Thank you to Ray Robinson, Dr Adrian Peterson, and Jeff White for this week's nostalgic look at St. Helena.
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| 1992 QSL |
Jeff: Occasionally, here on Wavescan, we like to bring you features about the radio history of some very remote and exotic locations, and today is one of those occasions. Ray Robinson in Los Angeles has been researching the radio scene on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena, which is probably most famous for being the isle to which Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled by the British in 1815, and where he died in 1821. So, here’s Ray.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. St. Helena is a tropical island in the South Atlantic Ocean, lying about 1,000 miles west of Angola, 2,000 miles east of Brazil, and 16 degrees south of the equator. It’s part of the British Overseas Dependency that includes Ascension Island to the northwest, St. Helena, and the Tristan da Cunha group to the far south.
St. Helena is actually the tip of a volcano that rises some 14,000 feet from the floor of the ocean, with only the top 2,700 feet poking out above sea level. The island is about 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, covering an area of 47 square miles. It has a very rugged coastline with only one small sandy beach, and that’s in a very difficult-to-get-to location well away from the population centers. Indeed, much of the coastline consists of barren cliffs over 1,000 feet tall. The center of the island is forested, however, and due to its remoteness, it boasts dozens of unique forms of vegetation that are not found anywhere else on earth.
There are disputed claims as to who discovered the island, but it is likely that it was first sighted by the Spanish in 1500. However, it was uninhabited then and remained so for another century and a half. As far as we know, there have only been human settlements on the island for less than 370 years, beginning with a boatload of colonists sent from England in 1659.
Interestingly, it is claimed that the world’s oldest living land animal is on St. Helena – a giant tortoise named Jonathan that was imported from the Seychelles in 1882. He was already a fully mature 50-year-old adult when he was moved to St. Helena, so it is estimated that in 2025, he celebrated his 193rd birthday! And, there’s a whole Wikipedia page about him if you want to know more – just search for ‘Jonathan Tortoise’.
As far as the human population of St. Helena is concerned, that currently numbers about 4,500, most of whom are descended from Africa and several countries in Asia with only a small minority of Europeans. The capital is Jamestown, but because that is squashed into a narrow coastal valley with steep cliffs on each side that limited its growth, a second population area developed called Half Tree Hollow. This is on a hilltop overlooking Jamestown, and it has now become a larger settlement than Jamestown itself.
Originally administered by the East India Company from 1658 to 1815, St. Helena was then taken over directly by London following Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, so they could exile him to the island. Sadly, Napoleon died there just 5½ years later in 1821 at the age of 53. An autopsy pronounced the cause of death to be stomach cancer, but both arsenic poisoning from the makeup he wore, and mercury poisoning from medication he was given, are also possibilities. The island officially became a crown colony in 1833, and more than 15,000 freed slaves were landed there in the 1840’s.
When it comes to radio history in St. Helena, one of the challenges that must be understood is that electricity generation and distribution wasn’t available in Jamestown until 1953! However, the Annual Colonial Report, known as the ‘Blue Book’, for 1932, stated that “The Empire Short-wave Broadcasting Service is received well in the island”, and the same ‘Blue Book’ for 1947 stated “There are about 150 radio sets but there is no local radio station nor electricity supply!” So those radio sets must all have been operated by batteries or accumulators. A telephone service had been installed much earlier, with an undersea cable to Cape Town having been laid in 1889. A wireless communication station on St. Helena was installed just after the First World War, and it used the callsign BXH for communication with nearby shipping, and for the transmission of weather reports to London.
There had, of course, been military radio stations on the island during both World War I and World War II, but these only communicated with shipping. A Diplomatic Wireless Station started operating on St. Helena in 1965, but this did not make any broadcasts receivable by local people. There was also at that time a weather radio station located on St Helena and it was on the air under the British callsign GHH, operating with a 1 kW Racal transmitter and an inverted V antenna system on 6824 and 9044 kHz.
But the only option local people had in the 50’s and early 60’s for news and entertainment programming were stations like the BBC World Service on shortwave or the few stations in Southern Africa that broadcast in English and that were receivable on medium wave at night.
At least five different local amateur operators experimented with broadcast services from 1958 on, successfully demonstrating the need for a radio service on the island. The most famous and longest lasting was a service by Billy Stevens, who was known as the ‘Ham of Half Tree Hollow’. He received a license to broadcast, and played musical requests on 90 meters on Sunday afternoons from 2 to 4pm and on Thursday evenings from 7 to 9pm. People would go along to his house and give him 3d for a request, which helped offset the cost of the license. His theme tune, reputedly, was Jimmy Shand’s - Bluebell Polka (from 1955).
YouTube video Jimmy Shand - Bluebell Polka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-14L7wDwuGc
That sounds a bit Scottish to me! The St Helena Association in the UK also used to produce a programme called ‘Keeping in Touch’, for the purpose of recording messages from members in the UK, which they then sent out to Billy for broadcast.
In May 1965, the island’s telecom provider, Cable & Wireless, started broadcasting a part-time relay of the BBC World Service through a local transmitter on 3235 kHz in the 90 meter tropical band. Transmission hours were daily from 11am to 2pm and 5:45 to 8:45pm. But the first local radio station for the island, the government-funded Radio St. Helena, began broadcasting on Christmas Day, 25th December 1967, using a modified 20-year old Marconi 500 W communications transmitter on 1511 kHz, with the callsign ZHH. The station was officially opened at 9:45am by the then governor, John Field. However, all presenters were volunteers, and the regular broadcast schedule was for just two hours per day, from 8-10pm. The first paid staff member was appointed in April 1973, and broadcasting hours gradually expanded to 3-10pm Mon-Fri, with news from the BBC World Service hourly on the hour. This was a 9:30pm closedown in 1977:
Radio St Helena videos at YouTube
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Radio St.
Helena bumper sticker – the island-wide speed limit is 30 mph |
The station’s operating frequency changed in October 1978 to 1548 kHz, 194 meters, and two new Harris Gates 1 kW transmitters were installed in 1993. In October 2000, the schedule was increased again to 7am-10pm. Here are a couple of ID’s I found:
In the 1990’s and 2000’s, Radio St. Helena also broadcast internationally for one day in October each year on 11092.5 kHz shortwave – using the call-sign ZHH-50. Many of the station's regular presenters took part in this event, known as "Radio St Helena Day", thereby enjoying the experience of broadcasting to audiences all around the world.
The residents of St. Helena are officially known as St. Helenians, but colloquially they call themselves ‘Saints’, and they enjoy full UK citizenship. In 2005, a competing independent radio service on FM was started – Saint FM – with the slogan ‘The Heartbeat of St. Helena’. This station, the first on FM, has been quite popular, but without any government funding it has struggled financially and has been closed down twice, although it was then re-opened each time. Besides being broadcast island-wide in St. Helena, it is now also relayed by transmitters on Ascension Island and in the Falkland Islands, although interestingly, these are not mentioned in the new 2026 edition of the WRTH.
In 2012, the government decided to reorganize the broadcasting and print media services it did fund on the island, and created an entity called South Atlantic Media Services, or SAMS. The medium wave Radio St Helena closed down on 25th December 2012 - the 45th anniversary of its launch.
Two months later in February 2013, SAMS Radio 1 was launched in its place on FM as a new local radio service for St. Helena. And, at the same time, alongside Saint FM and SAMS Radio 1, a third FM service was launched carrying BBC World Service programming 24x7. If you want to tune in, both Saint FM and SAMS Radio 1 have 24x7 webstreams.
Back to you, Jeff.
(NWS/Wavescan)
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