This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The presenter of Children’s Hour must have felt hard done by. OK, she would have known John Reith’s reputation — the BBC’s director-general had, after all, forbidden an early radio talk on how to make fruit wine (“no intoxicants should be included”) and was furious when listeners abandoned his particularly strait-laced Sunday schedules for the “monstrous stuff” on Radio Luxembourg (mainly dance bands).
He even responded to a satirical song about his tendency to ban things, “We Can’t Let You Broadcast That”, by banning it. But surely Reith was overdoing things when he reprimanded the poor woman for livening up a programme about pirates with an impromptu “yo ho ho and a bottle of rum”?
Despite the D-G’s gloomy presence, radio’s early decades in this country were a thrilling time for broadcasters and listeners alike. Beaty Rubens, a BBC producer herself for many years, charts the birth of the invention that revolutionised domestic life for virtually everybody in the country. As a woman in Bristol put it, “I shouldn’t think there can be any lonely people left now. The wireless makes company for you at once.”
An early boost for the new wonder came from Dame Nellie Melba, who in 1920 broadcast a performance from the Marconi company’s headquarters in Chelmsford. The soprano had at first been reluctant — “my voice is not a subject for experimentation” — but then the Daily Mail offered her £1,000 (£45,000 today), and she changed her mind.
In 1922, the year the BBC came into existence, only 150,000 people could listen to the wireless. But cheaper models were soon available, and by 1939 the reach was 34 million, out of a population of 48 million.
Progress wasn’t always smooth. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife wondered if you needed to open your window to receive the signal, whilst in Devon a woman was found using her aerial as a washing line.
Broadcasters had to feel their way too: a note next to the microphone at 2lo (a forerunner of the Beeb) read “if you sneeze or rustle papers you will deafen thousands!” And of course, as with any new development in British life, pedantry was soon at play. Should the past tense be “broadcast” or “broadcasted”? Listeners were originally known as “listeners-in”, hence the book’s title.
Some people were worried that the wireless would (to use a modern term) dumb us down. A Liverpool headmaster called it “one more difficulty in the way of getting homework properly done”, and in 1935 the author E.M. Delafield noted the “well-known” quandaries faced by families: “Jazz or no jazz. Symphony concert or variety. Henry Hall [leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra] as a background to conversation, conversation as an interruption to Henry Hall.”
I couldn’t help thinking of the fears when I was a child in the 1970s about TV rotting my generation’s brains. And indeed of today’s debates about kids and their smartphones. Another similarity with today is politicians getting irritated with the media. The Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald disliked radio: “I am absolutely indifferent to all this booming, whether it is done by hostile or friendly people. I prefer to be left alone.”
His backbencher Ellen Wilkinson found the BBC’s coverage of the 1926 general strike so biased that she wanted her licence fee back: “I can hear enough fairy tales in the House of Commons without paying ten shillings a year to hear more.”
Actually in those days the Beeb wasn’t allowed to broadcast very much news. Fleet Street had successfully lobbied for a ban on radio bulletins before 6 pm, and the Radio Times once proclaimed: “If there is any News, it will be broadcast at 9.00 pm.” 2lo announcers would read the news twice, once at normal speed, then more slowly so that listeners could take notes.
Whatever the teething troubles, wireless was a miracle that brought people together and changed the way they saw the world. “It beautifies your life,” as one woman said. A 1926 cartoon shows a couple heading out for the evening, the wife instructing her babysitter to “let the little darling listen to ‘Children’s Hour’, and then, when he’s had his supper, the Radio Dance Band can play him to sleep.”
Some of Rubens’ most charming details relate to the sport commentaries that listeners came to love. “During Australia’s first innings,” one man noted, “I said to my wife ‘if they bowl Bradman for less than 14, then that pound note on the table is yours, my dear,’ but they didn’t.” Another wrote that “I’ve seen boxing matches on the pictures but they weren’t ever as real as that Albert Hall match. You could smell the cigars.”
