Radio Newsreel

In an era of 24-hour rolling news it’s difficult to comprehend that there was a time when broadcasters found that “the prospect of filling fifteen minutes each night with original actuality material was a terrifying problem”. That was the problem facing the producers of Radio Newsreel when it started in 1940. It was a programme that ‘provided a model for news coverage that was urgent and involving’, it would be heard around the world for half a century and in post-war Britain it was one of the most listened-to news broadcasts. Here is a brief history of Radio Newsreel.     

The idea for a daily programme that was “about the news of the day, introducing the voices of the men and women of Britain” came from two men in BBC’s Overseas division. First was Michael Barkway, the news editor for the Empire Service. But the main driving force was Peter Pooley, a former Empire Service announcer and by 1940 the Overseas News Talk Editor. He recalled the difficulties in sourcing news and actuality as “there were no news agencies to collect it for us and send it ticking into the office day and night. We had to wait for the news to break, then try frantically to collect our sound pictures and stories in broadcastable form and have our programme on the air by midnight”.

The first Radio Newsreel was broadcast on the North American service on 8 July 1940 live from a Broadcasting House basement studio at 4.30 in the morning. Producing and presenting that first edition was Robin Duff who opened with “The British Broadcasting Corporation presents Radio Newsreel – Edition Number One.” The title was meant to suggest the commentary with pictures approach familiar to American movie-going audiences who would see newsreels produced by Fox Movietone, Universal, Paramount and the March of Time series. Indeed the producers were always on the lookout for ‘radiogenic’ stories. The approach of the writers and presenters was to adopt a more conversational and informal approach than could be heard on the news bulletins.   

In that first edition there was a talk by a bomber pilot about the fortnight he’d spent drifting in an open boat, Geoffrey Cox (ITN’s news editor from 1956) on a meeting of the French cabinet days before Petain’s surrender and an interview with three Canadian soldiers in hospital.    

It was Duff who supposedly selected the library music that would open the programme, a piece called Imperial Echoes by Alfred Safroni in a 1928 recording by the Band of the RAF. It formed part of an opening sequence that was eventually introduced with the recorded voice of Canadian announcer Byng Whittaker who would intone “Whilst Britain awaits another dawn, we bring you news from the Battle Fronts of the World in – Radio Newsreel”. 

Audrey Russell and Barry Milne editing a disc for Radio Newsreel.
The Sketch 5 January 1949 

By October 1940 Radio Newsreel was also transmitted on the Pacific Service and the following year by the African Service and on the main General Overseas Service (World Service from 1965). There were also some Latin-American editions: Radio Panorama in the Spanish Service and Radio Gaceta in the Brazilian Service. Its style heavily influenced War Report when it started on the Home Service in June 1944. With the launch of the General Forces Programme in February 1944 it also carried a daily edition (initially with the presenters Phillip Robinson – a post-war Manchester-based producer - and actor and newsreader Norman Claridge) meaning that, until July 1945, it also had a domestic audience. In December 1940 the Newsreel team had temporarily decamped to Abbey Manor near Wood Norton but by June 1942 returned to London at the Overseas HQ at 200 Oxford Street (see Life at the ZOO). Reporters working on the programme in the wartime era included Audrey Russell, Alan Melville, future BBC tv newsreader Robert Dougall, John Irwin (later a post-war tv producer on Picture Page, In the News etc.) and George Weidenfeld (of Weidenfeld & Nicolson publishing fame). Two of the producers were Stanley Maxted who went on to became a war correspondent and George Innes, the creator of The Black and White Minstrel Show.

By November 1947 Radio Newsreel was a well established, well respected world-wide programme with the Radio Times reporting that there had been 2,676 editions for North America, 2,586 for the Pacific and 2,168 for Africa. So on Monday 3 November 1947 in addition to the six international editions a seventh domestic one was first broadcast on the Light Programme. News editor Stanley Rumsam explained that “every night at 7 o’clock it will bring to Light Programme listeners not only the hard news facts of the day but a series of sound pictures illustrating the news and current events. The editors will draw upon live and recorded despatches from BBC correspondents in Washington, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, the Middle East, the Balkans, New Delhi or Karachi and elsewhere. Happenings at home will be covered by radio reporters who will sometime be able to illustrate their accounts with actuality recordings made on the spot”.

Of course, this now sounds like every news programme but at the time all bulletins were straight reads by an announcer and there were no other news or current affairs shows. For nearly a decade Radio Newsreel was the major source of broadcast evening news, the only other being a film newsreel on BBC tv, though few folk had sets at that time, and competition from ITN was still eight years away. The listening figures for the Light Programme edition hit 4 million in the early fifties and it was still pulling in 3 million at the end of the decade, despite the draw of television.

Radio Newsreel always used staff announcers/newsreaders for the international and domestic editions, unlike other news programmes that followed such as The World at One and Outlook that relied on presenters with a journalistic background. Here are some examples from the Light Programme, Home Service and World Service dating from the 1960s and 1980s. The announcers I can identify, or who are indentified on-air, are Jimmy Kingsbury, Ronald Fletcher, Brian Hudson, Michael Murray, Pamela Creighton, Sandy Walsh and Jasper Britton. There are reports from Leonard Parkin, Reg Turnill, Conrad Voss Bark, Peter Nettleship and Harold Brierley.   

The ‘Light Reel’, as it was known in-house, came to be seen as the ‘master edition. A Radio Times article for the 21^st anniversary explained just how many daily editions were produced: 

Half-way through the evening programme, at 7.15 exactly, another Radio Newsreel goes on the air from another studio; this is heard by listeners in Africa and the Mediterranean area, and it is one of six such programmes broadcast daily in the BBC’s Overseas Services to different areas of the world. In fact, out of 49 weekly editions, 42 are broadcast overseas.

The Newsreel’s day starts just after midnight in London with an edition broadcast to America and Asia. Some hours later, while in Britain we are just getting up, another edition is being heard by West Africans at their breakfast and Australians at tea-and so on through-out the twenty-four hours. Besides those who hear it directly from the Overseas Services, in seventeen countries listeners have it relayed to them by their local stations. And some foreign station stations record it for re-broadcasting later, or select items of particular interest to them. For instance, one network in the United States broadcast 300 hours of Radio newsreel material in a single month; and 656 U.S. stations re-broadcast an item on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s retirement.  

The domestic edition of Radio Newsreel moved from the Light to the Home Service from Saturday 31 December 1966, although the Sunday edition had been carried on the Home since September 1957. However, it was dropped entirely in 1970 as part of the Broadcasting in the Seventies re-alignment, with the final edition going out on Radio 4 on Friday 3 April. The following week PM was launched at 5 pm with a 15-minute news bulletin at 6 pm and a 30-minute News Desk at 7 pm.  

London Calling billing from October 1988

Radio Newsreel continued for a further 18 years on the World Service though the number of daily editions started to reduce: five per day in the early 1980s and down to four by the middle of the decade. By 1988 the newsroom was producing three editions a day plus similar newsreels for the Australian and New Zealand broadcasting services

In 1979 the old version of the theme was dropped, much to the consternation of many listeners. The old 78 recording of Imperial Echoes was now too worn to run off any more copies so the BBC commissioned a new recording by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, who had also recorded a new version of Lillibullero. But as luck would have it some months later studio manager Keith Perrin had spotted a mint copy of the 78 in a junk shop in Tiverton, Devon which meant the ‘rightful’ sig tune could be restored.

In October 1988 the World Service announced ‘a new mix’ with some old programmes being dropped, some renamed or retimed and the introduction of Newshour. As for Radio Newsreel, presenter Sandy Walsh told listeners to the edition broadcast at 1500 GMT Friday 28 October that “our programme style is changing” and that it was the final edition of the programme. From the following day it had a shorter title, now just Newsreel, and a new theme. Out went the old 1928 recording of Imperial Echoes and in came a new electronic theme composed by Richard Atree of the Radiophonic Workshop which borrowed the melody of the old one.

Newsreel was broadcast just three times a day at 0215 GMT for Asia only (the rest of the world got Network UK), 1200 and 1500. But Newsreel’s days were numbered and just over two and a half years later the final edition was heard at 1500 GMT on Friday 31 May 1991, some 51 years after its first broadcast.

It’s back to 1961 and the 21^st anniversary of Radio Newsreel. It’s likely that this recording was taped off a shortwave broadcast so the sound quality is very ropey. The recording was recovered by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I extend my thanks.      

 Notes

Michael Barkway became the BBC’s Canadian correspondent and between 1962 and 1974 was editor of The Financial Times of Canada.

Peter Pooley resigned from the BBC in 1947 at a time when the news division came under the management of Tahu Hole. He joined the Crown Film Unit and from 1951 worked for NATO eventually becoming Assistant Director of Information.

Robin Duff would go on to become a war reporter and covered the liberation of Paris in 1944.

Once Upon A Time...

In the second festive offering I bring you not one, not two but three traditional fairy tales. These comedy pantomime retellings are from December 1985 and are packed with names familiar to Radio 4 audiences of the time.

Once Upon a Time... was written by Paul Shearer and Nick Symons. Both were ex-Cambridge Footlights with Paul going on to be a comedy performer and Nick mostly on the comedy production side. They had worked together earlier in 1985 on the Radio 4 series Nineteen Ninety-four. Paul’s comedy career was on both TV and radio in shows such as The Russ Abbot Show (BBC1), Gorham and Swift (Radio 2) and as co-writer on If You’re So Clever, Why Aren’t You Rich?  (Radio 4). He is now a property journalist. Nick Symons went on to produce A Bit of Fry and Laurie (BBCtv), became Controller of Comedy for Carlton TV and, from 2002, a freelance producer working on TV shows like TV Burp and Al Murray’s Happy Hour. He died in 2023.

Once Upon a Time ... Cinderella was broadcast at 2330 on Saturday 21 December 1985, the usual late-night comedy slot. In One Ear had just finished its second series the week before, indeed one of the stars of that show, Nick Wilton, played Buttons in this production. Nick regularly appears in panto as the ‘dame’ and this year is in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Festival Theatre in Malvern. Appearing as Cinderella is Helen Atkinson-Wood, from the cast of Radio Active. Chair of Just a Minute, Nicholas Parsons adopts a Noel Cowardesque voice to play a suave Prince Charming. Sounding as if they’ve just stepped out of an I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again sketch as the Ugly Sisters are Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden, with Tim occasionally dropping into his Lady Constance de Coverlet voice. In a nod to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue there’s a quick game of Mornington Crescent and Late Arrivals. Midweek’s Libby Purves is the Fairy Godmother and Nick Maloney (Son of Cliche and The Fosdyke Saga) is Beamish. Providing other voices, in this case Ted Lowe, Denis Norden and Robin Day, is Rory Bremner, pretty new to the comedy scene at the time and heard that year on Radio 4’s The Colour Supplement.      

Once Upon a Time...Jack and the Beanstalk was broadcast at 2215 on Sunday 22 December 1985. The Today presenters were more than willing to drop their serious image and in this show its Sue MacGregor’s turn as Jack. Peter Jones, one of the regulars on Just a Minute, plays Jack’s Mother, and there’s an impromptu round of the game. Barry Took, of The News Quiz, is Sir Norbert and the Giant. Helen Lederer, another star of In One Ear, is Jill and Rory Bremner is again on hand to play sundry characters and impersonate Johnners, Parky and Prince Charles. Also credited as playing ‘traders, villagers, serfs, kettles etc.’ are the Incredible Bending Bodger Brothers. I assume this is the act usually known just as The Bodgers, who were John Docherty, Gordon Kennedy, Moray Hunter and Pete Baikie, who four years later would be part of Channel 4’s sketch show Absolutely. Fans of the shipping forecast should pay attention about half way through. In this particular show some of the jokes seem to fall flat with the Paris Theatre audience, or maybe they’re just not that funny.

Once Upon a Time...Rumpelstiltskin was broadcast at 1530 on Thursday 26 December 1985. This time the cast features Margaret Howard who has great fun as the Queen, for some reason adopting a t’Yorkshire accent. I wonder if this show made that week’s Pick of the Week? Today presenters John Timpson and, complete with a Geordie accent, Brian Redhead, play the King and Dad respectively. Putting in an appearance as the Pardon the Butler , plus some other roles, is Richard Baker, presenter of Radio 4’s Start the Week and Baker’s Dozen. Hale and Pace, recent stars of Don’t Stop Now – It’s Fundation play DI Broker and DS Bailiff. Sally Grace, a Week Ending regular, is The Storyteller, and very briefly Mrs T, whilst Nigel Rees, another voice from Week Ending and The Burkiss Way and at the time the chairman of Quote...Unquote, hams it up as a very Orish Rumpelstiltskin and other parts.

Music in all three shows is provided by I’m Sorry’s Colin Sell. The producer is Alan Nixon who at one time or another had already worked with many of the performers on shows such as The News Quiz, The News Huddlines, Quote...Unquote, In One Ear, Stop the World, Don’t Stop Now –It’s Fundation, Son of Cliche, In Other Words...The Bodgers and The Fosdyke Saga.  

Professor Unwin’s Jazz Lecture

For the first of this year’s Christmas posts I’m taking you back over six decades to Boxing Day 1959. On the BBC Light Programme that evening, between Ken Sykora’s Guitar Club and Radio Newsreel was the regular Saturday evening show Just Jazz with Steve Race. For this holiday edition Steve’s guest was Professor Stanley Unwin, ‘Professor of Jazz Studies at Brewflade University’. Deep joy.

An article in that week’s Radio Times told us what we could expect:

We have often wondered from what university Stanley Unwin got his title of Professor – we have learnt to be cautious from past experience with such other luminaries as Jimmy Edwards. The answer, it seems, is Brewflade University, where he holds the Chair of Jazz Studies. Well, well. Anyway, you can hear his Inaugural Lecture on this subject in today’s Just Jazz (Light), which will be introduced as usual by Steve Race. 

Professor Unwin has apparently undertaken to supply a critical commentary to the discs that Steve will put on the turn-table. The result will be some surprising new insights into jazz.  

By a stroke of luck a recording of that show has survived, or at least part of it has, and was recovered in New Zealand by Duncan Lockhart, to whom I pass on my thanks for forwarding it on.  

Just Jazz was broadcast on Saturday evenings on the Light from Saturday 5 October 1957 to 15 July 1961. The regular presenters were Steve Race, Charles Melville, Sim Copans and Frank Dixon.

The Morning of the Year

In a recent edition of University Challenge (1) Amol Rajan asked “Give me the composer of this piece which became, in 1927, the first musical work commissioned for the radio by the BBC.” After hearing an excerpt, which neither team identified, the answer was given: “It’s Gustav Holst with The Morning of the Year”. Needless to say I got to thinking why was this commissioned and who commissioned it, and when it was it first broadcast. Here’s what I found.

The person behind the commission was Percy Pitt, (pictured above) the BBC’s director of music. Pitt himself was a composer and conductor most notably working for the British National Opera Company in Covent Garden before joining the BBC on a full-time basis in November 1924.

In 1926 it was decided that the BBC should broadcast a series of ‘national’ classical music concerts which would ‘present important works on a scale which cannot be attempted in the ordinary concert or a studio performance’. These twelve concerts would be broadcast every two or three weeks between September 1926 and April 1927 (2) and relayed on all BBC stations live from the Royal Albert Hall. The concerts included a mix of established works and some world premieres and, in the case of Gustav Holst, a work specially commissioned for the season. Pitt and Holst had first worked together some three years earlier when as director at the Royal Opera House he had organised the premiere of Holst’s The Perfect Fool.       

Holst started work on what would be the choral ballet The Morning of the Year in November 1926. Based on a scenario by Douglas Kennedy and with words by singer Steuart Wilson (3), the music stemmed from traditional English sources and was intended to portray mating rituals in the Spring. The work would be dedicated to the English Folk Dance Society of which Kennedy was the director. 

The work received its world premiere in the tenth National Concert broadcast on Thursday 17 March 1927, though being a radio broadcast the ballet was not performed with just the music played and sung by the orchestra and chorus. Holst was quoted in the press that he considered it his most important work since The Planets but in a letter to Percy Pitt he denied this and suggested that what he actually said was that it was the best thing I’ve written in the last two years “which is a very different matter. “  

Like all the other concerts in the season the music was performed by a National Orchestra of 150 musicians. This was actually the combined forces of the Covent Garden Orchestra and the BBC’s Wireless Orchestra. For the tenth concert the orchestra was joined by the National Chorus under chorus master Stanford Robinson which comprised the London Wireless Chorus (what would become the BBC Singers) plus choristers drawn from the Civil Service Choir, Lloyd’s Choir and the Railway Clearing House Choir.

The first part of the concert was the first performance of Arthur Honegger’s King David, a symphonic psalm in three parts after the play Le Roi David by René Morx, which Honegger conducted. The second part was the premiere of The Morning of the Year with the Orchestra conducted by Holst (pictured above), followed by Honegger’s steam locomotive-inspired symphonic movement Pacific 231.

The notes in that week’s Radio Times described The Morning of the Year as ‘a representation of the mating ordained by Nature to happen in the Spring of each year’. The characters are the Headman, the Hobbyhorse, and Youths and Maidens’. It then goes on to quote the scene and story from the published foreword to the score which all sounds a little bit racy for Reith’s BBC:  

The Voice of Nature is represented by the Chorus. The singers take no part in the action.

The Scene is laid in an open clearing in the forest.

The Voice of Nature is heard calling on mankind. The Headman and Hobbyhorse, representing the human and animal worlds, enter and dance together.

Nature calls on the Youths to enter. At the conclusion of their dance and under the direction of the headman they form a moving pattern in the background. The Calling-on-Song is repeated and in response the Maidens enter. While they dance the background of Men moves independently.

This continues until the two groups become aware of one another. They hear the Voice of Nature calling them together: O Dance of Love, O Joy of Dancing! This is the Dance of My True Love.

The Mating Dance follows, and at its culmination these words are sung again.

All the couples go out with the exception of the youngest Youth and Maid, who are mated by the Headman.

The Voice of Nature is heard in the distance as the youngest couple and later the headman disappear into the forest. 

A few weeks after the BBC broadcast, in June 1927, the ballet was given a private performance at the Royal College of Music by members of the English Folk Dance Society. Again Holst was on hand to conduct. Later that month it had its first public performance at London’s New Scala Theatre on Charlotte Street.   

The critical response was mixed. “Unfortunately some of the audience expected an orgy on the lines of Le Sacre du Printemps. They did not get it. The music was austere, as usual. And, as in several of his recent works, there were times when the writing seemed calculated rather than inspired. (4) The crucial Mating Dance is rather too bland and folksy (5)

Since that 1927 concert The Morning of the Year doesn’t appear to have been broadcast again as part of a concert performance - it’s certainly not featured in any Proms concert – other than a 1956 recording by the LPO under Sir Adrian Boult that was on the Third Programme the following year. When it is played on Radio 3 it’s usually the 1982 recording made by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Atherton. There is also a 2008 recording made by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Richard Hickox.

So if The Morning of the Year was the BBC’s first commission, I wonder what the second one was!

(1) Southampton v Imperial broadcast on BBC Two 17 November 2025 

(2) The 1926-27 season of National Concerts started on 30 September 1926 and ended on 7 April 1927. There was a second season between October 1927 and April 1928 mostly from the Queens Hall just across the road from Broadcasting House. By this time the BBC had also taken over the administration of the Promenade Concerts which effectively brought the National Concerts idea to an end. 

(3) Wilson was involved in a successful libel case against the BBC when in 1933 the Radio Times published a letter criticising his performance in a broadcast of St Matthew Passion. Despite this, during World War II, he was appointed music director for the Overseas Service and in 1948 director of music for the whole BBC.     

(4) Quoted in Gustav Holst: A Biography by Imogen Holst

(5) Quoted in Gustav Holst: the man and his music by Michael Short

The Wireless Foxtrot

The early days of radio broadcasting inspired a number of songs about the new medium. There was Flotsam and Jetsam’s Little Betty Bouncer who ‘loves an announcer down at the BBC’, On the Air by Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orpheans and Radio Times –‘the daily times that Big Ben chimes are radio times’- played by Henry Hall and the BBC Dance Band. Predating these songs was 2-L-0, a foxtrot by Montague Clayton published in 1923, and recently discussed on the British Broadcasting Century Facebook page.  

Was 2LO the first tune written about a radio station? Probably. But was it the first tune about radio? Well no. Months before the British Broadcasting Company came into existence in November 1922 there was song called Everybody’s List’ning-in.

According to The Era newspaper this was ‘the First Wireless Song’. On 24 May 1922 they announced it as follows: 'Messrs Chappell and Co are publishing the first wireless song fox-trot, entitled Everybody’s List’ning In, both the words and music by Ernest Longstaffe, the composer of Loony Melody and Auld Nest and incidentally of the music of His Girl now running at the Gaiety'.

A few days later on 27 May 1922 London’s The Evening News said: 'Inspired apparently by the publicity given of late in the Press to the subject of wireless telephony and broadcasting, Ernest Longstaffe, the composer who wrote a good deal of the  music of The Golden Moth and His Girl, has written a song fox-trot called Everybody’s List’ning-in'. 

What’s remarkable is that when the song was published there was actually very little coming through the ether for listeners to tune their cat whiskers into. There was the frivolities of Peter Eckersley and his team at 2MT in Writtle that had started in the February and, going on air the same month the song was published, 2LO in London and 2ZY in Manchester. Of course, if the atmospherics were in your favour you could also pick up stations from the continent and even the USA.  

An internet search reveals just a short extract of the music and lyrics from the song which goes: ‘Everybody’s listening. Sitting at home and listening. Everybody’s list’ning in. Pick ‘em up as they go, to and fro’. Whether the song was recorded on a 78 remains, for the moment, a mystery. It was, however, broadcast at least once as it was played on Glasgow station 5SC during the afternoon Hour of Melody on 21 January 1924. (With thanks to Mike Barraclough for spotting this).  

As for Ernest Longstaffe (pictured above), he was a composer, arranger and conductor who would eventually join the staff of the BBC. From 1926 he worked on dozens of radio revues and pantomimes, many of the early ones starring Tommy Handley, and the concert party show The Air-do-Wells. He became a full-time staff member as a producer in the Variety department in May 1935 and was mostly associated with The Pig and Whistle (1938-44), a series of rural tales centred round a village pub, written by Charles Penrose, aka The Laughing Policeman, and The Happidrome (1941-47) set in an imaginary variety theatre. Each week it would sign off with the song ‘We three in Happidrome, working for the BBC, Ramsbottom and Enoch and me.’ Longest-running though, was Palace of Varieties (1937-39 & 1944-58) which he both produced and conducted the resident orchestra. It aimed to recapture the atmosphere of old-time Music Halls. Longstaffe was billed as the ‘licensee and manager’ of the establishment and the entertainment in the early programmes was provided by the likes of Suzette Tarri, Al Bowlly, Harry Hemsley, Clapham and Dwyer and Gillie Potter. Various people chaired proceedings including actor Bill Stephens, Nosmo King and Rob Currie. For the recordings the artists wore full make-up and traditional costumes and the studio audience were given song sheets and urged to join in the choruses of the old favourites. Presumably this provided the inspiration for television’s The Good Old Days.    

If you know more about Everybody’s List’ning In please contact me.

A Scrapbook of Memories

With no sound archive to draw on early radio broadcasts about recent history, whether focussing on political or social developments, simply relied on some learned person giving a talk. Eventually feature programmes were created which included interviews with those who were either there at the time or held some expertise in the subject. To add further colour some events were recreated, often with effects and music, either by the participants themselves, assuming they were still around, or by using actors.   

This essentially is what the Scrapbook series did, a now forgotten programme that ran on BBC radio for forty years. It was a programme which ‘to thousands of listeners, as well as the critics ... represented the art of sound radio at its best’ and that ‘probably gave more pleasure than any other long-running series of BBC programmes.’ (1)

The person who devised and researched nearly all these programmes, just over one hundred in total, was journalist Leslie Baily. He would describe them as ‘an historical pageant in the air, a weaving of patterns in music and speech to evoke the events and emotions of years gone by’.

The first Scrapbook was broadcast on the North Regional service on 8 November 1932. Publicity for the programme read: ‘Old –fashioned scrapbooks in which there was such an odd, yet such an attractive conglomeration of contents, seem to be dying out altogether. This evening, in the North Regional programme, the first radio scrapbook ever to be compiled by Leslie W.A. Baily, a well-known Northern journalist, and will be produced by Wyndham Godden. As the name implies, it is just a variety of items - drama, music, poetry, song and comedy - all placed side by side with no idea of sequence.’(2)

The seemingly haphazard approach of the first programme did not garner entirely favourable reviews though: ‘Perhaps the trouble with the programme lay in its being too inconsequential. Even a scrapbook must, one feels, reflect something of the taste of its owner. This radio scrapbook, made, no doubt, in a far from leisurely way, betokened a too-catholic taste. I do not think the suspicion of a theme running through it would have destroyed its charm’. (3)

Four Scrapbooks were broadcast from the North before, in November 1933, it became a production for the National Programme. From now on each programme would look at a particular year and the technique was refined as Baily and producer Charles Brewer sought to ‘bring to the microphone people who did the things, who saw the things, that the Scrapbook recalls.’ That first National edition covered 1913 (see above) and included the Volturno Disaster, the Tango Craze, the Pelissier Follies, the production of Hindle Wakes and the Suffragette Movement. Lt-Col John Moore Brabazon reminisced about aviation, cricketer Percy Fender talked about the sport and Walford Hyden, musical director to Anna Pavlova, also contributed.   

By the following year a Scrapbook for 1909 employed a number of actors to dramatise events with the cast including Dorothy Holmes-Gore, Adele Dixon and Carleton Hobbs. There was music from the BBC Theatre Orchestra and the voices of Christabel Pankhurst, Ernest Shackleton, Winston Churchill and others played from gramophone records.

Twenty-eight editions of Scrapbook aired before World War II with some years being revisited such as 1913 having a revised Scrapbook in December 1937. Further editions were broadcast in wartime including a New Year’s Eve special billed as For Auld Lang Syne featuring forty years of memories and melodies. In the summer of 1940 a different approach was attempted with a series of Everybody’s Scrapbook (36 editions of 4 series 1940-43) with Baily explaining that instead of a particular year the memories would be ‘more widely selected’.   

How the Scrapbooks are made. Radio Times 2 November 1934

Writing in 1957 Baily said that ‘the Scrapbooks are now the oldest-established feature in British Radio’. He went on to say how he and producer Charles Brewer ‘in our wildest dreams and ambitions ... did not foresee that the Scrapbooks would still be running more than twenty years later’ and how ‘the large and faithful audience which the Scrapbooks continue to attract today, despite the counter-attraction of television.’

For many of the 1930s and 1940s editions the person who regularly turned the pages of the scrapbook, i.e. the narrator, was actor Patric Curwen. Post-war the main narrator was announcer Freddy Grisewood. In My Story of the BBC (1959) he wrote: ‘One of the chief reasons for its popularity is, of course, that there is always a nostalgic memory in each broadcast for practically every listener of mature years. I always marvel at the skill with which Leslie Baily selects the salient points, never missing anything of consequence. The he ferrets out suitable characters to relate the incidents from personal experience. He manages to track down the most surprising people; and when those who should have told the tale are dead he ably weaves in contemporary recordings of their speeches. The living and the dead thus meet as though the years stood still, thereby adding considerably to the sincerity of the scenes re-enacted.’ Others who provided narration were Carleton Hobbs, Gordon Davies and David Peel, commentator Robert Hudson, Jack de Manio, Desmond Carrington and, for the final 14 editions, Michael Flanders.  

Such was the popularity of the Scrapbooks that some were issued on disc as early as 1935 (Scrapbook for 1910) and in 1963 Fontana issued LPs for 1914, 1940 and 1945. (4) Baily also wrote three Scrapbook volumes covering 1900 to 1914, 1918-39 and one just on The Twenties. The retention rate of the programmes in the BBC Sound Archives is good and they have often been plundered for other documentary series and CD collections. Some audio clips of early BBC broadcasts, especially from the first decade before recordings were regularly kept, are, in fact, re-creations from Scrapbooks such as 2LO announcements by the first director of programmes Arthur Burrows. The Scrapbook for 1924 (Home Service 1958) had Beatrice Harrison playing her cello to coax the nightingales to sing but it had, in fact,  been recorded in 1955, though the nightingales proved microphone shy that eveing. (5) 

On one notable occasion the programme itself was responsible for unearthing a rare recording, that of the first royal broadcast when King George V spoke at the opening of the British Empire Exhibition on 23 April 1924. It was known that a recording had been made but that it was missing in the Sound Archives. Leslie Baily mentioned this in Scrapbook for 1924 (Home Service 23 February 1955) which prompted listener Dorothy Jones to contact the BBC saying that her husband had recorded it at home and that she still had the metal disc. (6)

As the series progressed and more recent years were featured so a greater use was made of archive recordings. So, for example, Scrapbook for 1940 broadcast in 1960 had the recorded voices of The Queen, Churchill, Eden, Chamberlain and so on as well as contributions recorded specially for the programme and a repertory of actors.

The Scrapbook team in 1960 of (l-r) producer Vernon Harris,
narrator Freddy Grisewood and Leslie Baily. Far right is
Sydney Moseley who'd worked for the Baird Television 
Company in 1932

By 1960 the 70^th Scrapbook was broadcast and the team had ticked off 40 years with Baily adding: ‘Sometimes we make a new version, and when we do this the old script is discarded’. (7) ‘Each show has a theme determined by the mood of the year under review’. New editions continued to be added in the 1960s, interspersed with repeats but there had been an interval of over two years when the programme re-appeared in April 1967 with Scrapbook for 1952. From then on the programmes were written and compiled by John Bridges as Leslie Baily, suffering from ill-health following a stroke in 1964, was stepping back from work, though he still advised the production team.

The final two Scrapbooks aired on Radio 4 in 1974 with Michal Flanders turning the pages for 1963 – JFK, Profumo, The Beatles etc. - the most recent year that the series alighted on, and a final wartime visit, a first time review of 1943. And that was it, apart a repeat of the final edition the following year the Scrapbooks have not been heard of again on BBC radio for over half a century. 

Leslie Baily illustration Daily Express
31 December 1949

What about the creator of the Scrapbooks? Leslie Baily was born in 1906 in St Albans and educated at the Quaker boarding school in Sibford, Oxfordshire, and Cheltenham Grammar School. He joined the staff of the Yorkshire Evening Post as a junior reporter, later becoming their radio correspondent, and then radio editor for the Sunday Referee.    

He started writing for the BBC in 1924, his first broadcast being an adaptation of A Christmas Carol for Belfast station 2BE. By his own admission his “knowledge of radio dramatic technique was nil” and that he adapted it “more or less as you would arrange him for stage”. The following year he was writing for the Leeds station including their first birthday programme The Spirit of 2LS. He continued to adapt and write works for both the Leeds and Manchester stations including Hello Yorkshire in 1926 featuring cricketer George Hirst and novelist Willie Riley which provided the germ of an idea for the Scrapbook series. Other works of note were The Trial of William Penn (8) that reconstructed the 1670 Old Bailey trail in which Penn was charged with ‘causing a tumult’; this was also broadcast by NBC in America. There was also The Fantastic Battle (9) based on a story by C.R. Burns about ‘a nation whose idealistic chief discovers a method by which war will be made an impossibility’; this was also broadcast in New Zealand, Canada and Ceylon. In 1937 he joined the staff of the BBC as a writer-producer in the Variety department working on shows such as The Story Behind the Show (‘the story of famous stage successes’), a series of ‘radiobiographies’ called Star-Gazing as well as the Scrapbooks.    

Baily left the BBC in 1946 to become a freelance writer for radio and television and also penning radio columns for the Evening News in London, Yorkshire Evening News and Lancashire Evening Post. As well as radio plays and features in 1947 he wrote and researched a six-part profile of Gilbert and Sullivan (10) and in 1950-51 edited and introduced Dear Sir... a ‘correspondence column of the air.’ This was followed by Leslie Baily’s Log Book (Light Programme 1953-4) billed as ‘a journey through Britain with a recording machine’. In one programme, for instance, he interviewed a sewerman in a Manchester sewer, a diver on the bed of the Clyde and met exiles from Lancashire on a Cornish flower farm. Baily made brief forays into television such as a weekly inert of scrapbooks on South Coast holiday resorts for Southern TV’s Day by Day programme (1962). 

During the 1950s he lived in Sibford where he was active on the Village Hall Committee and his wife Margaret in the local WI. In 1960 they moved to Saffron Walden but by the Spring of 1975 they were back in Yorkshire, at Shipton-by-Beningbrough, to live with family members. He died just under a year later, in February 1976. The obituary in The Times described him as ‘a pioneer of British radio broadcasting’ who will be ‘remembered with affection by more than one generation of listeners for the BBC Scrapbooks’.   

The idea of annual scrapbooks did not disappear completely from the airwaves. There was, for instance, the Radio 2 series A Year to Remember in which Cliff Michelmore ‘opens his scrapbook to capture the songs that made a particular year special’. Radio 1 had 25 Years of Rock (later 30 Years of Rock) and reworked as Radio 2’s Sounds of the 20^th Century ‘an audio journey through five decades of triumph, tragedy and trivia’. And, with a title refering directly back to the Scrapbook programmes, Chris Kelly played ‘soundtrack memories of a year in film’ in Radio 2’s Cinema Scrapbook. (11)

There was also another Scrapbook-related series, and I have some audio for this, and that was the 13-part series Time to Remember. Written and presented by Leslie Baily and produced by Scrapbook producer at the time, Vernon Harris, it took a more thematic approach rather than concentrating on a particular year, though it inevitably plundered the archive recordings from the Scrapbooks. Made for the BBC’s Transcription Service (so primarily aimed at overseas radio) it was also broadcast on the Home Service in 1962. Time to Remember was billed as follows: ‘ Leslie Baily, journalist and broadcaster, looks back on some of the events of our lives and introduces the recorded voices of famous personalities, past and present’.        

In the fourth edition titles Strange things are coming the theme is one of technological developments, especially radio. The story starts in 1896 with Guglielmo Marconi and moves to 1910 and the role of wireless in the arrest of Dr Crippen complete with recollections from Captain of the SS Montrose, Henry Kendall. Moving on to 1913 the importance of wireless signals in saving passengers and crew of the SS Volturno. Marconi engineers W.T. Ditcham and W.J. Pickett recall their experiments in trans-Atlantic transmissions from Ballybunion to Nova Scotia in 1919. Next we hear the voice of Robert Watson-Watt and his 1935 experiments that led to the invention of radar. The programme concludes with Bernard Lovell and the work at Jodrell Bank.

This edition of Time to Remember was broadcast on the Home Service on 25 July 1962, though it’s likely that the recording was made from a broadcast on another station as the continuity announcer says that another edition follows tomorrow at 5 pm, which doesn’t match the Home Service schedules of the time.  The recording was kindly donated to me by Duncan Lockhart.

(1) Quoted in The Golden Age of Wireless by Asa Briggs

(2) Report in the Hull Daily Mail 8 November 1923 p.8

(3) Review in the Yorkshire Post 12 November 1923 p.8

(4) The Scrapbook for 1940 is on Mixcloud – uploaded by Fred Bunzi – as is 1938 which comes from an off-air recording of the repeat on 10 July 1964

(5) The first programme retained in full is Scrapbook for 1901 (Regional Programme 1936) which includes author John Foster-Fraser who was an eye-witness to Queen Victoria’s funeral. The earliest surviving clips are of Scrapbook for 1921 (National Programme 1935) with actor Davy Burnaby on the Co-Optimists concert party, Marconi engineer Noel Ashbridge on early broadcasting and Harry Bateman talking about the R.38 airship disaster. Only clips remain of the wartime Everybody’s Scrapbook series.  

(6) For more on this seek out Paul Kerensa’s British Broadcasting Century podcast episode 85. Baily mentions this in his 1964 appearance on Desert Island Discs, available on BBC Sounds

(7) Surprisingly, despite scouring the pages of the BBC Programme Index it’s difficult to say precisely how many programmes were made. In 1959 when Scrapbook for 1936 was broadcast Baily wrote in the Radio Times that “there have been well over a hundred Scrapbooks” and that it was the 38^th year to have been covered. Yet a year later when Scrapbook for 1910 was transmitted he wrote that it was “our 70^th new production since the series began in 1933”. 

(8) First broadcast by the BBC on 7 May 1935 the cast included David Tennant, no, not that one. This David Tennant had been a 2LO announcer at Savoy Hill until 1929 when he married actress Hermione Baddeley. He was the son of Lord Glenconner and one of the original members of the Bohemian ‘Bright Young Things’. At the BBC’s HQ in Savoy Hill he was nicknamed the ‘£90,000 announcer’.  

(9) First broadcast on the Regional Programme on 11 September 1933 and repeated the following day on the National Programme. It was presented by Francis Worsley who would go on to produce ITMA as well as the wartime Scrapbooks and Everybody’s Scrapbook. The Fantastic Battle was revived in July 1934, this time produced by head of drama Val Gielgud. The story had originally appeared in the Radio Times for 3 August 1928.  

(10) This was remade in 1949 and again in 1955 and reworked as a 6-part series in 1965. In 1952 Baily’s The Gilbert and Sullivan Book was published by Cassell which formed the basis of the screen play he co-wrote with Sidney Gilliat for the 1953 film The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan starring Robert Morley and Maurice Evans.

(11) A Year to Remember ran on BBC Radio 2 for five series 1996-2001 with some editions presented by Cliff Morgan. 25 Years of Rock first aired on BBC Radio 1 in and five years later was extended as 30 Years of Rock. Those editions were then used as the basis for Sounds of the 20^th Century broadcast on Radio 2 in 2011-12. Cinema Scrapbook with Chris Kelly ran for six series between 1983 and 1988. There was also an earlier 1957 Light Programme music series titled  A Year to Remember with ‘melodious memories’ of a particular year’ scripted by Roy Plomley.

Time to Remember episode guide

1: The Changing World

2: Glamorous Nights

3 The Airship Men

4 Strange things are coming

5 The End of the War 1918-1945

6 The Edwardian Musical Stage

7 Science unlocks the secrets

8 History is People

9 Because It’s There

10 The Musical Stage Between the Wars

11 Adventures if Flight

12 Votes for Women

13 The War to End Wars

Scrapbook episode guide

RP=Regional Programme NP=National Programme FP=Forces Programme HS=Home Service R4=Radio 4

Most of the pre-war editions were first broadcast on either the National or Regional Programme and then repeated the same week on the other service. All are titled Scrapbook for ... whichever year unless otherwise indicated

1 RP (North) 8 November 1932

2 RP (North) 7 January 1933

3 RP (North) 3 February 1933

4 RP (North) 6 March 1933

1913 NP 11 December 1933

1909 RP 19 February 1934

1914 NP 7 May 1934

1910 RP 24 September 1934

1918 RP 9 November 1934

1921 NP 12 February 1935

1905 NP 5 June 1935

1911 NP 21 November 1935

1914 NP 23 March 1936

1924 RP 27 May 1936

1901 RP 24 September 1936

1908 RP 10 November 1936

1922 RP 21 January 1937

1912 NP 9 March 1937

1902 NP 7 May 1937

1907 RP 25 October 1937

1913 NP 17 December 1937 ‘reissued with new episodes and new personalities’

1900 Victorian 24 February 1938

1928 NP 26 April 1938

1914 4 August 1938 ‘a revival of the original production in May 1934’

1923 NP 11 October 1938

1903 NP 6 December 1938

1909 NP 7 February 1939 ‘revised version with new features and songs’

1929 NP 2 May 1939

1906 HS 29 October 1939

1929 HS 12 November 1939

1910 HS 3 December 1939

For Auld Lang Syne 1900-1940 Forty years of memories and melodies 31 December 1939

1930 HS 11 February 1940

1923 HS 31 March 1940

1903 HS 28 April 1940

Songs from the Scrapbooks FP 23 May 1943

1929 HS 23 December 1945

1919 HS 3 February 1946

1910 HS 3 March 1946

1937 HS 31 March 1946

1901 HS 5 May 1946 ‘revised edition’

1906 HS 27 October 1946

1925 HS 24 November 1946

Victorian Scrapbook HS 22 December 1946

1912 HS 21 December 1947

1927 HS 18 January 1948

1933 HS 15 February 1948

1939 HS 16 October 1949

1899 HS 25 December 1949

1929 HS 15 March 1950

1904 HS 11 June 1950

1902 HS 21 December 1952

1935 HS 18 January 1953

1937 HS 8 March 1953

1903 HS 22 November 1953

1914 HS 28 December 1954

1924 HS 23 February 1955

1930 HS 20 March 1955

1905 HS 1 November 1955

1945 HS 29 December 1955

1920 HS 31 January 1956

1934 HS 27 June 1956

1922 HS 31 October 1956

1896 Victorian HS 26 December 1956

1939 HS 30 January 1957

1947 HS 17 March 1957

1911 HS 21 April 1957

1928 HS 2 June 1957

1951 HS 10 October 1957

The Story of Scrapbook HS 19 November 1957

1908 HS 1 January 1958

1951 HS 8 March 1958

1918 HS 8 November 1958

1936 HS 25 February 1959

1919 30 September 1959

1949 25 November 1959

The BBC’s Christmas Scrapbook HS 24 December 1959

1932 HS 24 January 1960

1946 HS 20 March 1960

1910 HS 15 May 1960

1940 HS 5 October 1960

1931 HS 15 January 1961

1926 HS 7 March 1961

1921 HS 2 October 1961

1938 HS 7 September 1962

1922 HS 14 November 1962 40^th anniversary of the BBC

1902 HS 23 January 1963

1953 HS 26 June 1963

1907 An Edwardian Scrapbook HS 15 October 1964

1914 HS 11 November 1964

1952 HS 19 April 1967

1917 R4 7 December 1967

1930 R4 6 August 1968

1918 Armistice Scrapbook R4 10 November 1968

1948 R4 9 April 1969

1911 R4 25 June 1969

1923 R4 13 November 1969

1950 R4 5 March 1970

1945 R4 7 May 1970

1933 R4 25 August 1970

1900 R4 1 December 1970

1948 R4 23 April 1971

1926 R4 12 October 1971

1935 R4 13 March 1973

1941 R4 4 September 1973

1963 R4 5 March 1974

1943 R4 14 May 1974

 

Everybody’s Scrapbook episode guide

The narrator was Patric Curwen and producer Francis Worsley. All broadcast on the Home Service except some series 4 episodes that aired on the Forces Programme.

Series 1: Weekly then fortnightly with 12 episodes 25 July – 13 December 1940

Series 2: Monthly with 6 episodes 23 March – 10 August 1941

Series 3: Monthly with 7 episodes 28 December 1941 – 7 June 1942

Series 4: Mostly fortnightly with 11 episodes 27 September 1942 – 31 March 1943