TRAVEL CLUB RECEPTION

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26119, 23 May 1950, Page 2

TRAVEL CLUB RECEPTION

MR AND MRS MICHAEL MILES

Members of the Travel Club held an afternoon reception in the National Club rooms yesterday, to welcome to Christchurch Mr Michael Miles, a New Zealander who has made a name for himself in broadcasting in England, and Mrs Miles. Mrs Cecil Wood, who has known Mr Miles from childhood, presided. Mrs Miles wore an emerald green coat over a black frock and a small black hat. Lady Ward, wife of the president (Sir Joseph Ward) wore a dark green frock with knife-pleated skirt and hat to match.

Mr Miles gave the guests an entertaining account of his broadcasting career, which began in Wellington before the outbreak of war. Since then he has broadcast round the world. From Wellington, Mr Miles went to Sydney and then to Melbourne* where he was employed in radio announcing and news reading. His next, post was in Singapore, where, after the Japanese attack, conditions became very bad and half the staff of the broadcasting station was sent to Batavia. He was one that went to Batavia. Of those that remained most were known to have been killed; others were never heard of again. Mr Miles’s next journey, this time in a crowded cattle ship with two pigs tethered beside him and his companions as they slept on deck, was from Batavia to Perth, where he arrived just before his wife, who had also been evacuated from Batavia before he left and who was landed in Melbourne.

Mr and Mrs Miles then went to South Africa, and there in a military! hospital near Johannesburg he began ■ his “Radio Forfeits,” which has since] become famous. Yesterday Mr Miles described the tension of the night on which he introduced “Radio Forfeits,” his nervousness, his efforts for a quarter of an hour to induce anyone in the audience to take part, and then alter the first shy, self-conscious serviceman had agreed to co-operate, how the programme went splendidly. That programme Mr Miles has since presented in the Belgian Congo, in New York, and in England, where the stage version of the programme ran for three years. Mrs H. A. Young thanked Mr Miles for his address, and he and his wife then chatted to the many members of the club who attended the reception.