Edward Sandle on Communication
Lisa: Did you have communications with the lighthouses on the Island?
Yes, we did. They used to send weather reports to us, well not so much the … the one at St Catherine’s didn’t because they were on shore they’d got a landline and they could send their telephone calls and things, but we used to have a regular call from the Nab Tower, which was manned. I think it had three people on board at any one time and they used to regularly call to us.
One of the Operators actually lived in Niton so he rather fancied himself on recognising our voices so that he would call us up and its Niton Radio and Nab Tower and we’d tell him to go to a working channel where we could receive his weather forecast, but then he used to use our Christian names ‘cos he thought he … so we used to have a great game of disguising our voices .
There was one very famous … if you ever mentioned Niton Radio to anyone who’s at sea, they would always say, “Oh it’s that man from Niton Radio, ‘Niton Radio, Niton Radio’”
He was quite a young chap actually although he sounded very old and his name was Rodney Bets, so that was one of our favourite voices that we put on when this chap from the Nab Tower used answer, we used to say, “Nab Tower, go to …” and he’d say, “Hello Rodney.” We’d say, “It’s not Rodney” and one of characters was a joker. He actually went as far as talking into a teapot.