‘Is it necessary to have the window open when listening to the new device?’ asked Edith Davidson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1923, referring to the latest fashionable contraption, the wireless. We might laugh – but it does take time for the older generation to catch up with new technology. To this day I instinctively roll down my car window (unnecessarily, I’m pretty sure) to point my phone towards the sensor that will grant me access to my local club.
In her joyous, richly illustrated book about the early years of radio from the listeners’ point of view, the BBC radio producer Beaty Rubens takes us inside the British home. The period covers wireless’s inception in 1896, with the exciting Electrophone (its advertisement showed ‘Pulpit – politics – drama – general news – opera’ all going into a Victorian housewife’s ear via headphones), to the mass audiences of 1939. By that time, loudspeakers had replaced headphones and listener numbers had grown from less than 150,000 in 1922 to 34 million.
For anyone curious about how British families lived in the first half of the 20th century, the book is full of gems. There’s a glorious photograph of a cantankerous old man, born in about 1850, with headphones clamped round his craggy head as he listens to bulletins about George V’s approaching death in 1936. The inherent comedy of the British being dragged into their own century is a rich vein.
The enchantment on the faces of a gaggle of girls listening to The Children’s Hour in 1923 is an antidote to the frowning Victorian. Radio was glamorous and exciting.
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