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Mr. Robert Hilary Tomalski
7th February 1953 - 13th January 2001
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1 - The Funeral Bob's funeral was on Friday 2nd February at Merton & Sutton Cemetery,
Lower Malden Road / Garth Road, South London and although it was very sad and
mournful day it was also uplifting to see so many of his friends and colleagues
turn up to pay tribute to a much loved and respected person ( The Chapel was so
full, many had to stand ). The floral tributes can only reflect the person Bob
was. Adam Jennings has taken a selection of pictures taken on the day which you
can view in the flowers section by clicking the 'next page' icon below.
Father Taylor took the service then Caroline Padley read from the book of
wisdom, a work colleague ( from VW
publications ), John Briggs ( from L.B.C
Radio ) talked a little about Bob which I have a copy for you can read what he had to
say below, and his good friend for many years Trevor Brook spoke of Bob's life and interest's in pirate radio. The Music played was Beethoven's
6th symphony ( the pastoral ), Al Stewart - The Year Of The Cat and Queen - Your
my Best Friend.
We then all went to the Beverely pub which was local to the cemetery where we
had a chance of meeting one and other and sharing all the good times spent with
Bob!!!
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2
- Order of Service
ORDER OF SERVICE IN REMEMBRANCE
OF
MR.
ROBERT HILARY TOMALSKI
(7th
February 1953 - 13th January 2001)
2nd
February 2001 13.00hrs
- Music
- Beethoven 6th Symphony - Pastoral
Father Taylor talks and offers prayers - then introduces Caroline Padley (From
WVI Publications)
Caroline Padley reads from the book of wisdom reading
Then introduces Mr. John Briggs - presenter from LBC
Mr.
John Briggs will talk about Bob
Then introduces Mr. Trevor Brook - long time acquaintance and friend
Mr.
Trevor Brook will talk about Bob and remembers
- Music
- Al Stewart, Year of the Cat
Father Taylor
offers prayers
- Music
- Queen, Best Friend
Coffin is taken
out and we all follow to graveside for final prayers and blessing
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3
- speech by John Briggs 
I should start by saying I didn't know Bob for long - and I didn't know Bob
the man either - I'm not sure that many of us did. But I did know Bob the
broadcaster, Bob the encyclopedia, Bob the patient problem solver and Bob the
smiling genial gentle giant.
For me and thousands of LBC
listeners, Bob was Inspector gadget. With a familiar cry of 'Greetings' he
bounced into the studio normally accompanied by a large suitcase with the
latest silver or black box stuffed full of circuit boards and silicon
chips - and a team of wild software engineers couldn't have restrained
him for explaining the benefits and pitfalls of this latest offering. I took
over the Saturday morning show where Bob was already resident in January last
year. Bob's section was just 30 minutes long - but it was clear that with my
love of gadgets and Bob's pure and unadulterated enthusiasm for his subject we
had to extend it to an hour, which we did almost immediately. In
a world that is pushing us all headlong into the network, wired, digitised and
pervasive world of technology - Bob was there to make sense of it all. He
truly enjoyed teaching people how to understand the intricacies of his work.
His wealth of knowledge solved hundreds of problems for listeners with modems
that wouldn't connect or video's that wouldn't tune - and even the simplest
problem was handled with care and consideration for those people for whom
technospeak was not their first language. We rarely clashed. In
fact our major disagreement was his belief in Windows and PC's and my love of
Apple Macintosh. Bob would sit and listen patiently while I attempted to
defend the Mac in a PC dominated world - happy to give me my two penny worth.
Bob was generous to a fault as a broadcaster - and never ever corrected me -
at least not so as the audience could tell - but when he thought I was talking
completely out of the back of my hat - which is not unusual - he would raise
his eyebrows in surprise as if to say - are you sure about that - but we were
always on the same team on air. I say team - let's be honest - this was Bob's
hour. I'd introduce each caller by name as in - so Fred you're live on LBC -
what can we do for you - and the caller would reply - hello Bob - and who
could blame them. Bob's breadth of knowledge was staggering - and I should add
irreplaceable. I should add that Bob was not of course purely
defined by his knowledge of things technical - he loved music - and had
managed to recreate his large collection of Vinyl albums digitally - how else
but by downloading them over the net. He would often enter the studio and
comment on one of the previous musical guests that he'd heard on the show as
he was driving in to join us. I'm not an especially religious
man - and I'm not sure I know where we end up on the next stage of our voyage
- but wherever it is I have a sneaking suspicion that Bob is able to watch
down on us today. And I am pretty certain that he has a broad smile on his
face - for two reasons. The first one is that he would smile to see so many
people here today. he might even be faintly embarrassed - Bob was not a man to
make a fuss on his own account. I'm not sure he ever knew how many people
thought of him as a friend and how many people wanted to pay their respects to
him today. And secondly because wherever it is he is watching from - for all
my protestations to him that it should be run by Apple Macintosh - I bet you
he's found out that it's run by Windows on a PC... and he knows he was right
and I was wrong. Many thanks to John
Briggs for allowing us to print his speech which really summed up Bob
nicely... back to the top
4
- Speech by Trevor brook
Bob Tomalski -
Broadcaster and journalist, 1953-2001
Bob. What was all this radio stuff about then?
Most of us here know that Bob had his tangles with the authorities,
like almost anyone in this country who tried to do something creative
that involved using the highly government-regulated radio spectrum. What
was going on here? What made a well brought up young lad in South London
get involved in activities like this? What was it that Bob
believed in, and what were the changes that he wanted to see?
Well, Bob was interested in gadgets. He was interested in
bits of technology from an early age, and one of the few pieces of electronics
around in a 1950's and 1960's household was a radio set. Most people pay
little more than passing attention to a radio; they quickly fiddle with it
until they hear something they like and then leave it alone. But Bob
was more curious than that. What he did was to spend hours tuning around
carefully in the gaps between the big stations that everyone listened to.
He found the foreign stations. He found the Welsh service. He
found the Scottish service. But most strikingly of all he found Radio
Jackie and one or two other pirate stations which appeared on the airwaves on
Sundays. These were exciting. For one thing, the people on them were
little older than Bob himself. But that wasn't the only attraction.
Can you imagine what was happening when each presenter had just a single
one-hour programme each week? An entire week's events, news, jokes and so
on were packed into that hour. Terrific energy and production effort
went into every one of those programmes. This stuff was radio that you 'listened
to', not radio that you 'had on'. Quite a different thing from most of
today's music stations, where people have to do a four-hour programme
stint every day of the week.
So, one thing led to another, and Bob met some other locals who
happened to be keen on soul music. In fact, so keen on soul music that
they wanted to broadcast it around London, so that everybody else could hear
it. And that is exactly what they did. It broke the law of course.
People who went on to the tops of tower blocks with transmitters did rather tend
to be pursued by the radio investigation service. The government told the
story that there were no frequencies available. Now Bob was not stupid.
He had enough technical knowledge to know that this was simply not
true. So, either government officials were too dim to realise the truth of the
situation... or they were just lying. Nowadays we have 300
independent transmitters operating in those same wavebands, so you can probably
work out which it was. Anyway, in Britain, the result was that any proper
public debate about the possible merits of more radio listening
choice was sabotaged by this perpetual claim that it was impossible anyway.
So, we had pirates. Other countries which had not
liberalised the airwaves had pirates as well, but some of them took the
refreshingly realistic approach that no harm was being caused and they permitted
unlicensed operations to continue until they got round to regularising the
situation. Ambulances still reached their destinations and no
aeroplanes fell out of the sky. Not so in this country though.
The enforcement services here were too well funded and the established orthodoxy too
well entrenched. That 'frequency cupboard' was going to be kept well
and truly locked!
Bob had thrown himself into running a regular soul station, Radio
Invicta. He built a studio, tore it apart and built a better one. He eventually
sectioned off part of the flat as a separate soundproofed area. He built
transmitters - and got them working. But Bob was nothing if not
multi-skilled and he excelled in producing the programmes themselves.
Using nothing more impressive than an old four track reel to reel tape recorder
Bob would create highly polished jingles and station identifications. "Roger
Tate, super soul DJ". Other stations, both official and unofficial,
listened to what Bob and his colleagues did and their ideas were copied or
imitated.
Faced with the authorities Bob was remarkable, because he
was absolutely fearless. He was certain they were in the wrong and, given
enough time, were going to lose the battle. It was a war of attrition and
only perpetual piracy was ever going to bring about change. And
he was quite right about that. The government kept winning the battle
in the courts but began to lose the moral one. Eventually the law was
changed.
Do we have free radio now? In the sense that anybody
can decide to start up a new magazine, find the finance and get on
with it, no, we don't have that for radio. The process is bound up with a
long winded regulation and approval process involving a statutory body
which has had its fingers burnt in the past by the odd bankruptcy and
the odd scandal. So they play safe and issue more licences to those
who already have stations. The consequence is that originality and
creativity get crushed into blandness and mediocrity. My
own teenagers constantly flip between stations in the car, but they don't care
enough about any of them to listen indoors. Fresh people don't get to
control stations. Behind boardroom doors they might think it privately,
but in what other industry would the chairman of the largest conglomerate
in the market dare to say publicly that even the present regime was too open
and, I quote, "was out of date and was letting inexperienced players into
the market"?* That is a disgraceful statement. Where would
television, theatre, comedy, the arts, and so on be, if new and by
definition inexperienced people didn't get lots of exposure? The
industry is stale, complacent and rotten. Bob, there are more battles out
there and we needed you here.
For several years Bob worked for a hi fi retail
business and that was during a period of dramatic changes in technology. A whole
range of developments occurred and digital systems began creeping into the
consumer world with the invention of the compact disc. Bob was in a place
where he could get his hands on new products before most people in the
country. That enthusiasm and understanding of what was coming next is what
developed into Bob's work in broadcasting and journalism. His experience
and ease behind the microphone, combined with the skill that he had learnt in
the hi fi world of explaining complex technical matters to the layman,
meant that he was regularly called on by producers and researchers of radio and
television programmes. You never knew when Bob's voice would pop out of
the loudspeakers as you were driving around the country.
Despite a quite frantic pace of working though, Bob always had
time to help people. He was ready to teach complete
strangers about some piece of equipment they had or give them guidance
for getting the best out of it.
The magazine work Bob did over the past ten years gave him many
opportunities to travel abroad and meet the designers and manufacturers themselves. Bob thoroughly
enjoyed all of that. He was always fascinated and enthused about
new ideas and new products. In fact, when you think of Bob, you just think
'cheerful'. I cannot ever remember Bob getting seriously narked or
stressed about something. Cheerful it is. That has to be the keynote
for today.
Bob often surprised me by ringing from a mobile for a
detailed engineering assessment of some manufacturer's technology or
claims for a product. And then, after a half-hour long
conversation, he would announce that he was in Tokyo, or somewhere equally
outrageous... and had better go. There was no one like Bob and I shall
certainly miss that cheerful, ebullient and irrepressible personality.
As someone has already said: I hope that wherever you have gone
Bob, they have lots of gadgets.
Trevor Brook
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