Island Life Magazine Ltd August/September 2011 | Page 54

INTERVIEW

Kenneth with his family

Kenneth as a young Army recruit

evacuated to Herefordshire. It was a
great upheaval, but at the same time
it gave us all something different to
do and see. I quite enjoyed it, because
it wasn’t as if I had been living with
my parents, so it was something of an
adventure.”
Kenneth later attended Corpus
Christi College at the University of
Oxford, but was there only one year
before being called up for Army duty.
He served in the Coldstream Guards in
Normandy, saying: “My battalion went
over there 10 days after the Normandy
landings, but after only a month I was
wounded and had to come home. So I
didn’t see too much of the war, but it
was still plenty!
“I stayed in the Army another two
years, and just after the war went to
Palestine at a time when the Jews and
the Arabs hated us because we had
promised the Jews a country of their
own and the Arabs didn’t like that. So
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we were stuck in the middle trying to
keep the peace.
“It was difficult and uncomfortable
because we were surrounded by people
who didn’t like us. It was virtually a
war after the war. We didn’t have to
shoot anyone, but it could easily have
come to that.”
After leaving the Army, Kenneth
returned to University to complete his
Modern Language studies, and was
hoping to go into the Foreign Service,
but was not one of the five per cent
of many who wanted to go down the
same route.
“I wasn’t quite sure what I was going
to do and someone suggested trying
the BBC, which I did. I didn’t think
I would get a job because it was only
radio in those days. But I was given a
job as an announcer on what was the
Home Service.”
But Kenneth accepts that when he
transferred from radio to television in

1955 it was a very different media to
what we know now. He said: “These
were very early days of television and
it was difficult to get the feeling right,
because with radio all you had to do
was read it out and no one could see
you.
“But on television you were very
aware that there were perhaps two to
three million people watching you,
which made it very nerve-racking.
Editors were very strict in as much
that they didn’t allow you on the
news until you had served ‘an
apprenticeship’ as a general announcer.
We had to go through a bulletin, have
it recorded, and then someone would
go through it with us to point out
what we had done wrong. Actually,
that served me in good stead for all my
time in broadcasting, and nothing like
that is done these days. I hate to say it,
but it shows sometimes.”
He continued: “When I became the