Radio Ghosts of the Mid Twentieth Century

In the period from about 1930 to about 1960 many people in Britain had a radio but few had a TV. The radio was therefore the main form of home entertainment, alongside the gramophone. The BBC was the only radio broadcaster in the country and thus a major sponsor of the arts. But most of the broadcasts in this period are lost: it was too expensive to record them permanently and, once they had been aired, it was rare for them to be archived.

This means that for an entire art form, the radio play, and for experimental features such as sound collages, we do not have many early examples in existence. To get some idea of what they were like, we have to rely on scripts (these do not always exist either), publication in books (not many made it to this form) and reviews (often brief and general).

The same is true of music, where not only the performance but sometimes the composition itself is lost: and particularly in the case of incidental music for plays. Talks and readings are more likely to have survived, as their authors often collected these in book form. The Radio Times and The Listener, the two radio newsstand journals, did provide detailed listings and some commentary week by week, and some BBC paperwork also survives, giving insights into the commissioning and development of pieces. Even so, most radio productions from this period are only known as ghostly echoes.

Using the resources that are available, a dedicated researcher can try to build up a picture of what we have lost and what survives, and that is just what Roger Simpson has done in his study of Arthurian programmes, Radio Camelot: Arthurian Legends on the BBC, 1922-2005 (2007). Inevitably, this can be at times a little dry, reading simply as a catalogue or checklist, but the author works imaginatively with the sources to convey more colour and detail where possible. There are a handful of stalwart Arthurian works which recur throughout his survey, deployed in various forms by the BBC, eg Malory, Tennyson, Wagner, Eliot, and indeed one criticism that could fairly be made is that the broadcaster too often played safe and served up variations on established classics, rather than commissioning new work.

On the other hand, the BBC was occasionally adventurous, for example in sponsoring interpretations of David Jones’ difficult modernist long poems with Arthurian themes, which seemed to have made a real impact on listeners. They also adapted some of T H White’s popular Arthurian fiction such as The Sword in the Stone. They did not, however, use any of Arthur Machen’s Arthurian pieces, whether his Grail fiction or his essays, nor did they do anything with Charles Williams’ Grail thriller War in Heaven, but they did broadcast in 1957 The Summer Stars: A Masque by Robin Milford, a musical tribute to his Arthurian poem In the Region of the Summer Stars. The Robin Milford Trust lists this as his Op. 102 and dates it 1946-57, but there does not seem to be any recording. Work was often taken up through the personal championing of individual BBC employees, as with David Jones’ narrative poems.

As we get into the later 20^th century and early 21^st century, more work is preserved, and the book provides a useful guide to Arthurian history and literature in the air during this period. For example, Simpson mentions a contribution to a 2003 programme by Prof Charles Thomas, the noted Cornish archaeologist, who warmly recommends two novels often overlooked: Castle Dor by Daphne du Maurier, completing a novel by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1962): and Dawn in Lyonesse (1938) by Mary Ellen Chase. This is set at the King Arthur Hotel, Tintagel, and replays the Tristan legends among Cornish fisher folk.

Radio Camelot illustrates what can still be achieved with patience and ingenuity to retrieve at least some knowledge of lost radio productions, and it would be interesting to see a similar survey for fantastic literature more generally, or for some sub-set of it, such as ghost stories.   Early on, of course, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was the obvious choice for any ghostly theme, and there were also folklore and ancient customs talks, but perhaps surprisingly M R James was not then greatly in evidence. Algernon Blackwood, however, became a household name as an established ghost story raconteur on the radio, known familiarly as ‘the Ghost Man’.

I have encountered by chance descriptions of a couple of interesting productions: Horton Giddy’s ghost story Off Finisterre (1936) and the fantastical Candlemas Night by Ernest Randolph Reynolds (1955). I think it is likely that, as with Arthurian productions, there were other high quality and distinctive fantastical or ghost story dramas or audio collages during the 1930-60 period that are awaiting rediscovery, even if we only have faint echoes of what they were.

(Mark Valentine)