Listen in: How Radio Changed the Home—Beaty Rubens (Oxford, U.K.: Bodleian Library Publishers, 2025, 259 pp.)
Reviewed by A. David Wunsch
Beaty Rubens, a retired producer of programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio, has written a lively description of how the BBC affected home life in Great Britain, starting as a private British company begun by the Marconi Corporation and an American Company, Western Electric, in 1920, and continuing into the early days of World War 2.
As Rubens points out, the concept of broadcasting had its roots in a form of the telephone: a technique of narrowcasting where wealthy people could subscribe to have a second telephone line connected to their home. A telephone receiver, connected to this line, would receive music and theatrical entertainments from a central office. Because of its cost, the medium never really caught on, but it shows that the concept of sending out entertainment by electricity preceded the radio or “wireless” as the British call it. The electrophone, as it was called, had a fan-in Queen Victoria, and Marcel Proust praised it in his letters. His French version was called the Theaterphone, and he died in 1922, just before he might have heard wireless radio.
As Rubens points out, the concept of broadcasting had its roots in a form of the telephone: a technique of narrowcasting where wealthy people could subscribe to have a second telephone line connected to their home.
There were only around 2000 subscribers to the electrophone in the United Kingdom a year after the BBC was launched. In 1922, about 150,000 people in Britain could listen to the wireless. Ten years later, this figure had grown to 1 million, and in 1935, it was 28 million. In 1939, the figure had risen to 34 million out of a population of 48 million. Note, however, a point made not in the book, over a third of the population did not have radios in 1939. The author might have delved into whether it was the expense of the annual license fee or the cost of purchasing the set, or, for those without mains electricity, the bother of having batteries recharged. When the annual license fee was 10 shillings, a day laborer might make 25 shillings in a week.
The book is not strong on technical details, for example, Rubens’ description of the workings of a crystal radio maintains that it contained a coil of copper wire, which she refers to as “the cat’s whisker.” Sorry, this is wrong. The set did have a coil, but this is not the cat’s whisker, which was a separate wire. Wireless sets of the 1920s required some technical skill for their mastery, and the author rightly compares the procedure to her elderly mother struggling decades later to master email.
The first live radio broadcast by a British Monarch was on 23 April 1924, by V. King George (Queen Victoria’s grandson) when he opened the British Empire Exhibition. Although most people still did not have wireless, it is estimated that 1 million people heard him talk, thanks to the setting up of public loudspeakers connected to wireless sets in cities and towns. For most of them, it was the first time that a Monarch’s voice was heard. In the city of Brighton alone, it was estimated that 10,000 people could hear the King speak in front of one theater. By contrast, only a few hundred people heard Queen Victoria speak at the opening of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Before wireless, most British people passed through life without having heard a monarch’s voice. In contrast, most of the nation heard Edward VIII abdicate his kingship on 11 December 1936 over the wireless.
In 1936, the Listener Research Unit of the BBC commissioned two women, Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, to produce a report, published as a pamphlet, Broadcasting in Everyday Life: A Survey of the Social Effects of the Coming of Broadcasting. Their work focused on a working-class portion of the English city of Bristol, a neighborhood called Barton Hill. Rubens not only uses the report to advantage but also derives information from the notes recorded by Jennings and Gill and stored in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
During most of the period treated by Rubens, the Director General of the BBC was John Reith. I wish she had given more space to describing his philosophy of broadcasting, which he held from the time he assumed his post until he left in 1938, and which mostly coincides with the time interval covered in this book. A Scottish minister’s son, much of whose personal belief was shaped by Mathew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy.
Culture and Anarchy was a best-selling book that appeared in 1869, promoting high culture—in contrast with that of the “toiling masses.” Arnold promoted “the best that has been thought and said,” a philosophy taken up by Reith along with a strong dose of Christian values. Much of BBC Director Reith’s program material was intended for a middle or upper-class audience. One cooking show seemed to imply that the intended audience had a cook, while a popular show for children assumed that they came from homes with nursemaids and indoor bathrooms. Recall that in the mid-1920s, the majority of the population left school at age 14.
Sunday broadcasting of the BBC was timed not to interfere with parish church services. The opening program each weekday, The Daily Service, could in some way substitute for churchgoing. Rubens self-identifies as a Jew, and one wonders how her parents, whom she mentions, reacted to the Church of England service and how other minorities, including Roman Catholics and Quakers, responded to the religious diet they were being fed.
In the period Rubens studied, the BBC had a monopoly: no other service could legally broadcast from British soil. A conscious effort had been made to avoid the Wild West of American broadcasting with its hundreds of stations sustained by commercials. This did not stop the British from listening to other services from abroad, most notably Radio Luxembourg, which supplied programming much richer in popular music and comedy than the BBC.
The BBC produced a series of educational talks, and in 1926, Hilda Matheson was appointed by Reith himself to be Director of Talks. One of its goals was to enlighten the newly enfranchised female voter in the workings of Parliament. The show persists to this day with the title The Week in Westminster. Matheson and Reith were increasingly at odds, especially when the latter prevented discussion on air of two recent novels: Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses. She resigned her position in 1931.
Most married women in the United Kingdom were housewives, and these were the principal consumers of wireless in the home. This was the case in the late 1920s and 1930s and stands in contrast to the early 1920s when wireless was seen as a man’s hobby, enabled by his tinkering with or construction of wireless sets. However, the broadcast of sporting events, a largely male obsession, remained a major draw for the BBC and attracted a surprising number of women. Another appeal of wireless during the worst of the 1930s Depression Era was that one did not have to clean and dress up as was deemed necessary for outside activities like a trip to the movies. Like for today’s cell phone, educators complained then of interference in children’s education: a letter is cited in a Liverpool newspaper where a headmaster complained that use of wireless was interfering with children’s willingness to do their homework. Before the coming of wireless, the household piano was seen as an instrument for females. But boys now heard, on the wireless, piano played in different ways, quite often by men, and many turned to the instrument.
Rubens has done a fine job of tracing the content and evolution of the BBC over its first 20 years and how it was received.
Rubens is sensitive to class differences as brought forth by wireless. The headmaster of the upper-class Rugby School told The Daily Telegraph newspaper that he feared “people would listen in to what was said to millions of people, and that could not be the best thing.”
To summarize, Rubens has done a fine job of tracing the content and evolution of the BBC over its first 20 years and how it was received. It is richly illustrated with magazine images taken from the period under consideration. My favorite, a cartoon from 1923, shows an upper-class group at the dinner table. Each member is connected to a set of headphones being served by one crystal radio—no one is speaking. The image is prophetic of contemporary discussions about cell phone use while dining.
I hope this book might be followed by another: one that begins with a new broadcasting service called the Forces Program, which the BBC offered in 1940. Its stated purpose was to serve members of the Armed Forces, but its content was far from Reith’s prescription, featuring as it did comedy, popular music, and quiz and variety shows. The service was continued after the war and became as easily available as the original Home Service, and was known as the Light Program. This was followed by yet a third service, which was closer to Reith’s original vision. There are now even more services of the BBC, all of which can be heard on the World Wide Web. To hear live-streamed classical and jazz music, try https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_three. Hip-hop is also available at another BBC site.
Reviewer Information
A. David Wunsch is a professor emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854 USA. Email: david.wunsch@uml.edu.
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