The electrical installation dispute, part 10 ....

On a September day in 1950, Alfred Nicholas Thomas who was representing the BBC in experimental live television transmissions from an aircraft; found himself working with Arthur Carrington of Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd., on the same project.

Long before microwave links made live network television transmissions a very ordinary and practical means of relaying television signals, several people had begun experimenting with the idea of turning circling aircraft into flying antennas. One such group was the U.S, Westinghouse company with their version called 'Stratovision'. It was later used by a U.S. university, and it was also adopted by the U.S. military which used it over South Vietnam during the wars in South-east Asia.

But in the U.K., it was the BBC monopoly which had resumed TV transmissions commenced before WWII, that teamed up with the Marconi company to experiment with live television programs transmitted from a flying aircraft to a ground station. It was this event which brought together a BBC transmitter expert named Alfred Nicholas Thomas and Marconi's lead spokesman for television camera sales named Arthur Carrington, way back in the year 1950. In the middle of their escapade were representatives of the Pye Group of companies.

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​Arthur Carrington covered the same event for a Marconi publication, and although he acknowledged the BBC, he made no mention in his report of Arthur Nicholas Thomas. However, it is clear that these two men worked together on projects such as this from at least 1950 onwards.

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Arthur Carrington headed-up the Marconi sales team that sought government contracts for Marconi cameras. There was a lot of cross-over between events that Carrington became involved in, and those Pye became involved in. The cameras used in this airplane experiment are the same cameras used by Pye to televise the 1949 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race from ship-to-shore via the launch Consuta. 

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There is a picture of the camera on the vessel with accompanying text beginning on page 161 of 'Radio Man', the life-story of Pye's C.O. Stanley. [See picture extreme left]

The same sort of 'borrowing' of events that David Block engaged in to produce the glowing CV for Arthur Carrington in the Radio Caroline 'puff pieces' of text, were merely a somewhat dishonest public relations exercise engaged in by Leslie Perrin and Associates.

This same 'technique' cropped-up again and again in the original Radio Caroline literature where one writer merely copied from a previous writer. Many of the acts of achievement that were credited solely to Arthur Carrington, are in fact documented achievements of the Pye Group of companies in association with both Marconi and BBC.

So the question is: why did David Brock invent a CV for Arthur Carrington?

The answer is very clear. Pye could not be seen to have any connection whatsover to the launching of Radio Caroline, and therefore Arthur Carrington took sole credit in an attempt to create the impression that Atlanta and Caroline were two different projects. But this cover-up actually created and then disguised a fatal flaw in the outfitting of Radio Caroline. It was a problem that George Saunders was told to go and remedy.

It was also a problem created at Greenore and subsequently blamed on Ove Sjöström and it appears that neither George nor the Ove had any idea of how this problem came about in the first place. But we do, and this is what we will explain tomorrow in the final part of this electrical installation dispute, before returning to the rest of the story.

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