Life Was Not Dull In The East

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 158, 3 July 1942, Page 4

Life Was Not Dull In The East

HE Malaya Broadcasting Corporation has been dis banded, and the 250 members of its staff have scattered to the corners of the earth. Some are in Chungking, some have returned to England, some are in India, Australia and New Zealand, some did not choose to leave Singapore. F. A. Sampson, writer of the article on this page, left Singapore for Batavia after the Johore Causeway was breached and a fortnight before the island fell. He left Batavia four days before the Japanese arrived there. He worked voluntarily in Australia for several weeks, assisting the Government with shortwave Eastern language broadcasts. Then he came to New Zealand. The staff of the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation mushroomed from 20 to 250 in a year. Mr. Sampson, who had a wide experience of newspaper work in Shanghai, opened the news department, which in a few months expanded its

broadcasts in Asiatic languages to a point where the MBC was sending out 33 news bulletins a day in twelve languages besides English. As the Japanese advanced down the peninsula late in January, the MBC, in accordance with pre-

arranged plans to operate transmitters elsewhere, prepared to send a unit overseas to supply news and information in the event of Singapore’s transmitters being damaged by enemy action, As things turned out they

had to be blown up, and the overseas unit took over the complete service for a few days. Accordingly, on February 1, Mr. Sampson lett Singapore in a party of 43 to set up a " ghost station" in Batavia. His ship, jam-packed with evacuees, was bombed, but the party arrived intact, and borrowing transmitters from the Dutch, set to work at feverish pace to get the unit on the ait. (Mr. Sampson’s winter clothes were in Shanghai, his summer clothes in India, and he landed in Batavia with two shirts, six pairs of shorts, and a steel helmet which he had borrowed from the Singapore Naval Police and neglected to return). Before joining the MBC, Mr. Sampson was six years with "The North China Daily News," later working on "The Shanghai Evening Post," the city’s American paper, as city editor. For a newspaperman in Shanghai life was never dull. During one stormy period of

three and a-half months, Mr. Sampson recalls, seven members of his paper’s staff resigned, two were assassinated, one was _ kidnapped, and several were injured on one of four occasions when bombs were thrown into the office. —