rtainly not because the newsreader had gone berserk or something like
that. The Chief Censor was Professor Eric Sloman who had been the
first Director of the Police Academy in Kerkyra (Corfu). Then there
were censors for the eleven languages used in these broadcasts. The
censor for the Polish broadcasts was the Countess Walevska,
grand-daughter of Napoleon's lady friend. The Countess was a rather
large lumbering woman who always came into the studio carrying lots of
parcels. One evening she came in and sat in an armchair on the other
side of the studio to wait her turn for the Polish broadcast which
followed the Greek. As I was reading the news bulletin I suddenly
became conscious of a regular ticking noise in the headphones I was
wearing. I made a sign to Mr Joly who was acting as switch censor at
the time, and he got up and walked over to the Countess. He whispered
in her ear and asked her what was in her hand bag. The Countess
blushed and replied that she had just collected her alarm clock from
the watchmaker. I don't know if any sharp-eared listener had heard
the ticking and thought that we had a time bomb in the studio.

"Having mentioned my good friend Mr Norman Joly I must record that
he was the technical supervisor for the foreign language broadcasts,
handling such things as wavelengths for the short wave relays,
training the newsreaders (of whom there must have been over 30) and
acting as studio manager and switch censor for some of the languages
which he knew.

"A regular broadcaster in our studio was Francis Noel-Baker who
later became a Labour member of Parliament in the British House of
Commons, like his father. The Noel-Baker family are well-known in
Greece because for several generations they have owned a large
property on the island of Euboea (Evia in Greek). Francis speaks
fluent Greek, and his mother was related to Lord Byron. In recent
years he has switched his allegiance to the Conservative Party led by
his personal friend Margaret Thatcher.

"Major Patrick Leigh-Fermor the writer who had kidnapped
Major-General Heinrich Kreipe in Crete and spirited him away to Allied
headquarters in Cairo, came to our studio and described how this
audacious operation had been carried out by him and Captain William
Stanley Moss, ex-Coldstream Guards, with the considerable assistance
of the Cretan resistance movement partisans.

"Purely by coincidence, it was the Greek news bulletin from