User:Rod McLoughlin

Roy Williams was the professional name of Roy William McLoughlin, a BBC radio Light Programme and Home Service announcer and producer from 1942 to 1967, after which he moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands, working as a freelance journalist and writer.

Born Maidenhead, on 2 September, 1912 and educated at the William Borlase School, he worked for the Story Department of Twentieth Century Fox Films reviewing novels and plays before joining the BBC during the Second World War. Months before the outbreak of war, he had published what was to be his only novel A Yank in Fleet Street (Methuen, 1939). On joining the BBC, he initially broadcast on the overseas service from Bush House, principally to North American listeners.

Becoming a member of the permanent staff after the war, he worked as an announcer for the Light Programme and Home Service but although his real interests were in programme-making rather than in broadcasting he had relatively few opportunities to demonstrate this. However, his enthusiasm for popular music and folk culture led him to travel Europe with a portable tape-recorder to make 'Continental Roundabout' and 'Around Europe in Song' during the 1950s.

On retiring from the BBC after 25 years service, he moved with his family to Jersey in the Channel Islands where after an unlikely period as guest-house proprietor, he joined the staff of the local independent television station, Channel Television. As a broadcast journalist, he pursued his interests in what made the Island's culture distinct and specialised in short programmes on details of local life which appealed to his sense of the unusual. These could range from local crafts and customs like the making of Black Butter, a local jam made from the apple harvest, to a history of the Island's pre-war railway system.

He was to explore similar subjects in freelance radio broadcasts for the BBC South West, prior to the appearance of a BBC local radio station in the Island, and in print for a number of publications including the Jersey Evening Post and The Islander Magazine.

In later life he wrote a short book about the German Occupation of the Channel Islands, Living with the Enemy (Starlight Publishing, 1995), based partly on interviews made for an earlier Channel Television documentary. This was followed by a short maritime history of Jersey, The Sea was their Fortune (Seaflower Books, 1997) and a brief guide to journalism in Jersey, Stewards of the Media (La Societe Jersiaise, 1999). He remained professionally active, offering his services to a number of local authors as an, often uncredited, editor and proof-reader until his death in Jersey on 3 July 2005 at the age of 92.