Chimes at Midnight

“By that extraordinary economy of association which only sound produces the boom of Big Ben strikes right into the heart of the exiled Englishman. “ So said a pre-war BBC Empire Service pamphlet explaining why its broadcasts were so evocative for many of its listeners, even those who had never set foot in Britain. Indeed, it was noted that for many years the sounds of Big Ben, evoking both the City of London and parliamentary democracy, as well as marking the passing of British time, was rated top amongst listener preferences for many years. (1)  

The chimes of Big Ben have been heard over the airwaves exactly 100 years ago when they were first broadcast to welcome in 1924.A century later folk will turn on their radios or switch on the telly for the midnight ‘bongs’ no doubt followed by a quick and not entirely tuneful drunken rendition of Auld Lang Syne.

Since that first broadcast the chimes of Big Ben have become part of the radio broadcasting furniture whether marking state or royal events, introducing the news, prefacing the silence on Remembrance Day or ushering in the New Year.

Back in 1923 it fell to BBC engineer A.G. Dryland to arrange for the first broadcast transmitted live from a rooftop opposite the Houses of Parliament, recording the chimes amongst the general noise of Westminster.

Edward Pawley’s definitive guide to BBC engineering in its first fifty years wrote:  

An important first was the inauguration of the long series of broadcasts by Big Ben. This took place at midnight on New Year’s Eve at the end of 1923 and was treated as an OB. It was followed by regular broadcasts twice a day from 9 March 1924. The microphone and amplifier were at first installed on the roof of Bridge Chambers, Bridge Steer, Westminster. The microphone (a Round Sykes) was enclosed in a biscuit tin filled with cotton wool, but was later transferred (still wrapped in cotton wool) to a football bladder sealed with a rubber solution to guard against the inclemency of the weather and suspended about 15 feet above the bells. 

By 1926 a permanent Marconi-Reisz microphone was installed in the Clock Tower and by the mid-50s they were using STC4035 mics.

Dryland spoke about that first broadcast in the 1936 programme Scrapbook for 1924. That and other audio clips featuring or about Big Ben are included in this short montage.

By the time the Empire Service launched in December 1932 the chimes were heard around the world for the first time and on Christmas Day that year they rang out at 3 pm just before the first live speech from King George V.  

When the first non-English language service, the Arabic service, started on 3 January 1938 the first news bulletin was read after the Big Ben chimes. The worldwide broadcasts of Big Ben became an important feature of the Empire Service (later the General Overseas Service, now the World Service). In the 1946 BBC Year Book a Colonial Governor wrote:

'It was in helping us to overcome this sense of isolation that the broadcasts from home became so valued. Perhaps the biggest thrill we got every day was hearing Big Ben strike. It carried us right back home, right into the centre of things; and yet at the same time brought an almost unbearable nostalgia’

The quarter hour and half hour chimes continued to be heard during the day on the World Service as part of the general continuity as different transmitters switched in and out of the English Service until about 20 years ago. (I’m guessing here, if you know when please contact me).  The BBC's Japanese Service also used to start its broadcasts with the chimes of Big Ben.

For many years the complete bongs preceded the Home Service 9pm news, in what was known as the ‘Big Ben Minute’. But when the main evening news at was moved to 10pm in September 1960 only the first stroke of the hour was heard before being faded out. This practice continues for Radio 4’s 6pm news and midnight news (they were re-introduced instead of the pips around June 1981).  The Big Ben chimes at 10 pm were dropped in April 1970, apart from weekends, when The World Tonight was launched.

In the 1970s you could also hear Big Ben at the start of the days broadcasting on Radios 1 and 2 at either 5.30 or 6.00. This practice ended when Radio 2 moved to 24 hours a day in January 1979. The bells were also heard on Sunday mornings on Radio 3, who obviously liked a lie-in at the weekend, when programmes started at 8 am.   

Until a couple of months ago for just over six years (from August 2017), apart from some special events and New Year’s Eve, the broadcasting of Big Ben was from recordings whilst the Elizabeth Tower and the clock mechanism was repaired and refurbished at a cost of £80 million. The chimes were back in action over a year ago (from November 2022), indeed I heard them in January when I was in London taking the photographs for this post. But it wasn’t until Radio 4’s Six O’Clock News on 6 November this year that live broadcasts returned. The delay was partially to allow the mechanism to ‘bed in’ and also to allow for the installation of four new microphones.

Evan Davis spoke to Parliamentary Clockmaker Ian Westworth about the restoration for Radio 4’s PM programme. 

In 2013 to mark the 90^th anniversary of that first broadcast, poet Ian McMillan wrote seven poems for the BBC Radio 4 Extra series Big Ben’s Chimes. The seven programmes, each running at 3 minutes, interspersed McMillan’s words with music and archive recordings. I’ve stitched them together for this omnibus version. The programme producer is Moy McGowan.

Tonight, at midnight, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast an edition of Slow Radio devoted to The Clock. It promises an “hypnotic audio journey, as we tumble inside the delicate mechanism of the clock”.  

 

Notes:

The seven episodes of Big Ben’s Chimes are titled: Maintaining Big Ben, Big Ben Seizes Up, Big Ben as an Icon of Britain, Big Ben as Beating Heart, Big Ben - Good News, New Year in War Time and First Broadcast. 

In this post I have referred to the ‘chimes of Big Ben’ but of course strictly speaking Big Ben is the name of the large 13.7 tonne bell that provides the ‘bongs’ in the note of E. There are the quarter bells varying in weight from 1.1 to 4 tonnes that provide G sharp, F sharp, E and B notes which are set are set to the following lines: “All through this hour, Lord be my Guide. And by thy power, no foot shall slide”

UK Parliamentary blog on Broadcasting Big Ben

BBC Archive page on Big Ben

Broadcasting the Barricades

A little over eighty five years ago, on 30 October 1938, America was in a state of panic. Folk were taking to the highways and driving off into the hills, there were frantic calls to the police and to friends and family, people were taking shelter in their nearest church or arming themselves with shotguns. The cause, a radio broadcast with the breaking news of a Martian invasion, or at least some kind of invasion. Maybe it was the Germans?

Of course we know that most of this did not actually happen. The panic following the broadcast of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre Production of The War of the Worlds was mainly stoked by the press, unimpressed and unamused by the hype generated by the radio opposition.     

War of the Worlds succeeded due its blurring of fact and fiction and by deploying the grammar of radio broadcasting of the time, ‘we interrupt this program’, portentous bulletins, on the spot reports and so on.

But what US radio listeners wouldn’t have known at the time was that such a spoof broadcast was not a new idea. It had been heard on the BBC some twelve years earlier in a ‘talk’ given by a Catholic priest, the Revered Ronald Knox (pictured above). This talk, titled Broadcasting the Barricades, caused a great deal of public consternation and stirred up a press frenzy though it didn’t quite lead to “panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham.”

There’s no suggestion that Knox’s talk directly inspired Welles and co. but in subsequent interviews he did acknowledge that he knew of its reputation. The BBC broadcast had been reported in the US newspapers at the time with one writing that “we are safe from such jesting”.   

Knox was something of a polymath; his sermons had been published, he wrote about Catholic doctrine, published verse and satirical volumes as well as both writing detective fiction – his first The Viaduct Murder came out in 1925 – and writing about detective fiction – he was a member of the Detection Club and devised his ‘Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction’.    

The idea for what became Broadcasting the Barricades apparently came to Knox during the last election (presumably the General Election of October 1924) as he tried to imagine the news bulletins that might be broadcast during a revolution. This was at a time when the threat of a ‘red revolution’ would have seemed real to many listeners. The Communist Party of Great Britain had not long been formed and with labour troubles already rumbling and the ill-advised 1925 Gold Standard Act the political situation seemed febrile.   

The broadcast, running for 17 minutes in total, was made live at 7.40 pm on Saturday 16 January 1926 from the George Street studios of the BBC’s Edinburgh relay station (call sign 2EH). 2EH broadcast locally produced programmes as well as carrying SBs (simultaneous broadcasts) from London. Knox’s talk was unusual in that it was an SB from Edinburgh heard on a number of other stations, most significantly 2LO in London. It wasn’t, though, broadcast nationwide as 2ZY Manchester, 5IT Birmingham, 2BD Aberdeen and 2LS Leeds did their own thing.  

David Pat Walker (in The BBC in Scotland) describes the programme:

The broadcast had been arranged by Edinburgh’s Station Director George L. Marshall, who had met Knox on more than one occasion and knew of his reputation as an author and humorist. Officially described as a ‘Talk’ it was in fact a lengthy spoof news bulletin, complete with effects, reporting an imaginary communist rising in London.   

At the beginning of the programme some sixth sense made George L. Marshall warn his audience that it wasn’t to be taken seriously but he under-estimated the listeners’ unshakable belief in everything they heard. As grave and utterly unexpected tidings flowed out of headphones and loudspeakers throughout Britain a state of alarm bearing on consternation swept across the country. The National Gallery was in flames. Big Ben had been demolished by trench mortars. A communist revolution was exploding in London and the mass forces of the unemployed had plundered the Savoy Hotel and set it on fire. Finally, as the programme ended, there was a report that ‘unruly members of the crowd are now approaching the British Broadcasting Company’s London station with a threatening demeanour.’

Listeners up and down the country sprang to their telephones, convinced that London had been laid waste. The Savoy Hotel was bombarded with calls from the excited relations of guests while the Irish Free State made enquiries through diplomatic channels to discover whether it was true that the House of Commons had been blown up. Later that evening the BBC issued an apology, ‘the BBC regrets that any listener should have been perturbed by this purely fantastic picture.’

Knox himself thought his broadcast so far-fetched that no one would believe it was real. Unlike War of the Worlds, Broadcasting the Barricades, was a one-man affair with only live effects punctuating the story. His characters added to the satirical nature of his theme: Sir Theophilus Gooch, a film actress Miss Joy Gush, Mr Wotherspoon the Minister of Traffic and a Mr Popplebury, the Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues.

Some passages were, however, quite dark: “the BBC regrets that one item in the news has been inaccurately given; the correction now follows. It was stated in our news bulletin that the Minister of Traffic had been hanged from a lamp post in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Subsequent and more accurate reports show that it was not a lamp post, but a tramway post that was used for the purpose.”   

Meanwhile, down in London announcer Stuart Hibberd was working that evening:

I was on duty at Savoy Hill and, as Knox was speaking from Edinburgh, I did not listen at the beginning, but soon so many phone calls from apprehensive listeners were coming through that I had to listen. Obviously the whole thing was a spoof; you only had to listen to sentences like ‘the mob are now swarming into Hyde park and throwing ginger beer bottles at the ducks on the Serpentine’ to realise this; after all, it was night, and bitterly cold, with ice and snow everywhere in the London area. But still the telephone calls came in, and we had to put out a reassuring announcement at the end. Sometime later that evening a call was put through to me from a commercial traveller, who told me that he had only just got home after a very long day. He found the wireless switched on, both his wife and his sister-in-law, who was staying with them, drunk in the sitting room, and his best bottle of brandy empty under the table. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ he inquired.

Twenty minutes after the live broadcast Knox and Marshall were having supper at the Caledonian Hotel when a call was put through from BBC managing director John Reith saying that staff at Savoy Hill had been annoyed by anxious inquiries. On Monday Reith asked for a full transcript by telegram. Marshall despatched office boy Tony Cogle to the post office to telegraph the script to London. It was, he later recalled, the most expensive wire he could remember having sent. In the meantime Knox had by now travelled over to Dublin where he was due to speak and so missed most of the fallout that hit the press on the Monday.

Despite the initial furore there was no official rebuke for Knox; he continued to broadcast through to the 1950s. Indeed at a programme review board the following month the talk had been picked out as one of the ‘outstanding items’ broadcast in January and even Reith himself was pleased with it as it showed that people were listening. The press attention, he concluded, only served to increase the number of public appreciations. Anyway not too long after Broadcasting the Barricades the BBC had far more important issues on its plate with the General Strike.    

The influence of Broadcasting the Barricades didn’t just extend to War of the Worlds. The following year, on 30 June 1927, Australian station 5CL based in Adelaide broadcast what was billed as a Special Broadcast. It too used the device of interrupting a music programme for a news announcement and then special effects to dramatise a supposed invasion. Inevitably the station, the police and the local newspapers were inundated with calls despite the frequent on-air reminders that it was ‘merely a play’,  

In June 2005 Raymond Snoddy looked at Knox’s broadcast and the fallout from it in the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Riot that Never Was. Recreating parts of the original broadcast was Bob Sinfield as Ronald Knox. It was produced by Paul Slade and Nick Baker for Testbed Productions.  

The full text of Broadcasting the Barricades can be found in Essays in Satire by Ronald Knox available on the Internet Archive

You can read more about Father Ronald Knox and the 1926 broadcast on the Planetslade website.