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Abstract
This article examines the content and impact of a series of BBC lecture courses broadcast in the early 1930s. The Group Listening Scheme was established in 1928: experts working in a variety of fields were invited to broadcasts a series of evening lectures. Adults across the country were encouraged to gather for the lectures and stay on afterwards to discuss them. ‘The Changing World’ consisted of half-hour talks over six evenings a week during a six-month period. The broadcasts amounted to a two-term syllabus, with 24 talks devoted to each of the six themes (the modern dilemma, industry and trade, literature and art, science, the modern state, and education and leisure). This article will sample some of these broadcasts and explore the listener response to the series in order to reach an understanding of the BBC’s achievements in adult education during the interwar period.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This Committee spent eighteen months interviewing witnesses and inviting expressions of opinion from organisations and individuals.
2 When The Listener, the BBC’s adult education magazine, was established in 1929, Lambert was the obvious candidate to become its first editor.
3 Area councils were more directly responsible for the promotion of listening groups, selection group leaders, and so on. Each area council has the services of an Education Officer.
4 Fieldhouse, History of Modern, 360.
5 “Week by Week,” 301.
6 W. E. Williams discussed the make-up of various groups in Radio’s Listening Groups, 200–1.
7 “First Aid for Discussion Groups,” 1128.
8 “The New Extension Movement,” 482.
9 Williams was a member of the WEA’s National Executive and editor of their magazines The Highway, The Travel Log and Adult Education; secretary, from 1934, of the British Institute of Adult Education; he was Editor-in-Chief of Penguin Books, and the creator of the Pelican imprint; he was also the chief advocate for providing education for servicemen and women during the Second World War, and set up the ABCA. He worked closely with the BBC as a regular broadcaster and radio reviewer for The Listener, and in 1941 he co-wrote a book, Radio’s Listening Groups, comparing the successes of the movement in Britain and America.
10 Williams, Radio’s Listening Groups, 192.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 196.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 199.
16 Ibid.
17 Listening Groups Report, Rotherham Public Library Group. Contained within folder R/14/29/6, Apr. to Nov. 1937, BBC Written Archives Centre.
18 Listening Groups Report, Northumberland Local Authority. Contained within folder R/14/29/6, Apr. to Nov. 1937, BBC Written Archives Centre. The ‘Men Talking’ format was of three or four men discussing a particular subject in a studio before the programme started; this conversation would simply continue after the microphone was turned on, and until the end of the programme slot. The idea was to create a spontaneous conversation, such as might be overheard in a pub, shop, or train.
19 Despite these aims, many gatherings were premised more on cementing good relations within communities—one report from a rural group noted that ‘It was generally agreed that the evening spent was pleasant from a social point of view as well as being informative’; another stated their group ‘provides a healthy discharge for repressed extremist emotions. There is a salutary broadening of the mind when extremist meets extremist’. Williams, Radio’s Listening Groups, 201.
20 Charles Siepmann, letter to T. S. Eliot, Nov. 17, 1931. Contained within folder ‘RCONT 1, Eliot, T. S. Talks: File 1. 1929–1937’. BBC Written Archives Centre.
21 Ibid.
22 R. A. Rendall, letter to T. S. Eliot, Mar. 10, 1932. Contained within folder ‘RCONT 1, Eliot, T. S. Talks: File 1. 1929–1937’. BBC Written Archives Centre.
23 Ibid.
24 T. S. Eliot, letter to Charles Siepmann, Nov. 16, 1931. Contained within folder ‘RCONT 1, Eliot, T. S. Talks: File 1. 1929–1937’. BBC Written Archives Centre.
25 The broadcasts were sufficiently well-regarded that by October 1931 publisher Allen & Unwin was keen to secure the rights to publish all the talks, organised into volumes to correspond to the various series. These were likely to have been ‘tidied up’ for publication, though: in a letter to Siepmann in October 1931 on the issue of publication, he insisted that ‘I should not want the publisher merely to take the text as delivered on the microphone or as published in the Listener. I mean that in any case of disagreement I might make minor concessions to the B.B.C. but am not prepared to make any concessions for a published text’. T. S. Eliot, letter to Charles Siepmann, Oct. 22, 1931. Contained within folder ‘RCONT 1, Eliot, T. S. Talks: File 1. 1929–1937’. BBC Written Archives Centre.
26 The Listener issue of 14 October 1931, for instance, printed (presumably abridged) versions of Harold Nicolson’s second lecture in his ‘The New Spirit in Literature’ series; John Dover Wilson’s lecture ‘Education Fifty Years Ago’ from the education and leisure strand; and the second lecture in Leonard Woolf’s series ‘Can Democracy Survive?’
27 Reith vehemently opposed this series, which promised to offer in-depth and largely affirmative discussion of modernist writers. Although Nicolson was eventually allowed to go ahead and broadcast, the row led to the resignation of Hilda Matheson, the BBC Talks Director.
28 I have written elsewhere about Nicolson’s detailed and successful efforts to make sense of the most difficult literature of the period, and his effective strategy of drawing connections between modernist authors and writers with whom listeners would have been more familiar. See Lawrie, “Appreciative Understanding,” 47–8.
29 Nicolson, “The Approach,” 545.
30 Nicolson, “Are Modern Writers Selfish?” 684.
31 Nicolson, “In Defence,” 780.
32 Nicolson, “Intellect and Instinct,” 824.
33 Nicolson, “Writing of Virginia Woolf,” 864.
34 Nicolson, “Significance of James Joyce,” 1062.
35 Hobson, Modern State, 40.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 43.
38 The others listed were French (6 groups), German (3), miscellaneous (20) and unknown (7). These numbers do not tally with much higher figures quoted at the start of this article; this is because those were the totals for the whole year, rather than each session.
39 “Wireless Discussion Groups,” 462.
40 “Wireless Discussion Groups,” 643.
41 Ibid.
42 “A Weighty Post-bag,” 596.
43 “Week by Week,” 949.
44 Ibid. A report following the conference noted that ‘Warm approval was expressed of the greater continuity of the broadcast lecture courses this winter: while the central theme of all, “The Changing World”, has evidently caught their imagination, and given a purpose and point to group listening and discussion’. “Week by Week,” 9.
45 “Education for Change,” 524.
46 Ibid.
47 Macmurray, “Landmark in Broadcasting,” 538.
48 Williams, Radio’s Listening Groups, 182.
49 Ibid., 183.
50 Fieldhouse, History of Modern, 360.
51 It paid an annual grant to the Group Listening Organisation the salaries of Regional Education Officers, Educational Engineers, and secretarial staff.