Daventry Arts Festival celebrates the history of BBC World Service in the town

“Radio gave us the power to get under a cell door and get to someone who had literally disappeared for years,” says broadcaster John Waite, discussing his historic broadcast on the World Service for his cousin Terry Waite while he was held in captivity in Beirut.

John, Terry and Sir John Tusa, who was managing director of the BBC’s World Service from (1986 to 1992), visited the iCon Centre in Daventry, for a special event celebrating the history of the World Service in town this week, as part of Daventry’s first Arts Festival to celebrate the Cultural Olympiad.

The service has a long history in the town starting as the BBC Empire Service (now the BBC World Service) in 1932, where broadcasts were transmitted from Borough Hill until 1992, having been chosen for its central location in the country.

The radio announcement of “Daventry calling” made Daventry familiar to millions of listeners across the world, especially during the Second World War, where crucial information was broadcast.

It was also visited by humanitarian Terry Waite, following his release after years in captivity between 1987 and 1991, to thank staff working for the World Service.

While spending 1,763 days captivity he was kept in solitary confinement, tortured and endured mock executions, his only lifeline to the outside world was the World Service.

“I got a radio in the last few weeks but I spent most of the time prior to that in silence.

“You long to know what is happening,” he said.

“You learn to live from within, I wrote my first book in my head in those years.

“But I was given information from the World Service before that, as we [fellow hostages John McCarthy and Brian Keenan] used to communicate by tapping on the wall in Morse Code and they used to tap news from the World Service to me through the wall.

“The first time they spelled out their name and I spelled mine back, at the time I regretted the first letters of my names were so far down the alphabet.

“I heard about the end of apartheid and about the Berlin Wall coming down through them.

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(Source : Northampton Chronicle & Echo via kimandrewelliott.com)