BIOGRAPHY AND THE EMOTIONS AS A MISSING ‘NARRATIVE’ IN MEDIA HISTORY

Abstract

Drawing on the unpublished private papers and fictional writing of the pioneering BBC producer Lance Sieveking (1896–1972), this article argues that a sustained focus on the biographical background of media professionals can broaden the scope of broadcasting history while offering a necessary narrative coherence. In the case of Sieveking, the article provides new detail on his family background, his wartime experience, and the part he played in the broader cultural networks of interwar Britain, in order to argue that many of the programmes he and his contemporaries made in the 1920s and 1930s should be understood as highly personal responses to the artistic and political world trends of the period. Further, in arguing for the merits of biography, the article draws on recent scholarship in ‘the history of emotions’ to suggest that a focus on the private life histories of media professionals can also advance our understanding of bodies such as the BBC as complex ‘emotional communities’ rather than as ‘total’ institutions.

Keywords:

• BBC
• 1920s
• 1930s
• radio
• Lance Sieveking
• emotions
• biography
• war
• modernism

Notes

1. This research has been supported by the award of a Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge and a Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington.

2. Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington: Sieveking MSS (hereafter ‘LLS’): Correspondence, Carpendale to Sieveking, 30 March 1926; Private Collection of Paul Sieveking: ‘Autobiographical Sketches of Lance Sieveking’, unpublished typescript, unnumbered pages (hereafter ‘Sieveking: Sketches’). All material is quoted by permission of Paul Sieveking.

3. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered page. See also Haynes, 25–48.

4. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered page. See also Scannell, ‘Stuff’.

5. Radio Times, 27 August 1926; Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered page.

6. LLS: Scripts: The Kaleidoscope, 4 September 1928.

7. Daily Telegraph, 5 September 1928.

8. Evening News, 5 September 1928.

9. Radio Times, 14 February 1930.

10. LLS: Correspondence: Gielgud to Sieveking, 12 July 1932.

11. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered pages.

12. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered pages; BBC Written Archives Centre (hereafter ‘BBC WAC’), File T5/534: Plays/A Tomb with a View (1951–1952), Gielgud to Barry, 16 November 1951.

13. Yorkshire Evening Press and Sheffield Telegraph, and News of the World, quoted in Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered pages.

14. BBC WAC: T5/534, Gielgud to Barry, 16 November 1951.

15. See note 14.

16. BBC WAC: R. Cont. 1/File 1: Lance Sieveking, 1946–1962, Note, 3 March 1958.

17. LLS: Correspondence: 18 September 1913.

18. LLS: Correspondence: 29 October 1913.

19. LLS: Correspondence: 4 October 1913.

20. Sieveking, ‘Psychology’; LLS: Correspondence: 6 October 1915, 21 November 1915, 11 April 1916, 15 June 1915, 16 May 1916.

21. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered page.

22. LLS: Correspondence, 18 November 1927.

23. LLS: Correspondence, 22 April 1918.

24. LLS: Correspondence, 1 January 1924.

25. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered pages.

26. See note 25.

27. LLS: Correspondence, 6 July 1922.

28. LLS: Correspondence. 25 September 1930.

29. LLS: Correspondence, 2 February 1933.

30. ‘Post-Scriptum’, in Sieveking Cud 47–48.

31. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered page.

32. Several authors mention the absence of a script for The Kaleidoscope: see LeMahieu 194; Scannell ‘Stuff’ 6; Cohen, 595. In fact, Sieveking's own working copy of the script does survive—see note 6 above.

33. LLS: Scripts: The Kaleidoscope, 4 September 1928.

34. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered page.

35. BBC WAC: Special Collections, S236/1–19.

36. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered pages. See also Sieveking, Stuff, 50, 18–19.

37. Sieveking: Sketches, unnumbered pages.