Hilda Matheson and the Battle of Savoy Hill

This week BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting the 5-part dramatised account of the story of pre-war BBC Talks Director Hilda Matheson and her working relationship with Director-General, John Reith, and the censorship of a talk by writer and politician Harold Nicolson in The Battle of Savoy Hill.

Matheson was effectively head-hunted by Reith in September 1926 to front the Talks Department, the first woman to be appointed to a senior role at the BBC.  During her brief 5-year tenure she effectively set the template for speech radio on authored talks (a style of broadcasts that has now all but disappeared with the exception of Radio 3’s The Essay), news and political coverage and debate and discussions on literature, history, social conditions, home economics, farming and so on. The Week in Westminster, started by Matheson in 1929 and still heard today, albeit under a much changed format on Saturday mornings, remains a testament to her pioneering work. Broadcasting, she saw as “a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth’s surface.”  

It was Matheson’s entrée into the life of London’s cultural and intellectual elite that helped secure her BBC employment; she’d first encountered Reith at an event in March 1926. During World War I she worked for the secret service – recruited at Oxford where she’d been a home student, as women weren’t yet recognised as bona fide students at that time - where she was posted to Rome. She left her role as political secretary to Nancy Astor MP to take up her job with the BBC, then based at Savoy Hill. Lady Astor would, in time, contribute to some of the early editions of The Week in Westminster. 

The nature of speech radio was still being developed under Matheson and she was keen to get the key thinkers and doers of the time to speak to the nation, to help shape the way that scripted talks were written for the medium and how they would best be delivered to sound both natural and authoritative without being stilted and lecturing. Her remit also included adult education and news, when the small news section created under Education moved to Talks in 1927. Matheson would commission Philip Macer-Wright, formerly of the Westminster Gazette, to report on how news presentation could be improved at a time when the BBC was still relying on re-writing Reuters-provided bulletins.

One aspect of Hilda’s life that the puritanical Reith would surely have objected to – although apparently it was something of an open secret at Savoy Hill - was her relationship with author Vita Sackville-West. She’d met Sackville-West in December 1928 when she came into the studios to speak with Hugh Walpole on the subject of The Modern Woman (though she had already broadcast some talks earlier in the 1928 on poetry and her travels in the Middle East). Correspondence from Hilda to Vita, of which almost 100 letters survive, also feature in The Battle of Savoy Hill.  

By 1930 Matheson’s working relationship with John Reith was already somewhat fractious particularly with regard to any subject or speaker regarded as ‘controversial’, with the DG naturally erring on the conservative side. This all came to a head in late 1931over the series The New Spirit in Literature (twelve talks broadcast on the National Programme Sept-Dec 1931) in which Vita’s husband Harold Nicholson had been invited to speak. Reith and Director of Programmes Roger Eckersley wanted no mention of D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. Nicholson threatened to pull out “pointing out the ludicrous nature of a programme on modern literature without reference to these two defining authors”.  A compromise was reached but Matheson felt severely undermined and tendered her resignation.    

What is also interesting, certainly from a current perspective, is that Matheson’s resignation was also seen as useful to Reith and the BBC over perceived left-wing bias in some of the talks’ subject matter and choice of speakers. The October 1931 General Election had led to the formation of a National Government under Ramsey MacDonald but the bulk of its support came from the Tories and there was growing criticism of the BBC in the right-wing press. Thus her leaving the Corporation helped Reith to be seen to be stamping out any perceived left-wing bias.

After leaving the BBC Hilda continued to be involved in radio. Nancy Astor tried to persuade her to become a BBC Governor but she declined. Instead she became a radio critic and columnist for The Observer and Weekend Review, wrote a book on the subject (Broadcasting , Thomas Butterworth Ltd, 1933) and at the outbreak of World War II became the Director of the JBC (Joint Broadcasting Committee) founded to “promote international understanding  by means of broadcasting”. She also worked for Baron Hailey in 1937-38 on producing The African Survey, eventually taking over the bulk of the work, for which she received an OBE. By now she was living with the poet Dorothy Wellesley – her relationship with Sackville-West had ended in 1931. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease Hilda did not survive an operation to remove part of her thyroid gland and she died in October 1940 aged just 52.

The BBC marked her passing in the annual BBC Handbook adding that “it was her zeal, and her ability to impart it to the wide circle of her acquaintance, that started broadcast talks and discussions, and began that process of bringing to the microphone the celebrity, the expert, the thinker, and the man-in- the-street which has continued since in ever-widening circles”.

Until just a few years ago Hilda Matheson’s pioneering role in radio broadcasting was largely overlooked. The 6’6” frame of John Reith tends to loom large over the pre-war BBC narrative. In 2018-2019 the BBC ran the Hilda Matheson Woman into Leadership regional development programme. Just last month even MI5 recognised her role in that organisation and with the BBC as part of their LGBT+ History Month events.

The Battle of Savoy Hill written by Jill Waters is broadcast on Monday to Friday this week on BBC Radio 4 at 12.04 and repeated at 22.45 and then available to listen again on BBC Sounds. Hilda Matheson is played by Romola Garai, Vita Sackville-West by Nancy Carroll, John Reith by Derek Riddell, Harold Nicholson and R.S. Lambert (a producer in the Adult Education section and the first editor of The Listener) by Richard Goulding and Lionel Fielden (a Talks producer) by Simon Paisley Day.  The narrator is Clare Higgins. The Battle of Savoy Hill was created by Jill Waters of The Waters Company who retain the rights for the series. 

Hilda Matheson 1888-1940

Notes:

(1) When Hilda joined the BBC as a Talks Assistant (i.e. producer) in September 1926 the Talks division was part of the Education Department under the stewardship of John Stobart but was hived off in January 1927 under Hilda’s management. Broadcast talks were an early feature of BBC schedules with the first given on 23 December 1922 and the second on 27 January 1923 on the unlikely subject of How to catch a tiger.

 (2) The changes in the structure of the Talks department and the role of Education and News are too lengthy and involved to reiterate here. For more on this early BBC history see The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless 1927-1939 by Asa Briggs and A Social History of British Broadcasting, Volume I 1922-1939 by Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff.

(3) Hilda Matheson’s successor as Director of Talks was her deputy Charles Siepmann. He was followed in 1936 by Richard Maconachie and in 1941 by George Barnes (later the first controller of the Third Programme and a couple of years later as the grandly titled Director of the Spoken Word which included the Talks division). Succeeding Barnes in 1946 was R.A. (Tony) Rendall and following his retirement on ill health grounds was Mary Somerville from 1950 to 1956. Former talks producer John Green was Controller, Talks (Sound) from 1956 to 1961 when it was merged with Current Affairs Talks under the management of J.A. Camacho. In 1972 it moved again to become part of Talks and Documentaries headed by George Fischer. Under Director-General John Birt it was finally subsumed into the mighty News and Current Affairs Directorate in 1987. The External Services also had an Overseas Talks department and a separate European Talks Department.   

(4) To read more about Hilda Matheson there are a couple of excellent books. Stoker: the Life of Hilda Matheson is a biography written by Michael Carney whilst Kate Murphy’s Behind the Wireless looks at the role of women at the BBC in the pre-war years. There’s also the fictionalised story of plucky BBC secretary turned Talks producer Maisie Musgrave as told in Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford in which Reith and Matheson are main characters.

The Countryside in March

Descriptions of one of the more capricious months for many years. The song of the mistle thrush in the shadow of the South Downs. Turning the old mire of winter into a tilth. The appearance of the early summer migrants such as the little ringed plovers. The impact of toxic residues from agricultural chemicals on bird numbers. The realities of country living on the Kent-Sussex borders. 

These were the topics on offer in this recording from the Countryside in ... series, an overlooked series that ran on BBC radio for nearly four decades. It first appeared on air on the Light Programme on 30 January 1952 as The Countryside in January, running monthly until 1972 when it switched to a more or less quarterly review.

The Radio Times described it as a “nature diary” compiled by ornithologist Eric Simms, whose idea the programme was, indeed there had been a tryout of the idea the previous May called The London Countryside. An article in the magazine explained: “News of the events of the month comes to Mr Simms through his numerous contacts with naturalists and he hopes that titbits supplied by this ‘jungle telegraph,’ together with talks by visiting experts on natural history, farming, the weather, and country lore will make the new programme a lively commentary on many aspects of rural life”.  Simms continued to contribute to the series until 1987.  

Providing the linking narration was C. Gordon Glover (pictured above) who, apart from a spell in the mid 50s when David Lloyd James presented, was associated with the programme until just before his death in early 1975.

Glover is an interesting character. Born in Edinburgh in 1908 he was a writer and novelist who during the 1930s lived for a while in Majorca with his first wife Honor Wyatt. Honor would go on to work for the BBC, writing numerous programmes for BBC schools  during the 1940s. Glover himself also worked for the Corporation as a radio producer and then a scriptwriter and presenter.  He wrote a number of radio plays from the mid-40s on, including dozens for Children’s Hour, as well as scripts for series such as Journey into Romance and All Hale with Binnie and Sonnie Hale. During the war Glover was involved in a brief relationship with the friend of his estranged wife, the novelist Barbara Pym. In 1946 he married again to yet another novelist Modwena Sedgwick.  One of the two children from his first marriage was Julian Glover, a noted stage, film and TV actor.

The Countryside in... continued after Glover’s death in 1975 with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas presenting and with regular contributions from Bob Danvers-Walker, Martin Muncaster and actress Mollie Harris, best known as Martha Woodford in The Archers. Following the death of Vaughan-Thomas in 1987 Mollie Harris was the main presenter until the series was put out to pasture with The Countryside in Spring edition on 27 April 1991.

Very few of the countryside programmes were repeated so this is a rare opportunity to hear an example of the show. It came to me via a contact in New Zealand, Duncan Lockhart. Duncan acquired a stack of tapes from a guy in Wellington who went to New Zealand in the late 50s as a wireless operator in the Merchant Navy. He took an early Akai reel to reel with him all round the world for music and information and some of the tapes had been sent to him by his family back in the UK.  

This edition, The Countryside in March, dates from Sunday 29 March 1964 when it went out on the Home Service just after the 1 pm. News. As well as Gordon Glover and Eric Simms you’ll hear contributions from Bill Douglas with a metrological report, gardener Albert Butler, ornithologist James Ferguson-Lees, Stanley Cramp, Vice President of the British Trust for Ornithology and writer Elizabeth Gray. Providing the introductory and closing announcement is Jimmy Kingsbury.  Producing this edition is Arthur Phillips who’d started the programme in 1952. He continued to oversee the series for 21 years and amongst his other credits were Holiday Hour and Motoring and the Motorist.

If you’re wondering what that opening poem is, it’s Easter by Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Gather gladness from the skies,

Take a lesson from the ground,

Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes,

And a Spring-time joy have found,

Earth throws Winter's robes away,

Decks herself for Easter Day.

The theme used for these countryside programmes was, for many years, a piece originally composed by Lambert Williamson for the 1950 Home Service series Northern Rivers. It’s played by the BBC Northern Orchestra conducted by Charles Groves. 

And finally I’m happy to report that I’ve passed a copy of this recording on to the Glover family to be enjoyed once again by Gordon's son Julian and his grandson Jamie.