This New Noise (4 page)

After leaving the BBC, Matheson's next big job was running the Africa Survey for Lord Hailey – a major colonial project that studied the geography, ethnography, economics
and politics of the entire continent. Later, in November 1939, her mother remembered, ‘a mysterious man began calling her up but would give no name. Finally they met. When she came back from lunching with him, she told me laughingly that he was a man who seemingly knew everything she had done all her life.' Once again, Matheson was being recruited into secret work, this time editing books and directing broadcasts for the purposes of propaganda aimed at audiences overseas. But she was not able to finish her work there. Philip Noel-Baker – the MP, Olympic medallist, Nobel prizewinner and Megan Lloyd George's lover for twenty years – ran into Matheson one day in June 1940 as he left the Ministry of Information, and remembered realising that she seemed terribly ill; he urged her to rest, but she told him that she needed to go on working, or ‘everything may smash'. By this time her affair with Sackville-West was long over, and she had been living with Dorothy Wellesley, the poet. In October 1940 she was dead, at fifty-two, of Graves' disease – an autoimmune disorder affecting the thyroid. The Hogarth Press produced a short obituary volume, in which H. G. Wells paid tribute to a woman who was ‘courageous and indefatigable in her work for that liberal thought and free expression which is the essence of democratic freedom. She maintained a steady fight against Sir John Reith, who was inspired by a loyalty to influences above him far stronger than any sense of duty to the greater possibilities of his position.' Composer Ethel Smyth wrote of the ‘blending of her intellectual grip with what one may call the perfect manners of her soul'.

Matheson's name is largely lost now, but as a pioneering and visionary figure in the BBC over the short but formative period of 1926–31, she deserves a more generous place in history. Her insights into the nature of broadcasting – observations made when the wireless was newborn and with all its possibilities ready to unfold – still stand as fresh and optimistic and clear-sighted. She wrote to Sackville-West, ‘
The
thing broadcasting does, or can do, its chief claim to any virtue as far as the spoken word is concerned, is that it provides not a silent-printed word, a dead word if you like, but a living and very personal contact with an individual. The crucially affectionate link that grows between listeners and announcers, between listeners and regular broadcasters … is something quite peculiar to broadcasting.' She wrote in
Broadcasting
a sort of spec for a successful commissioning editor – the kind of manifesto that could still do good service for the BBC commissioners of today:

She captured something of the anxiety attached to this new form of mass communication – something that resonates with the preoccupations of our own era, as history takes further technological leaps. She saw that some would be resistant – would be asking, ‘How can we escape from this new noise that is adding to the distractions of an already complex world? Is it to be yet another byproduct of man's inventive mind which will get beyond his control before he has learnt its power?' But broadcasting, she argued – ‘a harnessing of elemental forces, a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which hitherto we have been deaf' – was a wonderful, almost miraculous phenomenon, capable of magnificent things. ‘It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth's surface,' she wrote. ‘Broadcasting as we know it, moreover, is in its infancy; it is comparable to the rudest scratchings on the cave-man's dark walls, to the guttural sounds which served the first homo sapiens for speech.' What a destiny Matheson foresaw. What a future to live up to.

In the early years of the 1930s, the sculptor Eric Gill was commissioned to carve an image of a sower for the entrance hall of Broadcasting House. ‘Broadcast’ is the old word for scattering seed: you cast it far and wide and good things grow. As a preacher stands in the pulpit and hopes that the congregation will be improved by the word of God, so John Reith the minister’s son cast the seeds of virtue into Britain. The BBC was to ‘inform, educate and entertain’: Reith carefully placed the words in that order. The Latin inscription in the hallway of Old Broadcasting House, through which workers still hurry to their offices at Radios 3 and 4, translates like this: ‘This temple of the arts and muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931, John Reith being director general. And they pray that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest, and that all things foul or hostile to peace may be banished thence, and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.’ The partial source of this ringing statement of intent was biblical: Philippians 4:8.

But what lovely things are to be scattered? From its earliest days the BBC was a culturally polyglot organisation, a
clash of aesthetic tones. Hilda Matheson veered culturally towards modernism: she broadcast James Joyce reading from work-in-progress – not at all to the taste of Reith. ‘It would be idle to pretend everybody liked them or understood [the readings],’ she acknowledged in
Broadcasting
. ‘Difficult, obscure, experimental literature … is unlikely to make a wide appeal.’ Reith himself was conservative and traditionalist, as Harold Nicolson complained to his diary. They had been discussing the series of talks on modern literature he was to give, commissioned by Matheson. ‘The man’s head is made entirely of bone … [He] tries to induce me to modify my talks in such a way as to induce the illiterate members of the population to read Milton instead of going on bicycle excursions. I tell him that as my talk series centres upon literature of the last 10 years it would be a little difficult to say anything about Milton.’

Listeners had their own ideas, and many were impatient with BBC highmindedness – whether Reithian or Mathesonian in texture. In the first issue of the
Radio Times
, 28 September 1923, a reader’s letter ran: ‘Frankly, it seems to me that the BBC are mainly catering for the “listeners” who … pretend to appreciate only and understand only highbrow music and educational and “sob” stuff. Surely, like a theatre manager, they must put up programmes which will appeal to the majority and must remember that it is the latter who provide the main bulk of their income.’ Similar debates persist today. Why does the BBC bother with niche culture, to be enjoyed only by a few, some ask. Others wonder why it promulgates mass culture, which, they argue, the market could easily provide. Arguably,
though, it is precisely the dialectical tension between these two positions, the noisy jumble of cultures within the BBC, that has been one of its strongest and most exciting characteristics.

In 1935, the pioneering documentary-maker John Grierson made a film about the corporation for the GPO Film Unit (a department of the Post Office set up to make films mostly about its own activities). It was called
BBC: The Voice of Britain
. The two musical stars of the film were Adrian Boult, the conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the toe-tappingly brilliant Henry Hall, band leader of the BBC Dance Orchestra. Between them they represented the extreme edges of rarefied and populist culture then projected by the BBC. There is a similar bifurcation in the way the film portrays drama: while the film shows the delightfully home-made sound effects being created for a broadcast of
Macbeth
, the lighter end is represented by head of variety Eric Maschwitz, seen urging a producer to make sure a music-hall act’s jokes are cleaned up (‘It won’t get by for a moment, old boy’).

Maschwitz had been one of the early BBC employees who had populated the young corporation’s headquarters in Savoy Hill – ‘at one time … a slightly risqué block of flats where I had attended my first theatrical party in 1917’. It was dingy but it was exciting, and it was full of talented, adventurous young people. Reith’s personal discomfort with Maschwitz’s brand of entertainment was evident: he would turn up to rehearsals ‘at which he loomed over the awestruck performers like an anxious pike in a tank filled with tropical fish’. Maschwitz remembered how anarchic
it was. Reith, ‘his dour handsome face scarred like that of a villain in a melodrama’, was ‘a strange shepherd for such a mixed, bohemian flock … he had under his aegis a bevy of ex-soldiers, ex-actors, ex-adventurers which … even a Dartmoor prison governor might have had difficulty in controlling’.

Under Val Gielgud, brother of John, radio drama was developing as a form. It was ‘finding wings; like the cinema before it, it was on its way to escaping from the limitations of theatre’, recalled Maschwitz. Rather wonderfully, the makers of the earliest original radio drama, Richard Hughes’s
A Comedy of Danger
(1924), were so anxious about the visual limitations of the medium that it was set in the pitch-blackness of a coal mine. (For similar reasons the earliest Italian operas tended to feature the character of Orpheus, as if to answer the question, ‘Why are the characters singing?’) Arthur Burrows, the BBC’s first director of programmes, remembered, ‘I think all who heard this first attempt at building up a really dramatic situation entirely by sound effects will admit that it was very thrilling, and opened up a wide range of possibilities.’ BBC radio is now the biggest single commissioner of plays in the world, an artery in the great body of British dramatic writing.

The previous year, in January 1923, one of the earliest outside broadcasts of opera had taken place:
The Magic Flute
, performed from Covent Garden by the National Opera Company, one of the few musical or theatrical organisations that unhesitatingly decided to cooperate with the BBC from the start. Burrows’s colleague Cecil
Lewis, a First World War fighter pilot and author of
Sagittarius Rising
, gave a vivid account of its impact. He and others had assembled in Marconi House, then the BBC headquarters, to listen: ‘Our excitement was immense. The broadcasting of opera was an assured success – that could be said after listening for a few moments. The sound of the great orchestras contrasted so forcibly with our little band of seven in the studio that it came as a revelation of what the future of broadcasting might be …’ As for the listeners: ‘Many people imagining opera to be a dull and dreary thing were converted in an evening; many others who had never heard or expected to hear opera as long as they lived had it brought to their hospital or bedside.’ In a time when we can hear any music with a mere click of a mouse, it is hard to imagine just how extraordinary this access to the sequestered sounds of Covent Garden must have been.

While Maschwitz presided over such acts as the Dancing Daughters – a troupe of teenage tap dancers, costumed skimpily in the studio ‘to get the atmosphere’ despite being invisible to the audience – another figure, whose name is now almost lost to public memory, was moulding the BBC’s multifarious cultural mix. Edward Clark, who worked at the BBC between 1924 and 1936, was the son of a Newcastle coal exporter. Obsessed with music, and from a musical family, he persuaded his father to let him study abroad, as any Briton then seriously contemplating a musical career would do. In 1907 he set forth to Paris, then Vienna and Berlin, to learn the art of conducting. According to Dr Jenny Doctor, who has studied Clark and
his contribution to the BBC, as a musician he was ‘talented – but not supertalented. He was very good at seeing opportunities, and saw that the way to make it was to get to know the most significant people in music. He was very starry-eyed when it came to the big names.’ In Paris he courted Debussy and Ravel, but the crucial meeting of his life was with Arnold Schoenberg, whom he even helped move from Vienna to Berlin when his career as a painter and composer was failing. ‘As he talked he looked through you, incinerating your doubts or hesitations, making equivocation impossible,’ Clark recalled of the composer in 1952. In his turn Schoenberg, in a diary entry of 1912, noted of Clark, ‘Remarkable; he knows no Wagner operas, nothing by Mozart, nothing by Beethoven. But he wants to be a conductor!! And he has often seen [Strauss’s]
Elektra
! … He blames it on musical conditions in England.’

Clark was interned in Germany through the First World War; afterwards, returning to Britain, he assisted Adrian Boult as conductor of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and then joined the BBC’s regional service at Newcastle as music director of its orchestra. He was noticed in London (as perhaps one would be if one conducted the orchestral world premiere of Schoenberg’s
Verkläte Nacht
) and, after the Newcastle station orchestra was disbanded, he was brought down to Savoy Hill in 1927 as a programme planner. Once there, he became a crucial carrier of the modern music of Continental Europe into British homes, and an important force in changing those ‘musical conditions in England’. Under his curatorship, music
by the great contemporary European composers was performed by the BBC: he had Anton Webern over to conduct his Five Movements for String Orchestra for broadcast; invited Igor Stravinsky to perform his own piano concerto on air, and Paul Hindemith his own viola concerto. In 1934 he broadcast a complete performance of Alban Berg’s
Wozzeck
, no easy listen. According to Doctor, the reaction of the British public at hearing this kind of music was not quite what one might expect. To many listeners, it was not just modern music that was unfamiliar, but classical music altogether. ‘Many people hadn’t even heard a symphony orchestra in 1922 – and certainly not an opera,’ said Doctor. ‘Bach cantatas were just as unfamiliar as Schoenberg.’ New music arrived on the wireless in an uproar of ‘new’ noise.

One of Clark’s most lasting contributions was his devising of the idea of the BBC Symphony Orchestra – a group of committed, salaried players, in contrast to the norm, a shifting cast of freelance players, who could perform in flexible combinations and in a variety of musical styles. Along with the other four BBC orchestras, it is still an important mainstay of British cultural life, and has been the backbone of the BBC Proms since its formation. (The Proms, founded in 1895 by Sir Henry Wood, were taken over by the BBC in 1927 after they lost financial support from the music publisher Chappell.) The BBCSO was among the earliest orchestras to hold ‘blind auditions’. As Matheson noted in
Broadcasting
, ‘All auditions for the orchestra were made in such a way that the judges could hear but not see the players, which rendered a completely
objective judgement more certain, and which, among other things, threw membership of the orchestra open equally to women and men.’ Under Boult – its versatile if not always sublimely brilliant first music director – the orchestra’s calling card was to be its performance of new music – ‘novelties’, in the parlance of the day. According to Doctor, ‘Clark sold the BBC the idea that if you wanted to put the BBCSO on a par with the musical organisations of Continental Europe, if you wanted to establish a tradition, you must establish the tradition of the new.’

Clark married a singer, Dorothy, Dolly for short. After having a son, they separated, and while Dolly was working as a secretary at the BBC she met and later married the BBC’s first chief engineer, Peter Eckersley. Clark’s second wife was the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. She remembered the occasion on which they met – this was after his departure from the BBC – at the ‘brandy stage’ of a lunch with film director Basil Wright and composer Alan Rawsthorne at the Casa Prada Italian restaurant on the Euston Road, one of Clark’s haunts. In strolled ‘an elegant, “European-looking” gentleman in a white silk open-necked shirt and short blue linen coat … in his buttonhole the dark red clove carnation he invariably sported’.

He certainly cut a striking figure around town. In 1933 a writer for the
Sunday Express
wrote of him thus: ‘Think of him as the perpetrator and prime promoter of all the Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky that you hear (or don’t hear – I’ve often wondered) and you will want to throw a brick. Meet him, and you will immediately be charmed … Talks well, knows the best and cheapest
restaurants and a good wine.’ But he was not a man suited to institutional life. He infuriated his colleagues with administrative bungles and missed deadlines; his salary had to be paid in cash because he did not ‘do’ bank accounts. According to Lutyens’s memoir, before they met he would think little of taking not one but two girlfriends on a European jaunt, expenses paid by the BBC. He also had a volcanic temper: early in their relationship, an unsuccessful struggle to open a bottle of Tio Pepe caused an outburst: a ‘sudden, almost frightening and total rage … I had never seen the like … comparable to the vent of high explosive. It was so unexpected, so unnecessary and I was so unprepared – and somehow it was no laughing matter’.

The young BBC of the 1920s could accommodate such eccentricity and waywardness, just, though Clark’s file in the BBC archives is peppered with complaints and anxieties. In 1926, while still at Newcastle, it was noted of him that ‘a rather serious defect … due to his temperament is that in times of stress his language is most unpleasant. This is the main reason why he has a man for his typist clerk.’ That same year he wrote to a colleague of money, ‘I have an absolute horror of the subject in any shape of form’, and indeed his career was peppered by a series of financial scrapes from which the BBC wearily extracted him. (One employee in the administration department noted that ‘Edward Clark is not quite normal from the financial and economic point of view’.) He was also highly disorganised and maddening to work with. One memo complained that he was ‘one of those nervy neurotic people with whom it
is very difficult to reason’. Cecil Graves, about to become assistant director of programmes (he rose to be a wartime DG) noted, ‘While I realise that Clark is in himself a likeable person, he pulls absolutely no weight here and in fact hinders and hampers other people’s work.’ His skills as a conductor were also doubted by his boss in the music department, Kenneth Wright, in an internal memo: ‘So far as his conducting is concerned, I think you saw that he did not make a marvellous job of the Stravinsky … Stravinsky was very irritated by the amount of time wasted by Clark at the rehearsals … the same applies to Bartók.’ In January 1928, there was also a touch of panic about his role in rehearsals for Schoenberg’s massive orchestral and choral work
Gurrelieder
, whose British premiere Clark had engineered. Despite his linguistic skills, he was ‘useless as an interpreter’ according to Wright and bungled the rehearsal schedule; when the women of the choir failed to turn up ‘Schoenberg apparently blasphemed’. But it is thanks to Clark that the great flowerings of modernism from Europe – what Boult’s predecessor Percy Pitt dismissively called ‘certain foreign novelties’ – were introduced to British homes for the first time. As the 1930s wore on, this disorganised, rule-breaking man could no longer fit in, and, after a series of rows, resigned on 16 March 1936. Lutyens summed up his contribution: ‘Edward was first and foremost European-minded, with an equal interest in all the arts and creative phenomena of all the countries in Europe, not just the small parish of British music … He had a mind and outlook that expanded the narrow confines of music in England at that time.’