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
70th 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 20th 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 38th year to have been covered. Yet a year later
when Scrapbook for 1910 was transmitted he wrote that it was “our 70th
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 20th 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 40th
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
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