. PERSONAL COLUMN

In the days• of Lord Reith

KENNETH ALLSOP

Some Radio One disc jockeys elect to ad- dress themselves as Uncle. 'And here's a postcard from Solihull', they chatter with their scalding cheeriness, 'asking your Uncle Tone to play ..

They're not the kind of surrogate uncles I had as a boy, as one of the wireless genera- tion. The voice of Children's Hour was quiet, even, dulcet yet manly, pleasant in a thin, controlled way but stopping short of jovial, in accents of standard English. Beneath the tweedy ease was the steely firmness one later encountered in housemasters and district commissioners dealing with tribal con- tention. I never, in my memory, saw a photograph of Uncle Mac and his chaps, but without wondering about it I knew exactly what they looked like: jackets of ginger Harris, comfortably worn and with leather elbow patches; greying short hair with a high Wilfred Owen parting; jaws square set from biting on briar stems; perhaps a moustache still worn by those who had been at the Front.

Across the airwaves, then, certain assump- tions rang with the clear strong note of a school chapel bell: that the BBC's junior audience was gathered for story-time in an enormous national nursery. Nanny was clearing away tea. Coal burned brightly in the tall cast-iron grate and the flames glim- mered on the blacking and on the brass fireguard. Outside, yellow vapours wreathed in with the early winter darkness as the lamplighter strung an amber necklace around the square and the muffin man clanged faintly through fog and gaslight. Within, the big battered rocking horse and the lead soldiers in Grenadier scarlet were abandoned. British children everywhere were huddled in a secure, loyal BBC family circle of decency and decorum.

I suppose the general assumption that all Young England belonged to that world was not all that unimaginatively inane. In those Reithian salad days (he was elevated from general manager to director-general in 1927) programming was doubtless based on the economic reality that the listeners were mostly Home Counties middle and upper- middle class. (The upper class disdained the wireless; the working class couldn't afford it.) Thus for nearly twenty years (Reith's regime ended earlier than one might guess—in 1938—and then the war brought in- conceivable expansion of horizons) a formalised version of a rather confined style of British life was given wide currency, and there were held_ up as seemly, correct and 'done' certain criteria which until then had not been so obtrusively propagated. I don't think it's an accident that Frank Richards's fantasies of a utopian public school life simultaneously attained their peak of popularity in the 'twenties and 'thirties: they struck the same chords of aspiration and eager emulation in the same tradesman- clerk-small-businessman bourgeoisie.

Broadcasting then was, by orthodox measurement, slightly raffish and dis- reputable. It attracted (or was haven for) the educated maverick. Today after being ex- pelled from Shrewsbury or sent down from St John's for smoking pot, all the bounteous field of hippiedom is open; forty years ago for a contrary young man swerving off the straight and narrow establishment path, there was the BBC. Monocles and pearl stick- pins were prevalent; there was a distinct 'flannelled fool' ambience. Some cigarette cards which I still possess—Radio Celebrities, issued by W. D. & H. 0. Wills—bear such biographies as: 'After Haileybury and Pembroke College, Cam- bridge, he was inspired by the example of Pelissier to become a pierrot'. Their peers may have regarded them as a bit outré, even verging on the Raffles cast of gentleman- knave, but to the public within range of the London Broadcasting Transmitter they ex- uded at full fifty kilowatt power their tradi- tional class. alues and certainty.

I only vaguely perceived this in my out- post in the suburbs. Talks were on a lot, but they drifted over my tiny head. Humour I more accurately got the drift of. It was fairly explicitly divided between the 'comical lower orders' brand personified in Mabel Con- standuros's Buggins Family sketches and the Western Brothers' impersonation of upper class silly assery (boiled shirts, patent-leather hair, receding chins). The Baldwin era mid- dle class, poised insecurely between, could laugh reassuringly at both. To a child in a villa such as mine, far beyond the Ken- sington town house domicile of the Typical Listener at which the attitudes were aimed, the wireless had radiant magical pro- perties.

In any case these were certainly to do with the hardware itself. The works were in a box beside my father's armchair. When it was on, the innards vibrated with live filaments like

glow-worms and fireflies: my personal Houston Space Centre of the day. Much

stranger, high above was the loudspeaker on a corner bracket just under the ceiling at an appropriately heavenly altitude, and from it floated the seraphic strains of the Wireless

Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kneale Kelley playing Die Fledermaus. Savourers of

such scraps of sub-sociology will have recognised that this was after the 2L0 studio shifted from Marconi House, but positively before 1928 when Mr Kelley ceased to lead the Orchestra. One of the programmes he henceforth presented was Tunes Played Dur-

ing The Week Worth Repeating. It may be seen that from the start the BBC was frugally watchful of getting maximum mileage from its material.

The sense of mystery was intensified by the speaker's peculiar Art Deco guise. My parents had installed it in a bosky Bauhaus setting. Dried poppy seed pods and grass stems tufted a plasterboard 'modernist' paint- ting of a stabbingly angular Kandinskyish sunrise, and through its centre the cloth cone peeped coyly like one of Richard Doyle's tubercular waifs amid fern fronds and fairy wings. It's odd now to recall that then, in the twenties, there was a strong hangover of Pre- Raphaelite mediaevalism in children's pic-

ture books, all mixed up with tango IM-

dansant fashions, the primrose-glade pipers and elves of Estella Canziani's paintings, hard Aztec lines, and the combined _influences of Tenniel's illustrations and the annual devotions at Peter Pan. After all, only thirty years separated the appearances of Through the Looking Glass and Barrie's Darling family: Wendy and Alice together struck extraordinarily deep into the first elec- tronic generations. The wireless as an object was indivisible from Functional interior design; what came over it mythologised the other, older idea of England. It was a potent brew to imbibe.

Within ten years I was using the radio (as the wireless had become in vulgar parlance and among such adolescents as I who thought it sounded peppier) specifically for illegal, under-the-bedclothes listening to late night dance music from stunningly sophisticated West End night spots like the Cafe Anglais and the Kit Kat Club. Apart from our native Lew Stone and Roy Fox, one got occasional glimpses of signposts to the intoxicating foreign country of American jazz, from records of Tommy Ladnier and Benny Moten and Chick Webb. The wireless gave me the most serious and noble service.

I don't think there are any comparisons. My own children took television as a stan- dard household fitting, like the plumbing.

Wireless—the materialisation of voices from the ether—overtook and overwhelmed my age group. There is now no Director of

Children's Broadcasting, nor is there to be a Third Programme, that highbrow hideaway

which was obviously going to be levelled by an uprising from the Radio One ghetto. There are of course to be departmentalised wavelengths in the Portland Place supermart,

all neatly divided and docketed, and there are to be forty local stations. The BBC will,

it seems, continue providing traffic-jam

background music—and news coverage of World At One excellence. Most definitely it

will never again be possible to say that an olympian minority is imposing its patterns and preferences upon the majority. But will it be possible to say anything much at all about sound radio? Will it even be noticed?