Squeaks and squawks

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.