The Dish (Little Baddow)

Did you ever see that excellent movie, "The Dish"? We had our own version. Our neighbours were the Gibson family, and I used to play with the two boys. Their father John Gibson was an exceptionally talented engineer (still is actually) who worked for Marconi Communications. In the early 1960's, communications businesses around the world were gearing up for the Apollo missions, and signal tracking dishes were being installed to relay messages from the space missions back to Houston - hence The Dish in the movie. In 1965, the team at Marconi needed to test a 32 foot dish aerial. John Gibson happened to have a five acre field, and a clear line of sight over the Essex countryside (rumour had it there was nothing between us and the Urals).

Unfortunately his access lane could not accommodate the vehicles, dish and mobile cabins that were needed so they had to come down our lane, through our front garden, across the paddock having removed the fence, and into the Gibson's field. There the whole rig was set up, and the signals tested successfully. I remember going over to have a look in the trucks, where there were glowing green lights, lots of wires and some engineers having a heck of a good time with all their kit. In fact they were able to get a grainy TV picture all the way from the USA via a satellite called Early Bird. This was all part of the preparations for the 1969 Apollo moon landing.