WIRELESS PIRACY CHALLENGE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17410, 12 December 1924, Page 5 (Supplement)

WIRELESS PIRACY CHALLENGE.

LISTENER’S DEFIANCE. A defiant letter on wireless “piracy” has been sent by Mr R. M. Ford, of Park Row. Albert Gate, to the British Postmaster-General. M r Ford asks that he may be the first person prosecuted for uot having a broadcast license. “Not,” he writes, “ that J am anxious to he a martyr or enjoy being fined, or that I don’t want to pay, but merely because 1 would like the pub-

he to know that I, for one. do not like criminal methods employed in a civil matter, and because I wish to continue to believe that an Englishman’s home is his castle. from your threat in the newspapers. * he goes on. “ you clearly claim that your inspectors have the right to enter my house and go up into my little boy’s bedroom to see if it is true that he has tied a piece of wire to his bedstead ; and I will see your inspector to blazes, with whatever may bo the consequences to me, before I will tolerate such conduct.” “ HARROWED FEELINGS.” Mr Ford raises the point of the person who does not want to listen to British broadcasting stations. “Am

1 bound.” he asks, “ to allow' my feelings to be harrowed by long accounts of men fighting serpents in trees through floods (which receive no subsequent corroboration), when 1 would much prefer t‘o be trying to pick up ‘ Radiola ’ in Paris or a concert in Pittsburg? Will you take lOs from me to keep these things away from my receiving set?” Mr Ford adds that if the Post-master-General proposes and claims the right “to invade an Englishman’s home and take his little boy off to the police station in the middle of the night,” he is going the right way to set an Englishman’s back up, and won’t get his vote. The letter concludes : “ Awaiting the favour of your esteemed prosecution, 3'ours disobediently— —.”