It was at a time when broadcasting was in its infancy: when the studios were draped with curtains to eliminate echoes; the microphones were the size of a meat safe (a cooling cabinet the size of a modern microwave - pictured below); and the hooters of tugs on the Thames sometimes filtered through during news bulletins.
Writing his memoirs, This - is London, published in 1951, Hibberd (above and right) recalled:
"The three things that impressed me most, as a newcomer, were the general atmosphere of friendliness, the way I was at once made to feel at home - one of a family as it were - and the all pervading pioneering spirit, which seemed to proclaim from the house-tops, 'Here's a wonderful worthwhile job. Nothing matters more than broadcasting, unless it is still better and more extensive broadcasting.'"
Hibberd became one of the first professional announcers - broadcasters whose role covered what we now refer to as continuity announcing, as well as reading the news, and presenting various concerts and talks.
He and his contemporaries - Kenneth Wright, Lindsay Wellington, Stanford Robinson and Dan Godfrey - laid down much of what we now accept as the ground rules of writing broadcast news.
"The problem of writing for the voice and thinking in terms of the spoken word, as distinct from the printed page, has been with us since broadcasting began in this country. It was soon realised that a special technique would have to be developed, as what was required was shorter sentences than when writing for the eye and the use of as much colloquial English as possible."
This led to the adoption of three basic tenets that were applied when preparing scripts for news bulletins:
"1) Avoid the use of long sentences; 2) limit the number of parentheses (sub-clauses) to two or three at the most; 3) try to write sentences which slide easily off the tongue.
For example, it was imperative to avoid such phrases as 'The ruthless use of force', or 'The extraordinary orderliness of the room', or expressions like 'The Soviet-Finnish State', because they are not vocal."
All this is as applicable today as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, although for modern listeners - living their lives on the move, not clustered around a wireless set in rapt attention - the fewer subordinate clauses a sentence contains the better.
Stuart Hibberd's career spanned the General Strike of 1926, the death of King George V and the abdication of Edward VIII. Hibberd was reading the news on Sunday 3 September 1939, the day on which Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Nazi Germany.
"I read the one o'clock and several other bulletins which included the Prime Minister's Speech,"
Hibberd wrote in his diary afterwards,
"As I was reading one of the evening bulletins the sirens sounded. I remember how difficult it was to concentrate; automatically my mind was trying to picture the scene outside; but it was not an actual raid, merely a tryout, and the 'All Clear' soon went."
Hibberd continued broadcasting throughout World War Two and, on 7 October 1944, he included in his diary a letter received from a Belgian woman, addressed to the Announcers of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Brussels had just been liberated by the Allies.
"Dear Friends,
May I begin this letter by saying that you became, during the grim German occupation, good and dear friends indeed to all those English speaking Belgians, to whom you have constantly reminded the existence of a fighting Britain, one day coming to free us from the nightmare of the threatening Gestapo spectre ...
... Now liberation has come, and may I thank you for the brief moments of quiet happiness in between terrible devastating periods of German Nazism. Your help was most valuable in giving us courage."
On VE Day (8 May 1945) Hibberd was "up betimes and broadcasting before breakfast". On 5 August that year, he recorded in his diary the dropping of the first atomic bomb - "its effect being two thousand times that of the RAF's ten-ton bomb".
"Three days later Russia declared war on Japan. I put out this piece of news at the end of the Promenade concert on 8 August, and the next day the news that Japan had surrendered was given out in the one o'clock News. As I came through Oxford Circus after this, I thought everyone had gone mad. ATS and WRENS were standing on top of Peter Robinson's building showering down paper on people's heads below, and holding long paper streamers, which billowed out in the wind."
At the pinnacle of his career, Stuart Hibberd reckoned he regularly addressed a radio audience of 25 million, taking a conservative estimate of two listeners per radio set.
"Such figures are too frightening to contemplate,"
he wrote,
"and if I once began to think in terms of them when about to broadcast I should probably be almost inarticulate.
I prefer to stick to my original mind picture, of speaking to one family or one individual only, and leave the numbers to the statisticians, and the social results of the impact of the wireless on people to the historians of the future."
Stuart Hibberd died on 1 November 1983, aged 90.
