up and make my own impression as to whether it's safe and, if it is, I'll ask the riggers if they're willing to have a shot at repairing it. So that I could see what I was doing, I asked Campbell if he could mount a group of 8-kilowatt spotlights on the roof and illuminate the mast from top to bottom. Which he did. And there it was, standing out like a beacon all over north London. And I began to climb. Two hundred and fifteen feet with the wind clawing at me and the rain dashing against me. It was The most frightening experience I've ever had in my life and we lashed the aerials so that it could never happen again.
