LISTENING TO THE LISTENERS

Not long after British broadcasting began, the first managing director of a daring tech start-up compared the impact of radio with that of the printing press. His name, of course, was John Reith, and he was right. Radio was the first ever form of home-based mass entertainment and take-up was spectacular. In 1922, around 150,000 people were able to listen in (as it was then called), by 1939 the number had risen to 34 million. Reith soon published a memoir which set the unfortunate trend of telling the story of radio from the broadcasters’ perspective. My interest is in the listeners.

How did people feel when they acquired their first set and began to listen? What were their reactions to early broadcasts and to the knowledge that strangers across the country were sharing the experience? Did broadcasting revolutionize lives or simply reinforce old ways?

When Reith and his staff referred to listeners, they generally focussed on the kinds of people with whom they mixed.  It’s amusing to hear that Edith Davidson, wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, inquired whether it was necessary to open a window to listen in. It’s revealing to read that Cecil Lewis, one of Reith’s senior management team who doubled up as ‘Uncle Caractacus’ on The Children’s Hour, assumed that all children were summoned to a hot bath and bed by a nanny. But what of the 80 percent of the population who left school at 14 and did not live in homes with nannies and hot baths? 

The radio craze took hold a century ago in 1925 when the BBC opened the world’s first high-power transmitter in Daventry, Northamptonshire. Until then, reception had been patchy and poor outside a few big cities. Now, over 90 percent of the population could pick up the signal. This makes 2025 a particularly good moment to try to listen in to the grassroots experiences of listeners.

I started my research with promotional material: the brochures of radio manufacturers and the many new magazines which joined older-established publications on the newsstands.  It was easy to see, though, that most listeners’ first experience of radio didn’t resemble the colourful centrefold which appeared in the Christmas 1922 number of Illustrated London News. 

A massive number of contemporary cartoons provide a sort of counter-narrative. These apparently simple drawings are complicated to parse but their sheer number indicates the cultural impact of radio. At the very start, one revealing example questioned the impact of radio on domestic life. 

The Radio Times’ letters page provided another resource, through the writers of letters are, by definition, self-selecting:

‘I’m only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It is a real magic carpet. Before, it was a fortnight at Rhyl, and that was all the travelling I did that wasn’t on a tram. Now I hear the Boat Race and the Derby… There are football matches some Saturdays and during the week music and talks by famous men and women who have travelled and can tell us about places.’

(Radio Times. Letter from G.M.C., a Birmingham clerk pub 20 Jan.1928)

Then I made a find which hugely enlarged my evidence base. In its early days, the BBC did not undertake audience research. When the head of a Listener Research Section was appointed in 1936, one of his first decisions was to commission Broadcasting in Everyday Life: A Survey of the Social Effects of the Coming of Broadcasting. It was conducted by Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, who were already based in a working-class district of Bristol called Barton Hill.

Their pamphlet was known to historians but few copies survive.  Winifred Gill’s archive in the Bodleian Library in Oxford holds one. When I ordered it up, I found, to my huge excitement, that the box in which it was kept also contained two notebooks in which Gill had jotted down and transcribed the conversations she had conducted in Barton Hill.  Much was not included in the final publication, sometimes due to shortage of space, sometimes because it didn’t meet the brief or because it revealed too disturbing a picture of domestic life.

Barton Hill is a small area but here was first-person testimony from people with real names and identities:  Mr James the irrepressible Welsh grocer, Mrs Britton the chatty newsagent, politically astute Alderman Hennessy, proud autodidact Mrs Morse, thoughtful Miss Vile, Eileen and George, Joyce and Les, Eunice and Ken….

Mr James, the grocer, told Winifred Gill:

‘The News is for me the very special feature of all. It is unbiased, unprejudiced, and for the individual gives some insight into the possible warping of the newspapers. My wife releases me from the shop counter for the 6 o’clock News…..I’ve even neglected the bacon machine for the News.’

The interviews covered a wide range of topics and were particularly revealing about women’s experience of radio: daytime broadcasting enriched the drudgery and loneliness of housewives, but they disliked attempts by female broadcasters to teach them about cookery.  Meanwhile, in the evenings and weekends, men tended to control radio use, and, in a few cases, I found ugly stories of radio being used as a form of coercive control in the home. 

‘I wouldn’t be without it. I stay at home nowadays instead of going out to church. There’s the News…and listening to Talks…. One forgets a lot, but it’s not all lost. It may not be substantial knowledge, but it beautifies your life.’ 

Nowadays we tend to think of radio as a faithful, unthreatening companion, but look again at the 1923 cartoon. Switch the radio to a hand-held mobile device and it could as easily refer to a contemporary family dinner table. Far more than just a nostalgic look at the ‘golden age of radio’, listening in to the early listeners can shed light on domestic life today.