An EnCrypted Special: 'The Diver' by A.J. Alan
Nottingham-born A.J. Alan (real name: Leslie Harrison Lambert) like so many of the authors covered on the EnCrypted podcast led a colourful and varied life. He was a performing magician, a radio ham, a volunteer coastguard radio operator, and later a naval intelligence officer who, by the start of World War II, was part of the vital military intelligence effort at Bletchley Park.
Somehow, between the wars, he managed to also become one the Britain's most popular radio broadcasters, telling singularly strange short stories on the wireless to the delight of listeners across the UK. In a way he was a broadcasting pioneer for, although, like just about everyone else on the radio at the time, he spoke BBC English (Received Pronunciation), his delivery was rather less formal and rather more conversational. His rambling shaggy-dog anecdotes were contrived to appear off-the-cuff, but were in fact meticulously scripted, and Alan laboured over each story for weeks, sometimes months. The approach to story-telling, going off on tangents, adding inessential but entertaining detail to colour the tale, was influential. I fancy you can see traces of it in Ronnie Corbett's monologues on The Two Ronnies several decades later.
Many of Alan's stories ended up being put into print and, from the 1930s onwards, would be anthologised in various collections of ghost stories and strange fiction, perhaps most notably in the Robert Aickman-curated Fontana Great Ghost Stories series, although they were written to be performed and delivered in Alan's inimitable style.
He died in 1941.
Archive radio of A.J. Alan is now hard to find, but you can hear some gramophone recordings on the Stars of the Wireless site here: https://rfwilmut.net/wireless/alan.html
For this "special" episode of the podcast - a tribute from one Nottingham "radio ham" to another! - I have tried to recreate the feel of one of those vintage broadcasts with this reading of what is arguably A.J. Alan's most traditional "ghost" story, "The Diver".
If you are interested, you can read more about A.J. Alan in this informative essay: https://tychy.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/premonitory-tales-from-dickens-signalman-to-the-radio-broadcasts-of-a-j-alan-66/
More great horror stories are on their way...
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