Special thanks to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing AWR Wavescan. Early DXers will recall the impact that Radio Luxembourg had on European listening.
Jeff: You probably know that in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, Radio Luxembourg was a powerhouse Top 40 station in Europe with transmitters on LW, MW, SW and FM. Their MW transmitter on 1439 kHz (208 metres) was rated at 1.2 MW, and in its heyday, it was by far the most successful station beaming programming in English to the British Isles, with a format and jingle package very similar to that of WABC in New York. However, the station had a very colorful history, going right back to the early 1930’s, and Ray Robinson has been digging into the pre-World War II events that led to the creation of the station in the first place. Here’s Ray.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Luxembourg is a small triangular-shaped country in north central Europe with a land area just under 1,000 square miles, about two-thirds the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. It is squeezed between Germany in the east and Belgium in the west, and shares a short border with France in the south. Luxembourg is one of the least densely populated countries in Europe with a total population of around 670,000. Its government is a representative democracy headed by a constitutional monarch, Grand Duke Henri, making it the world’s only remaining sovereign grand duchy. The city of Luxembourg lies about 117 miles from Brussels , 119 miles from Frankfurt, 230 miles from Paris, and just 300 miles from London.
I was recently researching in some British newspapers of the 1930’s for other purposes, and I came across a number of articles and program listings for Radio Luxembourg, that tell a story that I think is not well understood or documented elsewhere. So, over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to take a look at that very interesting formative period in European broadcasting.
For our purposes, the general setting starts with the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had been given its royal charter in 1927, with Scotsman Sir John Reith appointed as Director-General. A staunch Presbyterian, Reith’s philosophy of broadcasting was that the purpose of the BBC was to inform, educate and entertain, in that order. He greatly resisted American-style programming where the goal was to attract the largest audiences and thereby the greatest advertising revenue. There was no advertising on the BBC (as indeed there still isn’t to this day), and most musical programming was classical in nature. At a time when American, Canadian and Australian stations were drawing huge audiences with the broadcast of baseball, hockey and rugby games, the BBC carried little sports programming, not wanting to spend its limited airtime on football or cricket matches, regardless of how popular they may be. On Sundays, there was no broadcasting at all before 12:30pm, so that people had time to attend church, and for the rest of the day, Sunday programming was always very somber and serious.
In the late 1920’s, a number of privately owned stations in France took advantage of this to broadcast programming of a more popular nature – dance band music, showtunes and the like – across the Channel to the British Isles. These included Poste Parisienne, Radio Lyons, Radio Toulouse, Radio Paris, Radio Eiffel Tower, Radio Normandy and others. But, these were not high powered stations, and could typically only reach the south of England by ground wave at night, and the north of England by sky wave. The Midlands generally didn’t receive any signals at all from the continental stations, and of course nothing could be heard from them anywhere at all in the British Isles during the daytime.
To exploit this opportunity at a whole new level, a new company was set up in Luxembourg in 1930 called Compagnie Luxembourgoise de Radiodiffusion (CLR), with a franchise from the Luxembourg government to create a new radio station of not less than 100 kW, with advertising allowed to be carried, as well as foreign language broadcasts.
To coordinate frequency allocations in the countries of Europe, a Convention had been held in Prague in 1929. The Government of Luxembourg had not attended, but in their absence they had been allocated the medium wave channel of 1346 kHz, or 223 metres. This, the Convention deemed, was adequate to cover the small country.
However, the new company, CLR, had ambitions for coverage much greater than just of the country of Luxembourg itself, and had set about constructing a high powered long wave station. They had succeeded in raising capital of 5 million French Francs, mainly from investors in France, who could see the commercial possibilities for broadcasting to the British Isles. CLR bought a large area of land on the Junglinster plateau about 10 miles NE of Luxembourg city, and there set about constructing its first transmitter site. Studios were built in the city itself.
Setup and construction took a couple of years, but finally on Sunday March 19th, 1933, the new station was heard. In the UK the next day, the Nottingham Evening Post reported “The new giant transmitter, Radio Luxembourg, blossomed out into the open with a vengeance last evening, and is on a par with Radio Paris as regards strength and quality.” At 7:35pm, they announced they were using a wavelength of 1191 metres (252 kHz) with 200 kW, the power being generated by two 800 hp diesel engines.
They remained in test mode for several months, carrying no advertising, and identifying the station as Radio Luxembourg Experimental. Programs on Sunday evenings were in English, on Mondays they were in Italian, and in other languages on other days of the week. Newscasts were carried nightly in French, German and English.
On Friday April 7th, about three weeks after the first tests began, a reporter in the Manchester Evening News wrote: “Every night now I am getting fine signals from Luxembourg – Radio Luxembourg Experimental as it is announced in French. Almost every language of importance in Europe seems to figure in these announcements. I have heard German, English, French, Dutch, Italian and Luxembourgish (a local dialect of Flemish). For the past two Sundays I have heard excellent gramophone record concerts announced in English for practically the whole evening. The wavelength is definitely 1191 metres, just above Kalundborg (Denmark, which was on 1153 metres, 260 kHz – only 8 kHz higher). I sincerely hope the station gets this or some equally good wavelength officially. It promises to be a station of high entertainment value.”
On Sunday April 9th, it was reported that the station operated from 7-11pm with one short breakdown and one record played on the wrong side!
There were 14 stations that could be heard on long wave in the UK in 1933:
Leningrad, Russia on 857 m, 350 kHz,
Oslo, Norway with 60 kW on 1083 m, 277 kHz,
Moscow, Russia (II) on 1115 m, 269 kHz,
Kalundborg, Denmark with 7.5 kW on 1154 m, 260 kHz,
Luxembourg with 200 kW on 1191 m, 252 kHz,
Motala, Sweden with 30 kW on 1348 m, 222 kHz,
Warsaw, Poland with 120 kW on 1411 m, 212 kHz,
Paris (Eiffel Tower) with 13 kW on 1446 m, 207 kHz,
Moscow, Russia (I) on 1481 m, 202 kHz,
BBC National Programme with 25 kW on 1554 m, 193 kHz,
Berlin (Deutschlandsender) with 60 kW on 1635 m, 183 kHz,
Paris, France (Radio Paris) with 75 kW on 1725 m, 174 kHz,
Lahti, Finland on 1796 m, 167 kHz, and
Huizen, Netherlands with 8.5 kW on 1875 m, 160 kHz.
In short – just 14 stations on LW, compared to over 30 on MW from outside the UK, plus another 6 BBC MW transmitters carrying the National Programme and the London, Midlands, North, West and Scottish Regional Programmes.
In the summer of 1933, with the growing need for more frequencies for more stations in more countries, another frequency coordination conference was convened in Lucerne, Switzerland, under the authority of the League of Nations. This time, Luxembourg was a participant. The BBC under John Reith was staunchly opposed to what they considered Luxembourg’s brash commercial style of programming, and considered them to be a pirate. They asked the UK government to bring pressure to bear in Lucerne to prevent Luxembourg from being formally allocated a long wave frequency. Whether they did or not isn’t recorded, but the upshot was that the Conference did not approve of the use of long wave frequencies for international broadcasting, preferring only to allocate them to geographically larger countries which could not adequately provide national coverage from just one or two medium wave transmitters.
Thus the Conference didn’t think the size of Luxembourg justified a long wave allocation and only assigned them a medium wave channel of 240m, 1249 kHz. The Luxembourg delegates were dismayed and became non-signatories to the Lucerne Plan.
Radio Luxembourg’s popularity and commercial success grew steadily during 1933, primarily because it was broadcasting popular dance band music of a type not heard on the BBC, especially not on Sundays! Broadcast hours expanded to 8am-11pm UK time, and the powerful long wave signal was comfortably heard throughout most of Great Britain during the daytime.
On Wednesday 10th January 1934, just four days before the Lucerne Plan was due to take effect, a column appeared in the Nottingham Evening Post saying:
“Although the transmissions from Radio Luxembourg are for the most part electrical recordings and in consequence ‘thin’ compared with live band concerts, they are extremely popular, the reason being the class of music put over.
During each Sunday dinner hour (meaning lunchtime) there are dance records, and in the afternoon until about 8 o’clock these electrical recordings of further dance music are radiated, all being sponsored.
Then follows a tip-top program of English music, free from advertising material, and contributed by the station orchestra. The difference in quality – for the better – is very marked.
However, it cannot be denied that Luxembourg is a very popular station, and its popularity has been won by the BBC – on Sundays, of course, simply by the type of music transmitted. It will be extremely interesting, therefore, to watch what happens in the Grand Duchy.”
And that’s where we’ll pick up the story next week in part 2.
(AWR Wavescan)
(QSL graphic/Teak Publishing Archives)