Contact With Alaska, Greenland and Malaya. Old Boys: Blackhall.

The report ends with a rallying cry, “Come on, ’Sonians!”, and I read it aloud in our kitchen with feeling, because our eldest is sixteen and upstairs. I can reach my cousin in Perth, Western Australia, on WhatsApp in forty seconds. I cannot reach a boy twelve feet above the extractor fan.

The Watson’s boys did not give up. The same report lists the kit with the pride of a car advert, a 150-watt transmitter and a V-beam aerial pointed at the United States, and hastens to reassure readers that the aerials are inconspicuous and do not spoil the look of the school. A year later the club was still asking old boys to send their QSL cards, the postcards radio amateurs swap to confirm a contact, and members were collecting scrap metal and wool to sell for a new beam aerial. Wool. The road to the old boys ran through other people’s jumpers.

Alan Masson, a member around 1960, remembers the station running every lunchtime from a room under the school stage. Tom Simpson, a teacher, built the equipment; John Hughes taught the theory. On a good day, Masson recalls, Australian stations could sound as if they were next door. The boy upstairs is actually next door, plus one floor, and sounds like Malaya.

The club’s final problem is a familiar one. Masson’s recollection ends with the former members in touch mostly by email and another reunion overdue. Decades of trying to raise the old boys, and they are now on the one network nobody answers.

I tried the 1956 method first. I sent “Come on, ’Sonians!” to the family group. My husband replied with a thumbs up from the sofa. The eldest read it at 6.02 and did not reply.

At 6.15 I switched off the router. He was in the kitchen by 6.16. Range: twelve feet. Watson’s had 150 watts and never got past Blackhall.