Odyssey of a Sound Recordist , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Malcolm Stewart

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

91 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A fascinating memoir looking back on a ground-breaking career. Published posthumously, the book contains a number of colour photographs from Malcolm's archives.In a time before television had really started, the computer age had barely begun and there was only one domestic channel on the radio - the BBC Home Service. One of the few operators changing the discs was a 15-year-old boy from the East End of London. The year was 1944 and Malcolm Stewart had just embarked a career that would take him on a journey to leave a world of poverty and drabness behind him.That journey would take him to Hamburg and forces broadcasting, a billet that would see him placed in charge of former members of the SS, and uniquely for someone destined for the film business give him the kind of security clearance that attracted the CIA. Malcolm's book recounts a career spanning some of the most important British films of the twentieth century, being deported from Cuba and fleeing via the jungle from Ghana with help from the CIA.In his garden shed, Malcolm also started Audio Systems, a company that would for a time, rival both Pinewood and Shepperton Studios for their sound services. He developed the world's first portable multitrack recorder. He went from the film business to television news, covering some of the biggest stories of the 80's. Through this long and distinguished career he met many world leaders, film stars and journalists, who knew him as Malcolm, one of the industry's unsung heroes.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838599539
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	8 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 Malcolm Stewart

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Front cover image courtesy of Bühler Group

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: 0116 279 2299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781838599539

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Produced and Rewritten by Nigel Stewart
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction

1. 1929-1939
2. 1939–1945
3. RAF Hamburg, 1947-1950
4. 1950
5. Egypt, 1954
6. Venezuela, 1954
7. The Bridge on the River Kwai
8. Jenny
9. Ghana
10. 1960-1961
11. Cuba, 1961
12. Audio Systems, 1961
13. Lourdes, 1965
14. Royal Tour, Malta, 1967
15. The COI
16. Malta, 1969
17. Geneva, 1968-1971
18. The End of Audio Systems
19. Tel Aviv University, 1975-1977
20. Egypt, 1979
21. Freelancing, 1979
22. Northern Ireland, 1979-1981
23. De Lane Lea, 1984
24. ABC News, 1980-1981
25. Epilogue

Afterword
Foreword
Historians (a tribe I belong to) often lament that their sources are distorted, biased, unfair: the diaries, letters, chronicles of the past are often written by the literary elites, or, at least, by people who could write (which, before the 19 th century, was a tiny crowd). They complain that biographies and memoirs are usually those of celebrities: kings and queens, politicians, war heroes or warmongers, literary and musical giants, and, more recently, actors, footballers and rock stars. One can therefore only welcome what appears – on the surface – to be the recollections of an ‘ordinary’ person, someone who, though in contact with celebrities, has never been seen on screen or on the media but was recording their words, someone who was behind the action, the glamour, the plots, the stars, the great directors. Yet Malcolm Stewart, (originally the name was Schweitzer), a sound recordist, is far from being ‘ordinary’. He was born in January 1929 in the East End of London, home, at the time, of a significant population of poor Jews, perhaps as many as 50,000. His prospects, at birth, did not seem particularly favourable. In October, a few months after he was born, the stock exchange in Wall Street crashed signalling the beginning of the great Depression. Soon mass unemployment loomed throughout Europe and the USA. By the time Malcolm was four Hitler had become the Führer of Germany. By the time he was ten the Second World War had broken out. His father Harry (Isaac), a barber, was also born in the East End as was Malcolm’s grandfather Solomon, but Solomon’s father was born in Wloclawek (Poland), at a time when one in five of its inhabitants were Jewish. Malcolm’s mother, Rebecca, was born in Kharkiv in 1902, in northeast Ukraine, and arrived in London two years later.
The family was poor but relatively safe compared to the Tsarist Empire not to speak of Nazi Germany. Yet, anti-semitic prejudice was rife in England when Jewish refugees started to arrive in the East End. John Colomb, Conservative MP for Tower Hamlets, set the tone in a speech in the House of Commons (10 March 1887) where he complained that no other great state ‘permit the immigration of destitute alience without restriction…’ and called for it to be stopped. The Pall Mall Gazette (February 1886) warned that ‘foreign Jews are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native born East Ender.’ In 1903 a former president of the street sellers’ association, complained that the Jewish immigrants monopolized certain trades. Arnold White, an English journalist with strong populist and imperialist sentiments noted in his The Modern Jew (1899) that Jewish immigration was threatening the ‘British way of life’.
Until 1937, Malcolm’s household had no electricity, but had a piano and a radio. No-one used the piano but the radio was something else. Its glass battery had to be recharged twice a week in a shop but the effect of the disembodied sound coming from a box with a large horn speaker had a decisive impact on young Malcolm: ‘It triggered a passion that never left me’. With the radio one could enter a different, far wider world, a world of music, of stories, of games and, of course, of news including Chamberlain’s declaration (3 September 1939) that the country was now at war with Germany. He refused to follow his father as a barber or to go in the garment trade like his mother. He wanted to work in radio or the ‘wireless’ as they said in England, and so, immediately after school, he was given a job as a trainee technician at the BBC in Daventry. His love for sound was confirmed ‘it was like fireworks had gone off in my head’ and he discovered a lifelong passion: classical music. By 1944 he was working in the recording department at Bush House in London, home then of what was known as the BBC Overseas Service (having been previously the BBC Empire Service, and, since 1965 the World Service). For the kid from the East End it was like being in the centre of the world, surrounded ‘by every nationality under the sun’ and a ‘babble of different foreign languages.’
The book takes us from Forces Broadcasting in Hamburg to the glamour of the film business; accused of spying for the CIA in Cuba to fleeing from Ghana. We are treated to his encounters with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, Malcolm Muggeridge, Yehudi Menuhin, and even Oswald Mosley, Harold Wilson and of course, Margaret Thatcher.
Malcolm takes us behind the scenes of the film making process with technical details (explained in a lucid language) which may be of particular interest.
The fascinating anecdotes pile up too many to mention but they reveal the humanity behind the not-so-ordinary Malcolm. To get the full flavour of a life behind the scenes in the midst of world affairs, there is only one thing to do: read the book.

Donald Sassoon
Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History
Queen Mary, University of London
Preface
In October 2003, following a cruise through Central America, I was admitted to hospital with viral pneumonia and myocarditis. For a man in his 70s survival rate is only 20%. I’d actually had two close friends die from exactly the same condition, so I knew my chances were pretty slim.
In my early days in hospital, I found that I was talking to myself at night a great deal – probably down to the combination of medication and stress. I was recounting my entire life’s story. I was amazed at what was appearing in my mind, memories that had been lost for years came flooding back. It was like windows opening in a dark room.
I was just so sorry that it was all going to waste. I really didn’t want to depart without some record of my life. I’d had such a varied life, with so many stories to tell, that I felt a sense of urgency to record it while I still could.
My wife Jenny brought in my laptop one visit, so when I woke up during the night, I could write to my heart’s content until the small hours – but now with a sense of purpose.
That was when I began to write this story, during those 20 days in hospital, and I dedicate it to the staff at the Clementine Hospital, Harrow who nursed me back to the position of being able to finish it.
Introduction
It was the 31st May 1994, I was selling my old left-hand drive SAAB 900, that I kept at our flat in Cannes. The buyer was a Russian by the name of Alexander Malikov. He was the head of Pravda’s London Bureau (formerly a Soviet news agency).
A few months earlier, when I was ordering a new left-hand drive for use in France, I mentioned to the SAAB dealership in Piccadilly that I wanted to sell my old car that I kept in France.
Then one day in February, Jenny answered the phone, “Can I speak to Mr Malcolom the journalist?” She handed over the phone saying that there was a Russian who wanted to speak to me.
It was Alexander Malikov. “Hello Malcolom [as he used to call me], do you remember me? We met in Geneva in 1985. I hear from SAAB that you have a car for sale”. He said he was interested in buying it, and taking it back to Moscow. So I agreed that when I next went to Cannes, I would bring the car back to London, so he could see it.

After Easter, Alexander came to our apartment with his wife to see the car. He was very impressed with its condition. It may have been 10 years old but we only used it for eight weeks a year, whilst the rest of the time it stood unused in our underground car park. We discussed, and a price of £4,000 was agreed.
Before finalising the deal he wanted to have the car technically inspected, and arranged for someone from one of the monthly motoring magazines to inspect it. The report was glowing, and the expert said that he had never seen a 10-year-old car in such good condition.
The technical expert left, and Alexander and myself finalised the deal, he gave me a cheque, and asked if I would keep the car for a few weeks whilst he arranged shipping back to Moscow.
My apartment was a very large penthou