Ian Woolf: SOE officer RIP

Kyt · Jul 21, 2008

Ian Woolf: SOE officer and head of British Forces Broadcasting | Times Online Obituary

Ian Woolf was best known as the firebrand Director of the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS). When he stepped down in the early 1980s it was the end of a 36-year career with an organisation about which he was passionate. During his time as director he pushed through a series of changes that brought about a transformation in both the quality and the style of programming. Prior to his career with service broadcasting, he served with the Merchant Navy as a wireless operator and with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in German-occupied France, then in Burma.

Ivan Justin Woolf, always known as Ian, was born in Capbreton, south-west France, of an English father and Swiss-French mother. Brought up bilingual on the Côte d’Azur, he left for England with his parents in the spring of 1940 shortly before the blitzkrieg brought northern France and the west coast under German occupation. While with the Merchant Navy, his ship on one occasion limped into Newfoundland with an ominous list after being torpedoed.

His French language and appearance led him to the SOE and, after commissioning, he was flown into Le Blanc airfield in a DC3 Dakota on August 26, 1944, to work with Major Amédée Maingard’s Shipright circuit of French Resistance groups operating between Poitiers and Montluçon. He facilitated several SAS air-landing

operations and maintained his radio link with London from the Hôtel de France in Poitiers after the Resistance had liberated the city.

Withdrawn to England by the end of September, he volunteered for operations in the Far East against the Japanese. After further training, he was

parachuted into Burma in the summer of 1945 to join Major “Troff” Trofimov (obituary, May 26, 2006) running a team of the SOE’s Force 136 in the Karen Hills. During Operation Character, Trofimov’s team raised a group of 750 Karen guerrillas for operations against Japanese lines of communication, and they also prevented substantial numbers of the enemy escaping across the Sittang river. As the intelligence officer for this group, Woolf became an acting major and was mentioned in dispatches.

After the Japanese surrender in

August 1945, he was sent to join the Army Broadcasting Service working in Naples, from where he moved first to Udine and then to Trieste on the same mission. Demobilised in 1947, he attended a course at the ABS headquarters in Eaton Square before returning to take charge of the station in Trieste, where he found a talented team of young servicemen eager to be shown how to enjoy broadcasting. He moved in 1954 to be Controller of the BFBS in Nairobi, where the dominant news was of the Mau Mau insurrection.

He became senior programme director of BFBS Cologne in 1957 and later took over control of the station. He found that many senior army officers in Germany considered the network’s role to be chiefly educational — but Woolf argued that an audience had first to be captured by entertainment and won the day, subsequently improving both the station’s reach and reception.

Appointed deputy director on the setting up of the BFBS head office in London in 1962, he threw himself into selecting and training staff of the highest standards. On becoming director in 1970, he began to change the image of forces’ broadcasting by increasing the news content and information relevant to the circumstances of servicemen and women abroad. Recognising that 70 per cent of the listeners were below the age of 30 and accustomed to listening to popular radio at home, he adapted his broadcasting formula to the journalism of The Sun and Daily Mirror, provoking opposition from the traditionalist sources — but again he got his way.

As early as 1959, when he was a member of an advisory committee on service broadcasting, Woolf had advocated the establishment of a television service, but this was rejected as too

expensive and difficult to maintain in terms of quality of material. Woolf fought this battle over more than 15 years and, thanks to his determination and cogent argument, BFBS TV became a reality in 1975. He retired when the BFBS was merged with the Services Kinema Corporation to become the Services Sound and Vision Corporation in 1983.

He married Marian Woolf, daughter of Herbert Woolf, brother of Leonard Woolf, who was the husband of Virginia Woolf, in 1946. They had met on a troop ship where she alone had applauded from her cabin after hearing him playing the flute in his. She survives him with three sons.

Ian Woolf, officer of the wartime SOE and Director, BFBS, 1970-82, was born on August 15, 1923. He died on June 30, 2008, aged 84
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Antipodean Andy · Jul 21, 2008

An interesting history. RIP.

Pathfinder · Jul 22, 2008

That's an interesting war he had.

RIP Ian.

Brian S · Jul 22, 2008

Ivan Justin WOOLF

Ivan certainly had a very interesting War and survived. Which sadly many of his Comrades didn't.

Perhaps we will learn even more when his Personnel File is opened.

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