COMMENTATOR AS FIREFIGHTER

Evening Star, Issue 23325, 22 July 1939, Page 4

COMMENTATOR AS FIREFIGHTER

TO DEMONSTRATE MODERN METHODS John Snagge, of the 8.8.C.’s outside broadcasts department, undertook another of his extraordinary exploits in the cause of broadcasting this month. For the purposes of a programme from Daventry, he visited the impressive headquarters of the London Fire Brigade at Lambeth, to take part as a novice in a practical demonstration of modern fire-fighting methods. Among the operations at which he was called upon to try his hand were the working of a hand pump, the extinguishing of flames by means of a hose, the climbing of the Fire Brigade’s practice tower by moans of a hooked ladder, and the severing of a £in bar of iron with a fireman’s axe With him, to show him the way, was an expert fire-fighter. Though, as far as possible, it was Snagge himself that listeners heard, another commentator was standing by to take over the description when Snagge’s hands were full. Snagge is rapidly acquiring a reputation for his unusual activities as a broadcaster; clad in the appropriate suit, he has broadcast from under water his sensations as a deep-sea diver; has tried conclusions with a ju-jitsu expert; has been lowered in a wildly-spinning bucket to the foot of a new drainage culvert and there shovelled concrete and worked automatic drills; has told from personal experience what it feels like to be the rider of a circus horse.