Daventry, Northamptonshire, UK. It was 1947. I had now reached seventeen and concluded that my condition was unique. There could be no one else like me, so resolution was impossible. My certainty that I was a woman was total but I did not see any point in cross dressing or pretending that my visible person was other than male.

 

My womanhood was within me, my brain and conscious being, independent of presentation. I consciously thought through suicide and kept enough Potassium Cyanide to achieve it efficiently were that to become my decision.

 

I avoided catching sight of myself in a mirror when naked. Since this could not always be avoided, it caused me to contemplate physical mutilation but I perceived that this would achieve nothing. Any sexual activity was as an observer, rather than a participant, like an out of body experience. Balancing all this hopelessness was my demand to investigate and learn about electronics, the new focus of my interest. There was also my faith in something more than mortality, particularly a new attitude to music now it no longer had to be my profession.

 

At this time, all males were required to do eighteen months national service in the armed forces. I was terrified. Boarding school had been one thing, but the army of the 1940s was very different. The day came when I had to register and was called for medical examinations. Being in very good physical condition, I faced this humiliating experience, having accepted the inevitable outcome.

 

After the physical routines I was twice called again to a great London hospital, to be seen by a person, to me of unknown expertise. I was questioned me at length. Eventually I blurted out that I had always known I was a woman and was dismissed with a wave of his hand. The surprise was a few days later when a card arrived confirming my medical grade. It was one which normally implied that at least one limb was missing! I can only assume that in those homophobic days, the same assumption was made as did that paediatrician in my childhood.

 

At this time the key to my survival appeared. The family of an old drinking partner of my late father was opening an electrical business. One of the brothers, seeing that I had already shown my capabilities by constructing a working TV receiver from government surplus RADAR [1] equipment, saw me as the key to a new venture into the recently reopened TV service.

 

His brother, the company secretary took pity upon me, without wanting to know the details of this troubled person. In them, I acquired a new family, where I was accepted and welcomed but not criticised. Locally I was viewed as strange. My mode of dress was sexually ambiguous, with very long hair but a full beard, never having shaved. This came about because I had decided that growing a beard was far less masculine than shaving every day.

 

I now had respect and support, which helped to keep suicide at bay and motivated me to make plans. I felt I might be able deal with my situation if I achieved academic recognition and success in technology. So I planned my career path, which would start with the success of the TV business venture in which I was now engaged. This would enable me to acquire deeper knowledge and time to acquire the qualifications essential for the next step: to enter hands-on research into my obsession, colour television.

 

Naively believing this would happen, I saw myself next with my own research organisation. Accepting that research is for the young, I felt that at some later time a move to something related but quite different would be required. Finally I perceived that experience gained in a technological career was probably a saleable commodity, wherein I perceived my final working years might be spent. While the detail and timescale was not to be as predicted, it all happened and lots more besides. Without it survival would not have been possible.

 

So those years between the end of my teens and my early twenties were spent building up one of London’s most successful retail and service TV organisations. But every few months I would get a period of despair when the woman within was fighting for her existence and my male presentation revolted me. I would be found crying and unable to leave the house or offer any explanation. But my new supporter and his wife always came to the rescue. I undertook part time study to qualify me for the break into research. At twenty three with studies complete, I was sure the time would soon arrive for the first move.

 

I had acquired a Ham Radio license and G3ILI [2] was on the air. Wanting more than only chat, I was fascinated by a new technique called SSB [3] which could revolutionise short wave communications. I became the seventh to develop and use this technique, which had an extraordinary outcome. I had noticed that the BBC was making experimental colour transmissions after midnight using a version of the proposed US NTSC colour system [4]. I studied its every detail and realised that my Ham Radio SSB experience applied directly to this magic means of making penny plain into tuppence coloured.

 

I set about building a colour TV receiver. Six months later it worked, after a fashion. So I wrote to one of the leading TV manufacturers who I had heard was starting work on colour TV, quoting my qualifications and telling them what I had done. An interview and offer of employment followed.

 

Over the next years, I became a group leader and finally Director of Research. This was also a time when I became involved in international broadcasting conferences, regulation and standardisation and was in constant demand as a lecturer. But it was not without traumas. Being involved in the international discussions concerning colour TV, I could see politics taking over from technology.

 

I became disillusioned, and my identity began to dominate once again. I was found by friends wandering the streets late at night and dangerously near a railway track. They took me in and nursed me back to sanity. The effect was to make me determined to use the power of politics and combine political tactics with technology. It worked and as a grand government functionary said some years later, “Bernie could tempt the birds out of the trees.”

 

My first major achievement was to make a significant contribution to the PAL colour TV system [5], which was being adopted in many countries. In this my fluency with the German language played a significant role and required my new political skills to do battle with French, who were proposing a rival system. Next was the first use of microcircuit technology in consumer colour TV receivers.

 

While this was a period of achievement, still every few weeks, the clouds would descend and I would be dominated for several days by my physical mismatch. The world at large was sympathetic, believing that I suffered from serious migraine. I now knew better than to enlighten them.

 

It was 1967 and colour TV services were opening world wide with mass produced receivers on the market. I had national and international renown for my contributions and published works. I was invited to spend several weeks lecturing in Moscow in the hope that I might persuade the Soviet Union to adopt the PAL system favoured by the UK. Although the lectures were a hit, politics supervened and the Soviet Union adopted the French proposed system.

 

I had to find something new for my research team, since they only had a few more months of current work. This void and my lack of success in Soviet Russia corresponded with one of my worst periods of depression. Suicide loomed again.

 

A sad event in the previous year was the death of the friend who had given me unquestioning support and that first chance. I made contact with his widow, who was now in need of help, having two teenage children. It only took a matter of hours for us to realise we needed each other to get through a desperate time. We set up home together and married; another day dawned for us both. Joyce had accepted for all those twenty previous years that I had and still had a serious problem. I could not explain it as I remained convinced that I was unique. Our total mutual trust avoided the necessity for explanations.

 

The new real family included two young people. My stepdaughter was to reach seniority in nursing and my stepson joined my organisation as an engineering trainee. Once again I could see a possible future.

 

[1] RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging, 1941). The term now is a standard English word, radar, without capitalization. The system uses electromagnetic waves to identify and locate fixed or moving objects, such as terrain, aircraft, ships, land vehicles, and weather formations, supplying data on range, altitude, direction, or speed. In Britain, Radar was originally called RDF (Radio Direction Finder).

[2] Ham (Amateur) Radio Callsigns. Ham radio operators ("hams") use radio equipment to communicate with other radio amateurs for public service, recreation and self-training. The ham's national government issues a unique callsign to licensed hams, which legally identifies each operator or station during communication. Some jurisdictions permit "vanity" callsigns. Such callsign structures, as prescribed by The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), consists of three parts. For the call sign G3ILI:  G3 = Great Britain, region; ILI is a unique identifier that is specific to the license holder. Many more variations are possible and subject to special conventions between the affected countries.

[3] SSB (Single sideband - USB/LSB). Shortwave radio operates between 3 MHz (3,000 kHz) and 30 MHz (30,000 kHz), a shorter requency than usual in the early days of radio. It is also known as HF (high frequency) radio because short wavelengths are associated with high frequencies (there is an inverse relationship between frequency and wavelength). A receiver must also receive the modulation type being transmitted. Single sideband(USB/LSB) is a common modulation used in the shortwave frequency range for long-range communications by ships and aircraft and broadcasting. Amateur radio operators use it for voice transmissions.

[4] US NTSC (National Television System Committee). NTSC is the analog television system commonly uses in the United States and some other countries. The first NTSC standard for broadcast was a black-and-white system developed prior to the Second World War. A second standard was issued in 1953 which allowed color broadcasting to be compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers, while maintaining the broadcast channel bandwidth already in use. NTSC was the first widely adopted broadcast color system. In 2009, the US ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standard will replace NTSC transmissions.

[5] PAL Phase Alternating Line). PAL is a colour encoding system used by broadcast television systems in many parts of the world. It was adopted by Western European countries in the 1950s when they found that the existing American NTSC standard wouldn't fit the 50 Hz AC frequency of the European power grids. Moreover, it represented a technical advance of the American standard at the time, correcting for colour tone shifting under degraded transmission conditions.

 

 

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