Her father’s voice: the travels of a wartime sound disc

From Canada to New Zealand, then to Egypt and back – this blog explores the travels of one wartime sound disc and how its contents enabled a New Zealand woman to hear her father’s voice for the first time, 82 years after it was recorded.

The observant reader will notice it has been a long time between posts on World War Voices. My day job has been taking priority in recent months (sadly, listening to wartime radio does not pay the bills.) However my research into New Zealand’s World War II sound recordings has been continuing, and recently I unpicked the story of one disc – or rather, one side of one disc. This ultimately gave me the great privilege of reconnecting a New Zealand airman’s wartime message home, with his family who had never heard the recording.

The disc in discussion raised many questions when I first came across it. One side is a recording made in Egypt, possibly in the port of Alexandria, by the N.Z. mobile unit broadcasters in May 1941. It is part of a talk by a New Zealand nurse about her experiences in Greece and Crete. The mysterious part is the reverse side, which holds a recording which had been named in the RNZ Sound Archives catalogue as “Greetings from New Zealand troops in Canada.”

How did messages from Canada end up sharing a disc with a talk recorded in Egypt?

The Canadian recording is an anomaly in the Broadcasting Unit collection that I am researching.  By rights, it doesn’t belong as it was not created by the New Zealand mobile unit broadcasters nor was it recorded in one of the theatres of war in which they operated. The answer is most likely that it found its way into this collection by default, because the disc it is on was sent to Egypt, where the blank side of it was used by the broadcasting unit in May 1941. But why was a half-used disc sent across the world?

The answer to that probably lies in my previous research into correspondence between the New Zealand Broadcasting Unit based at Maadi Camp in Egypt and National Broadcasting Service head office in Wellington, which has revealed some recurring themes. One is Wellington asking for more recordings of troops’ messages home to meet listener demand for the weekly radio programme With the Boys Overseas. Another recurring theme is the Egypt unit repeatedly asking Wellington via letters and telegrams, to send more blank recording discs for them to work with.

The 12-inch transcription discs on which the Broadcasting Unit recorded (at 78 and 33 ⅓ rpm) had a core of aluminium, a scarce commodity which was in high demand worldwide during the war for use in aviation.  This was coated with cellulose nitrate lacquer into which sound grooves were etched by the recording lathe, as depicted in this wartime Presto Recording Corporation advertisement.

This aluminium core is the reason why the 1,600 discs which survive today in the RNZ Sound Archives at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision may represent less than half the wartime broadcasting units’ original output. My research has established that owing to wartime shortages, after their contents went to air in New Zealand, many discs were sent by the NBS across the Tasman to Sydney, so that Amalgamated Wireless Australasia could re-coat them with more lacquer for re-use. Correspondence shows at least several thousand discs were recycled in this way,  sadly meaning their original recordings were lost forever. [1.]

The disc shortage probably explains why in early 1941 the NBS sent the disc from New Zealand to the Egypt-based unit, even though it was already recorded on one side. Only one side of it was therefore of use, but presumably that was still better than nothing and the blank side could still be recorded on and sent back to New Zealand.

If this is the original disc, it is an extremely well-travelled object that made its way from Canada to New Zealand, to Egypt and then back to New Zealand – quite a feat in the 1940s, let alone during war time restrictions on air and shipping.

The original Canadian side was marked “Defective” in yellow chinagraph pencil and the recording on it is incomplete.

The waxy, yellow chinagraph was used by broadcasting engineers to leave messages for their colleagues back in Wellington, such as where to edit a disc or to indicate when a disc was defective and therefore should not be played. The chinagraph wax gets into the grooves of the disc and makes playback noisy.

The “defective” side of the disc holds an incomplete series of messages home from New Zealand air crew who were training to serve with the Royal Air Force in Ontario, Canada. They were there as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme or EATS, which was renamed in 1942 as the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan or BCATP. This scheme was initially established by the R.A.F. in 1939 as Canada could provide more open air space for training the huge numbers of aircrew Britain was going to require in the war. It took on greater impetus during the Battle of Britain in 1940, when many R.A.F. non-operational facilities and aircraft were moved to Canada to avoid German bombing raids. Over 8,000 New Zealanders (as well as thousands of Australians and men from other Commonwealth nations) received air training in Canada during the war before being posted across the Atlantic to British air bases. Yet today, most New Zealanders are unaware of the scheme. (Anyone wanting to know more about this remarkable story should read In the Heavens Above, a lifetime project by New Zealanders Ivan and Lorna Lindsey to ensure the role played by BCATP trainees in winning the war is not forgotten. Most New Zealand public libraries should be able to find you a copy.)

The messages home from Canada, like the many thousands of messages recorded by the New Zealand broadcasters of Kiwis serving in the Middle East, North Africa, Italy and the Pacific, were all sent to NBS head office in Wellington, where the discs were edited together to be played as part of a programme called With the Boys Overseas, which broadcast on Sunday mornings throughout the war on National Broadcasting Service stations nationwide. I explored the popularity of this programme in an article for the New Zealand Journal of Public History last year.

Given the enthusiasm for the messages home heard in Boys, it is not surprising that efforts were made to give New Zealand men training in Canada the opportunity to send greetings as well. Wartime co-operation between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the NBS facilitated the recording of messages, so it seems most likely that the ‘anomalous’ recording was made by the CBC. [2]

I believe the messages from the New Zealand air trainees in Ontario were recorded in a Canadian radio studio, given the studio-quality ambient sound and the fact that each man is encouraged to the microphone by a professional-sounding announcer with a Canadian accent.

The “defective” Canadian side of the disc has no label at all, so I could only establish the names of the speakers by listening closely and then researching the names in Auckland War Memorial Museum’s invaluable Online Cenotaph database. This is a process I go through with all the discs I listen to, to verify the name and military service number of each speaker. I am supplying Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision with the verified names for their records and I send Online Cenotaph links to each recording to add to their database.

I have been able to establish the six airmen heard on the Canadian recording are John Jasper of New Plymouth, Dan Clifford of Helensville, Jack Goodlet, from Dunedin, Bert Hibell of Palmerston North, Ken Wright of Roxburgh, and finally a few words are heard from Harold Holtom of Paekakariki, before the recording ends part way through his greeting.

Further research into the air training scheme established that all six men sailed for Canada on the same troop-ship, the Aorangi in December 1940. New Zealanders enlisted in the Empire Air Training Scheme arrived in Vancouver or San Francisco, and then travelled by train to training schools throughout the Canada. The six speakers on the disc trained together as air observers/navigators for bomber crews.  This was firstly at No. 4 Air Observer School in London, Ontario.

They graduated from No. 4 A.O. School in April 1941, so it seems likely that they were recorded at the CBC-affiliated radio station in London, Ontario in early 1941, not long after arriving in Canada. Their recording would then have taken several weeks to get to New Zealand and then several more weeks for the disc to be packaged up by the NBS in Wellington and sent with other blank discs to the unit in Egypt.

We know the disc was in Egypt by 17 May 1941 as this was the date when the remaining blank side was used by the broadcasters there to record nurse Matron Eva McKay of No.1 New Zealand General Hospital. (It is a fascinating talk which I hope to write about in a future blog, describing how she led a party of 100 New Zealand, Australian and British nurses to escape from the German invasion of Greece and Crete.)

Tragically, Online Cenotaph records also revealed three of the six young men on the disc’s Canadian side, John Jasper, Bert Hibbell and Dan Clifford, would lose their lives the following year,  in operations with R.A.F. Bomber Command from various bases in England. This sad outcome was in keeping with Bomber Command’s extremely high casualty rate of 51%. [3]. It is said that a Bomber Command crew member had a worse chance of survival than an infantry officer in World War I.

Dan Clifford grew up in Helensville, north of Auckland and was working as a clerk for New Zealand Railways when he applied for aircrew training shortly after the outbreak of the war in October 1939. For the next year he trained in Levin, New Plymouth and Ohakea, and he married his fiancee Jean Wemyss shortly before he left for Canada in December 1940. Jean was pregnant with their daughter when he sailed.

After navigation and air observer training in several locations in Canada, Daniel was commissioned as a Pilot Officer and moved to Britain, where he was finally posted to No. 142 Squadron based in Binbrook, Lincolnshire in July 1941. A month later, his baby daughter Margaret was born on the other side of the world. No. 142 Squadron was at this time running night bombing raids over Germany and Dan served as an air observer on a Vickers Wellington aircraft, one of the mainstays of Bomber Command. Tragically, in January 1942 while on a mission to Bremen the bomber on which Dan was serving was lost over the North Sea. His body was never recovered and he would never meet his baby daughter Margaret. He was just 23 years old.

Dan is remembered in Britain on the Runnymede Memorial for the over 20,000 Commonwealth Air Forces dead of World War II who have no known grave. His name is also engraved on the International Bomber Command Memorial in Lincolnshire, England, not far from his last home at Binbrook.

Back in Aotearoa, Daniel Clifford is remembered on the marble walls of the Hall of Memories at Auckland War Memorial Museum and in its Online Cenotaph database. In 2016, Margaret’s own daughter Rochelle Cook contributed to the Online Cenotaph page for Daniel, the grandfather she never knew.

Fortunately she left an email contact and through this I was able to get in touch and alert her to the existence of a recording by a Daniel Clifford on the ‘defective’ disc. I sent her an mp3 file of the message to see if this was her grandfather. Rochelle was able to play her 81 year old mother Margaret the message recorded in an Ontario radio studio a few months before she was born. Margaret recognised the place names Daniel sends greetings to, as locations that were home to family members and friends, and was able to hear the voice of her long-lost father for the first time.

It is unclear if the greeting from Canada was ever played on-air in New Zealand during the war. Certainly the Clifford family had never heard it. The fact that this disc was labelled ‘defective’ may mean it was never aired because of its incomplete content, although the complete greetings on it could have been edited into an episode of the With the Boys Overseas.

Daniel’s wife Jean had been able to send him a photograph of his new baby daughter Margaret in late 1941 and the family knew he received it before he was killed, which Rochelle told me gave the family some comfort. After Daniel’s death, Jean eventually remarried and had two more children. Rochelle said hearing Dan’s voice for the first time was a very moving experience and it had a deep impact on Margaret as well as the wider whānau. The message has been shared with the children of Daniel’s brothers and sisters, cousins Margaret only reconnected with several years ago, again through Daniel’s Online Cenotaph web page.

Reconnecting families with the voices of departed loved ones is an incredible privilege and in this case, a very moving one. Thank you to Rochelle Cook and family for sharing Daniel’s story with me. Ngā mihi nui, moe mai rā Dan.

(Elements of this blog first appeared as an article in the Australasian Sound Archive journal no.46, 2024.)

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[1] ‘2,000 used discs sent to AWA, Sydney for resurfacing’ NBS Chief Engineer J. Smith to Noel Palmer, 8 July 1942, R22011495, Archives New Zealand, Wellington

[2] Hall, J.H. (1980) The History of Broadcasting in New Zealand, 1920-1954, Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, Wellington. p.130.

[3] Life and death in Bomber Command, Imperial War Museum website [Accessed 14 September 2024]