‘What are all these letters?’ asked my husband, unhelpfully stirring the pile on the doormat with his foot, looking without success for any addressed to him. They were about the BBC recommendations to announcers, published in 1928, that I wrote about last week. To entertain you further, I’ve been rummaging in a successor booklet, from 1930, on the pronunciation of English place-names. By then, George Bernard Shaw had taken over from Robert Bridges as chairman of the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English (in existence from 1926 to 1940). I’m not sure how that trimmed the vessel. Daniel Jones, the phonetician who worked with him, praised Arthur Lloyd James, the professor of phonetics who compiled a ‘remarkable’ series of booklets for the committee, but I’m sorry to say that in the anxious years of war, Lloyd James ‘fell a victim to depressive insanity’, and took his life in 1941.
His tone, working under Reith in 1930, was robust and elitist.
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