Peter Pendleton Eckersley (6 January 189218 March 1963) was a pioneer of British broadcasting, the first chief engineer of the British Broadcasting Company Limited from 1922 to 1927 and chief engineer of the British Broadcasting Corporation until 1929.

Early life

Peter Eckersley was born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1892. His father, Alfred (d. 1895 of yellow fever), was a railway engineer then in charge of building the Grand Mexican Railway. His elder brother was the physicist Thomas Eckersley; and his cousin, Aldous Huxley. In the 1911 census, he is recorded as a resident of the Bedales School-Co-Educational Proprietary Boarding School, Petersfield, Hampshire.

He attended Manchester Municipal College of Technology in 1912. He joined the Royal Flying Corps as a wireless equipment officer in 1915, where he obtained the rank of captain. He was stationed mainly in Egypt and at Salonika. Later in the War, he was sent to the Wireless Experimental Station at Biggin Hill where he conducted experimental work on duplex telephony for aircraft.

He Joined Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Co as the Head of the Experimental Section, Aircraft Department where he designed the Croydon Airport ground station transmitter.

Dorothy "Dolly" Clark, later Eckersley

In 1929 Eckersley began an affair with Dorothy "Dolly" Clark, estranged wife of the BBC programme planner and conductor Edward Clark, and then divorced his own wife. Lord Reith, a deeply religious man, forced him out of his job. Dolly had separated from Edward Clark in 1925 and arranged for Eckersley to visit Germany on BBC business with Dolly to accompany him. Although they made no secret of their liaison, his wife Stella was unaware of it until Reith's wife Muriel broke the news to her. but Eckersley was not sacked immediately as he undertook to end the affair with Dolly Clark and return to his wife. But he and Dolly reunited and he resigned in April 1929. The affair prompted a public enquiry into the BBC's personnel practices. The couple were married on 25 October 1930.

Dolly was pro-Nazi in her politics,

After Eckersley met Sir Oswald Mosley he became involved in his New Party, chairing its London Central Committee. From November 1939 the transmitter he had arranged to put in place at Osterloog transmitting station, was used for William Joyce's broadcasts to Britain and Europe. Eckersley has been described as "at best a foolish Fascist fellow traveller and at worst a traitor." Dorothy and James were tried in 1945 for providing support to the enemy: she was sent to prison for a year and James was bound over for two years. She died in 1971.

In his 1941 book The Power Behind the Microphone, he provided a visionary account of on-demand television : "I see the interior of a living-room … flush against the wall there is a translucent screen with numbered strips of lettering running across it. The lettering spells out titles which read like newspaper headlines. These are the titles describing the many different “broadcasting” programmes which can be heard by just pressing the corresponding button …".

Peter Eckersley died, aged 71, on 18 March 1963 at the West London Hospital in Hammersmith.

Eckersley was featured prominently in Jack Thorne's 2023 play When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, played by Shubham Saraf.

Published work

  • Eckersley, P.P. (1941). The Power Behind the Microphone. London, Jonathan Cape.
  • Eckersley, Myles, Prospero's Wireless, Myles Books 1997, , A biography of Peter Pendleton Eckersley - pioneer of radio and the art of broadcasting.

References