The minute I heard about this book I knew I had to read it, and I am very grateful to Bloomsbury for sending along a copy of Last Train to Hilversum - A journey in search of the magic of radio by Charlie Connelly pronto to assuage the need.
It was the word 'Hilversum' that did it, twanging a chord that echoed back into the deepest early memories of my childhood. We were definitely a radio family, the image of the enormous brown box so ingrained in my mind that I had no trouble locating it online.
Some of my clearest childhood memories are of that radio, it's tactile beige-gold fabric and the dials with the red back-lit line crossing the mysterious names, Luxembourg, Vienna, Prague (Prag-yew to me) and of course Hilversum. My mum and I would sing along to the Light Programme, Catch a Falling Star and Que Sera while she did the chores and I probably played with my Fuzzy Felt or something. My mum, I now realise, had grown up with the radio too. I still have her Ovaltiney's bookmark found in the Knitting Nancy box of all things...
Not mentioned in the book so I'll add a note here. The Ovaltineys broadcast on a Sunday from 5.30pm to 6pm on Radio Luxembourg in 1935 and spawning a club which had five million members by 1939, one of which was my mum.
I was deeply envious (I now realise) of my comic-swapping friend Ann (me Judy, she Bunty) because Ann and her sister Christine shared a bedroom and had a radio like ours between their beds. Imagine the joy of lying in bed and drifting off to sleep with a radio on. We didn't stretch to bedroom radios in our house, it was a luxury I didn't have until my thirteenth birthday when my brother bought me a transistor, and that was me sorted and forever spending my pocket money on new batteries.
One of the earliest surprises on reading Charlie Connelly's book was the fact that despite changing habits in every walk of life, plus the allure of social media, listening to the radio remains as popular as ever: 90% of the adult population listen to the radio at some time every week. The history of the early development of radio broadcasting was hazy to me, as were the roles of several women who forged a path as announcers for the BBC at its inception in the 1920s. It was a generally held belief that women didn't posses the gravitas with which to be radio announcers, but Sheila Borret was allowed to have a go and quickly dispelled that myth. Surprising then that the majority of complaints came from women, and though Sheila's career with the BBC was curtailed in the face of that opposition she was an indomitable character who forged a career in entertainment for many years afterwards.
But this book is full of lovely surprises, too many to mention but here's a few...
I still haven't read Attention all Shipping, Charlie Connelly's trip around the shipping forecast locations but to hear the names is always enough...Fair Isle, Rockall, Malin,, Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire. Broadcast daily at 00.48 and 05.20 on Radio 4 Long Wave and FM an again at 12.01 and 17.54 on Long Wave only.
And then I am reminded of Carol Ann Duffy's poem Prayer...
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
The reading of the football results brought back particular memories. Now read by Charlotte Green, for many years James Alexander Gordon was the 'voice' on a Saturday afternoon and I'll bet we weren't the only ones to play Win/Lose/Draw which involved declaring the result from the clearly defined intonation and voice inflection during the briefest of pauses before the actual score was announced. And of course who ever forgets the days when we were blessed with a classic. Forfar 5 ...East Fife 4
I knew nothing of the radio SOS messages either....
'Would Miss Joyce Wilsher, currently on holiday in Carlisle, please go to 2 Wicklow Street, Old Basford, Nottingham, where her fiance Raymond Holmes is dangerously ill (15 November 1952)
Broadcast regularly until they 'slipped gradually away into radio history' Charlie Connolly explores the people and the stories behind some of the messages often with quite unexpected results..
I mean I was definitely intrigued to discover more about this ...
'Will anyone in London or the south Midland area who on Saturday 19th December supplied a man with sandwiches containing sausage meat...communicate immediately with the chief constable of Oxford...the man was probably riding a bicycle. (20 December 1931)
I wonder if any of you have ever sent a request into a radio station...
My mum's sister and her son both had a 'thing' about the singer Malcolm Roberts and would be forever sending in requests for each other to the Jimmy Young programme.
'Oh not again!' my mum would exclaim, faintly embarrassed at their adulation.
Mind you I can't talk. I once emailed Simon Bates on Classic FM because, as he was playing 'Venus' from Holst's Planets, I watched a barn owl swoop and circle and rise and fall, cresting and diving in exact time to the music. He then read it out and I cringed ever so slightly.
So it's alright, you can own up here.
Bookhound and I have had a lovely nostalge (my word) about Last Train to Hilversum, and spent a happy ten minutes remembering and singing our favourite songs from Children's Favourites on a Saturday morning with Uncle Mac. Uncle Mac heralded the freedoms of Saturday over breakfast, and before I went out to 'play' with instructions to be back when the Mitcham Town Hall clock said 1pm. We are embarrassingly word perfect on Tubby the Tuba, Sparky's Magic Piano, Nelly the Elephant, Little White Bull and The Ugly Duckling.
And in the same way Sing Something Simple on a Sunday evening meant the weekend was over and it was back to school. I was thrilled to read that Corrie Corfield also recorded the Top 40 afterwards, trying not to include the voice-overs. Everyone in our house had to be silent too.
And there you have it. So much more to this treasure of a book than I have had space to include so don't miss it if you're in the mood for an escape and some magic, and please do share your radio memories in comments on this post.
Meanwhile I don't know about you but maybe a little bit of oompah-pah wouldn't go amiss this week either, and then scroll down for gifts
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