A Bit About Reg,
G4FGQ
My full name is Reginald James Edwards.
Since retirement I have been domiciled in Rowley Regis in the Black Country,
West Midlands, England. As I was born only half mile away and have returned to
live in the same house as I did at the age of seven it might be thought I'm a
stick-in-the-mud. Actually I've lived in various other parts of Britain for
most of my 80 years and still travel occasionally by rail, amateur radio,
letter post, and of course, by Internet.
From Rowley Hills, in the 'twenties',
it was possible to see the Earl of Dudley's Iron Works at Brierley Hill, 3
miles away, only on Sundays when local industry shut down its shunting yards,
rested the canal barge horses, braked the coal-mine winding engines, suspended
blasting at granite quarries, closed down the marl-holes, brickworks,
iron-pouring foundries, forges, blast furnaces, rolling mills, ground-shaking
steam hammers, ear-piercing machine shops, and the hundreds of fuming,
soot-belching, sky-blackening, smog-generating brick chimney stacks. However
there were no petrol fumes. Some buses still had solid tires. There were
petrol-driven vehicles on the roads but steam-driven lorries with trailers were
quite common, loaded with the raw materials and products of the many large and
small backyard factories which worked a 6-day week.
Always resourceful wildlife continued
to survive amid the noise and smoke. Smaller birds, house sparrows, blue-tits,
robins kept warm in winter by congregating around human dwellings all of which
were warmed with roaring coal fires. And the iron works continuously radiated
surplus heat through roofs and walls day and night.
Poultry and pidgeons were conveniently
kept in back yards and a midweek family meal of braised rabbit was cheap and
popular amongst the labouring classes. Shops and market stalls, lit with
suspended acetylene lamps, were open till 9 pm on Saturday nights when joints
of beef for Sunday dinner were available at give-away prices until Monday.
Butcher's refridgerators were not universal.
On Sundays the miners, machine
operators, iron-puddlers, pawn-brokers, cobblers, tailors, painters,
carpenters, fishmongers, grocers, bank clerks, 'gaffers' and their families
were called to church and chapel in their Sunday-best clothes by the peal of
bells. For children there were such places as twice-a-day Sunday schools where
discipline reigned.
Baird had not yet invented television
and the Sunday joint of roast beef was free of BSE. Milk was delivered each day
from local farms between the iron and gas works in galvanized churns via horse
and cart into housewives' quart jugs, still warm from cows'
udders.
There were no waiting lists for
hospital beds. Every small town had its Picture House showing Charlie Chaplin,
Buster Keaton or Keystone Cops. It was perfectly safe to walk about Black
Country streets at night which were lit by incandescent gas-lamps - each lamp
visited by the lamplighter with his pole at dusk and dawn. House doors remained
unlocked - keys had been lost years before. The likelihood of such everyday
circumstances being subject to sudden change never entered people's thoughts.
After all - Britannia with her trident, assisted by great battle-fleets of
16-inch-gun dreadnoughts and countless smaller warships, launched in Birkenhead
on the Mersey, Glasgow on the Clyde, Belfast and on Tyneside, still
indisputably ruled the waves of the worlds's five oceans.
But at that time in every town high
street a man was to be seen standing in the sooty drizzle, cap in hand, one
foot in the gutter, assisted with a crutch, the other leg having been left
behind in the gas-poisoned black mud and rusty shell-spinters of Flander's
fields. My father, a surviver of the high explosives, the land mines, the
shrapnel, machine gun bullets, the mud, flame throwers, mustard gas and
phosgene, who had returned with all bodily parts intact otherwise I would not
be at this keyboard, thought himself fortunate to suffer only from screaming
nightmares, once gave me, then a child, a half-penny, probably all the cash he
could spare, to put in such a deformed man's soggy, empty cap.
I recall, 65 years ago, in the middle
of the night in another bedroom of the same house where I now write, hearing
mother shouting to father - "Jim, Jim, wake up, wake up, it's all right now,
wake up!"
My father's brother, my uncle Billy
who I never knew, at the end of the war-to-end-war remained in Flanders Fields
somewhere under a carpet of blood-red poppies but with no known grave, together
with four million others of that generation, both friend and foe, all equally
innocent of any crime.
The granite and marble memorials and
cenotaphs in every city, town and village, with names, initials and rank
engraved in the stone, to this present day still propagate the cretinous lie
these men and boys actually gave their lives away - whereas they were deprived
of life in the most horrible of fashions without any means of appeal. Some
survivors were blindfolded and shot at the stake by their own comrades because
they had been driven out of their minds by months of the most unimaginable
horrors. They, their mothers, wives, children and families, were the victims of
so-called Statesmen, thieving owners of the Cannon Industries and the much
be-medalled, mentally deranged Field Marshals.
Black Country streets and houses are
now, by comparison, spotlessly clean. The external stones and brickwork of a
few of the very old buildings still remain blackened with the grime of ages.
Some factories have become museums, visited with well-earned respect and
appropriate reverence by our friends from the Land of the Rising Sun and other
long-distance tourists. The steam hammers are silent and the ground no longer
trembles as if in fear of their massive blows. The few remaining brick chimney
stacks are now smokeless monuments to a bygone age.
New factory chimneys are of steel and
appear to emit, if anything at all, only clean white steam. But the granite of
Rowley Hills, long extinct volcanos, widely known as Rowley Rag, is still
quarried by blasting, crushed into graded chips and used for road-making as it
has been for 2000 years ever since perceptive military engineers of the
disciplined Roman Legions first visited Rowley Hills and recognised the stone's
extremely hard and durable qualities. The skyline has been changed in the
process but unlimited Rag remains available for new motorways and repair of the
old.
The night clouds are no longer tinged
orange by reflection from the bright glow of yet more hundreds of tons of
molten iron pouring from blast furnaces like lava from volcanos. They are now
tinted a sickly yellow by reflection from the glow of 100,000 sodium electric
street lights.
Some chapels still open on Sundays but
only by co-operating and taking turns to do so. Other old chapel and church
buildings, now colourfully redecorated inside and out, welcome people through
their doors to listen to the Word of God from ministers of other religions
originating in ancient civilisations and cities such as Jerusalem, Mecca and
holy places further towards the Eastern sunrise.
Local industry is still busily
concerned with casting, forming, shaping, joining and assembling things made of
metal. But nuts, bolts, rivets, screws, spanners and soldering irons seem to
have gone out of fashion. There is now a whole battery of arc-welding machines
500 yards away from my QTH which blankets the 160 and 80 metre bands with
intense radio noise most of the working day. If, for a few seconds, just by
chance, none of them happens to be arc-ing, I then come under attack from
another battery at a range of 1000 yards. It is so strong I have been unable to
detect television timebase interference during factory working hours for ages.
Pollution of one sort or another, it seems, must always be with
us.
When still a boy I amused myself with
basket-weave plug-in coils, Hertzite crystals, cat's whiskers, spaghetti
resistors, and eventually a PM1HF 2-volt filament valve with which I could use
a reaction coil and condenser. These components were provided by my father (who
made his own variable, air-spaced tuning condensers) with threats of dire
consequences if any should ever be ill treated. Seventy years later I still
flinch at the thought of consigning unwanted radio components to the domestic
rubbish bin. I try to find a younger deserving radio amateur to donate them
to.
In the 1930's the Australian
Broadcasting Company could be heard as clear as crystal using one valve with
reaction (now referred to as positive feedback) and 50 feet of aerial wire
suspended from mother's clothes-drying posts. I heard prime minister Neville
Chamberlain's, 3rd September 1939, declaration of yet another war over the
wireless on a pair of S.G.Brown's iron-diaphragm headphones. It was noon,
Sunday. I felt frightened. I went out into the road. There was nobody about.
Father was silent as he forced down his Sunday dinner.
The World, yet again, was about to
change. The air-raid sirens were soon to be heard above the background noise
from local factories which continued to produce things made of iron, steel,
brass and copper as they had done for the previous 150 years.
At nearby Birmingham University Randall
and Boot were working in haste on the final development stages of the Cavity
Magnetron - shortly to be used in airborne radar to guide fire-storm machines
to their many thousands of defenceless victims.
As a long-serving seargent in the
St.Johns Ambulance Brigade father was later to spend his nights in the burning
streets during air raids. Mother, at the age of 43, went to work in a local
factory making nuts, bolts and rivets - vital components of war-machines. My
brother Frank also joined the RAF killing squadrons. He returned safely to
become an arc-welder. Father was eventually decorated with "Serving Brother of
the Distinguished Order of Knights of Jerusalem". He took piano lessons and
never returned to his between-wars radio construction
experience.
Long after WW2, father having rejoined
his brother, mother gave away the headphones, together with a BTH moving iron
horn loudspeaker and other sentimental, nostalgic antiques to the rag and bone
man who announced his weekly presence in the street by blowing on an ex-army
copper and brass bugle. She declined his offer of recompense in the form of a
live goldfish because she hadn't an empty Hartley's golliwog jam jar in which
to keep it. I forgave her only because she was my mother - God bless
her.
During WW2 I joined the RAF and worked
on microwave radar and similar top-secret airborne devices. I received a
high-tech education, with long holidays abroad on tropical islands with palm
trees and surfing-beaches, all generously paid for by His Majesty King George
6th. After the war it took another 30 years to directly return again to radio
by becoming a licensed radio amateur and building a solid-state 160-metre
portable SSB rig. I also taught myself another language - Morse!
Around 1962, still in the forefront of
technology, I attended a 3-day computer programming course. The input and
output device was a teleprinter. No floppy disks - just reels of ticker-tape. I
used for a few days a discrete transistor machine, 6' by 4' by 2' which was
almost as good as a modern pocket calculator and even did something useful with
it but did not sit at a computer keyboard again for 20 years when I bought a
pre-IBM Osborne computer - the very first portable - with a green 3-inch
screen. I still have it. It still works but I don't use it. Since then I have
taught myself three more languages - BASIC, MsDOS and
Pascal.
I do not know how to use a computer to
control a transceiver or even how to use one for maintaining the station log.
The two sets of hardware, computer and transceiver, have never been together in
the same room. (2002, they now are.) The pair of hobbies have peacefully
co-existed independently of each other for years - with one important
exception: I have always used self-composed computer programs to assist with
radio construction and experimentation. There's been a sort of
cross-fertilisation. The pair are now respectably wedded and decently
co-habiting these appropriately-named Home Pages.
Their offspring is a collection of
small, simple to use, high-quality computer programs the clones of which are
available free to radio amateurs, professional engineers, teachers, or anyone
who is prepared to provide a good home. In the process I have acquired yet
another language - HTML. Sometimes I dream in it!
* * * * *
Reg died in 2006. Those of us who knew
him miss him. He was an excellent engineer who could put his theories into
practice as he had great construction skills too. I remember the occasion when
he built a small topband vertical. He calculated all the capacitances and
inductances needed to make it resonate on 1930kHz, he built it, erected it and
guess where it resonated? 1930kHz of course!
May his programs live
on.
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