Obituary: Basil Skinner, radio engineer

Wartime radio expert who survived bombings and became BBC veteran. Picture: Contributed

Basil Skinner used to joke that Hitler had been out to get him. Given his numerous close shaves during the Second World War the assessment was not far off the mark.

He was bombed three times, witnessed the Nazi invasion of Norway, every ship he served on was lost and he suffered a dreadful mine injury to his right arm, forcing him to master his craft as a radio engineer left-handed in order to pursue his passion. He went on to become one of the longest-serving BBC employees, arriving almost at the advent of BBC Aberdeen, where he returned to help its television studio celebrate half a century.

Though obsessed with radio from childhood – as a boy he used to build his own crystal sets – he began his working life as an apprentice sheet metal worker, only breaking into radio after paying his own way through night school to learn the basics.

The son of a horseman turned charabanc driver, he was born on Boglash farm by Longside, west of Peterhead, and attended a local school before moving to Aberdeen, where he left Frederick Street School at the age of 16 to join the Henderson engineering firm. Among the jobs he was involved in there was the fabrication of dozens of metal pipes for the Kincardine Bridge.

He left the firm in 1938 after securing a full-time place on a radio course in Aberdeen and gained his Postmaster General’s Certificate the following year. Now qualified in his chosen career, he joined Marconi and subsequently served as a radio officer on four ships. His first vessel was the SS Sambrae and the teenager had already crossed the Atlantic to the United States several times before the Second World War broke out.

He later served on the SS Nalon, sailing to Argentina to bring back beef, and passed the site of the River Plate battle where the crippled German battleship the Graf Spee, which had been targeting the merchant convoys such as his, was scuttled in December 1939. Skinner’s vessel then headed north to the Caribbean where it joined a convoy to the UK which was infiltrated by a German E-boat. Having survived that encounter, he went on to join the SS Homeside on a mission to collect iron ore from Norway. During the journey, in March 1940, the young radio operator who had just turned 20, experienced the wrath of the Luftwaffe. The convoy was bombed as it made its way up through the North and Norwegian Seas. One merchant vessel was hit but the bomb failed to explode.

By April 1940 the vessel had reached Narvik in northern Norway, collected its cargo and was due to sail for home the next morning when a fleet of German destroyers emerged, guns blazing. It was the start of the invasion of Norway and the Homeside’s master decided to risk heading out of the fjord. Laden with more than 3000 tonnes, she made a maximum speed of only six knots but escaped the attentions of the enemy who were more interested in the British and Norwegian Royal Naval ships. His final sight of Narvik was a pall of smoke looming over the town from blazing buildings and vessels.

It was a difficult return journey, with boiler and steering problems and little food, but they made it to Kirkwall, where they were interrogated about the Narvik incident, and then on to England to deliver their cargo. When he reached home in Aberdeen he discovered that both he and his vessel were listed as missing. The Homeside later mysteriously disappeared in January 1941.

Skinner had already moved to another ship, the Welcome. He had been on leave from the vessel, visiting his girlfriend Julie, a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force stationed at Biggin Hill, and was returning to the ship when he was caught in a parachute mine blast in London, during the Blitz that began in September 1940.

It was one of the first times the weapons had been used on land and many of those around him were killed. Skinner’s right arm was very badly damaged and one of his bones completely shattered. He was treated at hospital in Greenwich, underwent various grafts and was about to have a pin inserted in his arm when the hospital was bombed. He was transferred to hospital in Dartford but by the time surgeons were ready to carry out the operation his bones had set and his elbow was fixed at a 90 degree angle.

Meanwhile, he discovered that his girlfriend had been killed in a German raid on the Biggin Hill fighter base. He was still only 21 and whilst recovering from his injuries he was married, briefly, to a 17-year-old. They divorced after she left him for another man. A subsequent young love faltered when his girlfriend’s father, a member of the closed Brethren, refused to countenance his daughter’s relationship with a man who was an atheist.

Skinner, who had learned to write and work again with his left hand, then served at Bletchley Park, receiving and transcribing German broadcasts which were then passed to the codebreakers who eventually cracked the Enigma code.

He was later seconded to naval training in Aberdeen, teaching radio maintenance to new recruits. He left Marconi at the end of the war and joined the BBC at its Aberdeen base in the city’s Beechgrove Terrace. However, when former employees, who had served in the war, finally returned to their jobs, he was made redundant.

He then joined the Air Ministry, working at Prestwick, before being invited back to the BBC and working at transmitting stations all over the UK, including those sending radio broadcasts overseas to places such as Russia where they were jammed during the Cold War.

He was working as a regional sick and holiday relief engineer when he got the chance to return to the BBC Aberdeen studios in 1964, where he was a senior maintenance engineer until retiring, for the first time, in 1980. But his extensive experience and vast knowledge of the intricacies of the Aberdeen operation were later called upon when he was twice asked to return, in an administrative role.

A slight figure of a man with a ready smile and a penchant for quoting chunks of a favourite book, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, he retired for a second time in the late 1980s and finally for the third time in 1993.

For Skinner, a licensed radio amateur since before the war, it had been no hardship: radio was his life and he continued to visit his former colleagues regularly over the years, returning to cut the Aberdeen news studio’s 50th anniversary cake in 2012.

Though unlucky in love and he never remarried, he enjoyed the company of women and often repaired the jewellery of his female colleagues by whom, along with many others who passed through the BBC, he is fondly remembered.

He is survived by his niece Merlyn.