[1] Plugge was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Chatham in 1935, defeating the Labour candidate Hugh Gaitskell by a majority of 5,897 votes.

He was told that a young member of the Le Grand family – which owned the town's Benedictine distillery – had a small radio transmitter behind a piano in his house, and that a local cobbler's business had increased after his name was mentioned during a broadcast.

Le Grand agreed, and a studio was set up in the loft over the old stables in rue George Cuvier, from which the programmes were broadcast by Plugge's employees.

Plugge hoped to restart transmissions from France after the war but changes in broadcasting regulations and a different attitude to radio listening meant that this never happened.

Under Lord Reith, the BBC was off the air until late on Sundays to give people time to go to church, and offered little but serious music and discussions.

Broadcasting historians have said that Reith reluctantly agreed to lighten the BBC's programmes on Sundays after his audience deserted him for Radio Normandy's light music.

The IBC's original London offices were in Hallam Street, near the BBC's Broadcasting House, then moved to nearby 35–36 Portland Place.

The BBC's Radio 1, inheritor of the audiences that Plugge's offshore successors had built until the 1967 Marine Broadcasting Offences Act made them illegal, later moved into the Hallam Street building.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Plugge moved in a social set that included Princess Margaret, her husband photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, broadcaster Julian Pettifer and English model April Ashley.

[1] Captain Plugge married (Gertrude) Ann Muckleston (13 January 1909 – 1993) in New York on 28 October 1935, a little over two weeks before he was elected to the House of Commons.