Radio Normandy

Captain Leonard Frank Plugge (21 September 1889 – 19 February 1981) was a British businessman and Conservative Party politician.

Plugge was Member of Parliament (MP) for Chatham from 1935 to 1945.

Captain Plugge married Ann Muckleston (b. London 13 January 1909) in New York on 28 October 1935. They had three children: Leonard Frank (13 January 1937), Greville (4 November 1944 – 1973) and Gale Ann (4 November 1944 – 2 January 1972).

Plugge created the International Broadcasting Company in 1931 as a commercial rival to the British Broadcasting Corporation by buying airtime from radio stations such as those of Normandy, Toulouse, Ljubljana, Juan les Pins, Paris, Poste Parisien, Athlone, Barcelona, Madrid and Rome. IBC worked indirectly with Radio Luxembourg until 1936. World War II silenced most of Plugge's stations between 1939 and 1945.

Plugge was a radio enthusiast and a pioneer of long motoring holidays on the European continent. There he would collect the schedules of radio stations he visited and sell them to the BBC to publish in Radio Times and other magazines such as Wireless World. It was on one such journey that he stopped for coffee at the Café Colonne in the Place Thiers (now the Place Général de Gaulle) in the Normandy coastal village of Fécamp. There, he asked the café owner what there was to see in the town, and was told that a young member of the Le Grand family – which owned the town's Benedictine distillery – had a small radio transmitter behind a piano in his house, and that a local cobbler's business had increased after a broadcast mentioned his name.

Plugge went to see Fernand Le Grand and offered to buy time to broadcast programmes in English. Le Grand agreed, and a studio was set up in the loft over the old stables in rue George Cuvier, from which the programmes were broadcast by Plugge's employees. The first presenter was a cashier from the National Provincial Bank's Le Havre branch, whom Plugge had met when drawing cash after leaving Le Grand. Bank teller turned broadcaster William Evelyn Kingwell agreed to motorcycle over on Sundays to introduce records.

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