My equipment and my staff of 20 men and 5 girls were housed on the 6th floor of the Metohikon Tamion building.When ELAS marched on Athens, there was constant firing, shelling and bombing throughout the 24 hours of the day and night for three or four weeks.The bombing was by light aircraft of the R.A.F.on the ELAS positions in the suburbs and Beaufighter aircraft straffing them with 20 mm cannon.Then ELAS set up a 75 mm gun in the northern suburb of Aharnon, and started hitting us back.When we had received several hits on and around our H.Q.building, I was ordered to move down to the second floor, to safer accommodation.I extended some of my antenna down-leads, and resumed normal service.One of our assignments was to transcribe, every day, what was said in the Greek transmissions of nineteen different countries about the situation in Greece, and to produce a daily summary in English, for the benefit of the Press Department.
In the summer of 1945 we began having interference on GIN, a station of the British Post Office which operated around 10MHz, transmitting a REUTER news service for Europe on the German Hellschreiber (Hell printer) system.This was a sort of very course TV picture of 49 dots, seven by seven.The letter 'I' for instance came out as seven dots vertically, and the letter 'T' just had another six dots across the top.The letters were very crude but readable, provided there was nointerference, or crashes of static.The interference, which made our tape quite unreadable, used to start around 3 in the afternoon and fade slowly away about three hours later, when the tape became readable again.I decided I would try and identify the source.All I had in the way of recorders were office-type Dictaphones using wax cylinders.I removed the three weights from the speed governor, and the cylinder spun round like mad.I managed to record for about three minutes and when I played the recording on another machine at normal speed the cylinder yielded up its secret - it was high speed morse traffic in 5-figure cypher.I typed it all out and noticed that some of the paragraphs began with the letter `B'.I subsequently found out it was a characteristic of stations carrying Royal Air Force traffic.I sent my text to London, and three weeks later the interference stopped.It was more than a month later that I was told what had happened.The transmitter causing the problem was located in Kandy, Ceylon.It operated with a rhombic antenna beamed to R.A.F.Calcutta.Its frequency was only 500 Hz away from GIN.The department which had allocated the frequency never imagined that it could possibly cause interference in Europe to the REUTER news service.But sunspot cycle 20, which was a good one, had decided otherwise.
In 1947 I was transferred to the British Police Mission to Greece, which was headed by Sir Charles Wickham.My principal duty was to interpret for Sir Charles, and for his second in command Colonel Prosser.My friend Mr Eleftheriou at the Ministry issued me with a special licence and I came on the air again using my pre-war callsign SV1RX.When the Police Mission closed down in 1948 I came to England and got the callsign G3FNJ which I have now held for over 41 years.
8.Wartime Broadcasts from Cairo.
Elias Eliascos, a former teacher of English at Athens College (a joint U.S./Greek institution) described to me how he came to be a news-reader at Radio Cairo in 1941 together with his brother Patroclos.
"When Hitler declared war on Greece and after the collapse of the front in northern Greece and in Albania, my brother Patroclos and I were summoned to the British Embassy in Athens and told that owing to our close ties with the British Council (of Cultural Relations), it would not beprudent for us to remain in Athens or even Greece after the German army had occupied the capital.We were told that we would be helped to leave Greece together with the British Embassy staff, the staff of the British Council and all the British nationals in Greece.
"The British Consul-General provided us with the necessary documents for my brother and me to board the last evacuation vessel sailing from the port of Piraeus.It was the s/s 'Corinthia' which left Piraeus on the 18th of April 1941.It happened to be Good Friday according to the Greek-Orthodox calendar.About five days later Hitler's army marched into Athens.
"The ship was packed and the British Embassy staff carried most of the Embassy files with them.One of the passengers was David Balfour who was the vicar of the little chapel attached to the Evangelismos Hospital, an impressive tall figure of a man sporting a large black beard.Although he had been ordained as a priest of the Greek-Orthodox Church he was a British national and it was widely rumoured that he was an agent of British Intelligence.His official title was 'Father Dimitrios'.He was also the spiritual father of the Greek Royal family.I refer to David Balfour because recently the 'ATHENIAN' which is the only English language magazine in Athens, in its issue dated January 1988, published a feature article about him, saying that even before the Germans had entered Athens he had shaved off his beard and divested himself of his clerical robes.
"I can say quite categorically that this was not true.When the 'Corinthia' sailed he was still 'Father Dimitrios' and in fact he officiated at a Resurrection service while we were still at sea.On the voyage we carried out lifeboat drill on two occasions, once when it was thought that there was a U-boat in the vicinity, and another time when an aircraft flew overhead which turned out to be friendly.I shall never forget how I was moved with emotion when I saw the women getting into the boats, most of them carrying babies or children in their arms, calmly singing hymns in low voices.
