How often, when listening to announcers or weather forecasters or politicians on the radio, do I think, ‘That’s an ugly voice’! This seldom applies to speakers with educated regional accents, such as Scottish, Irish or Yorkshire, but all too often to those from London or the Midlands where good standard English is becoming a rarity. This is not a matter of class; ‘Sloane’ voices are as unappealing as ‘Estuary’ ones; indeed the two sometimes hideously cross-fertilise. Good speech is a matter of clarity and the unselfconscious enjoyment of the spoken language.
It was an unexpected and nostalgic pleasure to listen to old recordings of or about the Bloomsbury Group. These have been enterprisingly collected on two CDs and drawn mostly from the BBC Sound Archive or the Charleston Trust. Knowing about Bloomsbury as I do, my grandfather being Desmond MacCarthy, and my parents being friends of Virginia Woolf among others, I had expected to hear high and precious didactic voices. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to hear so many unaffected and vocally mellow speakers, cultivated but not artificially so.
The Bloomsbury voice — as amusingly imitated by my mother — was in fact derived from Lytton Strachey’s voice; a high-pitched, emphatic squeak. Perhaps unsurprisingly Strachey was never recorded; his voice would hardly have been wireless-friendly. But others, like Frances Partridge, caught some of his speech mannerisms. In Frances’ own recorded interview she gives an illustration of Bloomsbury emphases: ‘I don’t believe a single word you say!’ And Bertrand Russell gives a hilarious example of the Strachey sound. Asked what literature should aim at, Strachey squeaked ‘Passion!’
The most agreeable voices are the voices of the older men, those who were undergraduates in Victorian times. Leonard Woolf, Desmond MacCarthy and E.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in