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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
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Britainâs holiday resorts. SPB travelled to seventeen regions andspent a week exploring each. A book with the same title appeared soon after, one of more than two hundred books that he published.
His message for people to go out and explore what lay on their doorsteps, preferably on foot, held a powerful appeal to those who could not afford the cost of travelling abroad, still less a car. The public responded in huge numbers. In July 1932, he was joined by 16,000 people â including Priscilla â on the Sussex Downs to watch the sun rise over the Iron Age fort at Chanctonbury Ring. Four special trains had to be laid on for this midnight excursion.
E. M. Forster praised his broadcasts, suggesting that for his next venture he might visit âthe Unknown Tyne, Mersey and Clydeâ, and, rather than winkle out beauty spots, examine âthe quite intolerable horror of the unemployed manâs lifeâ. SPB jumped at the challenge, persuading the BBC to let him deliver a series of eleven talks on the unemployed. The series was introduced by the Prince of Wales, and proved vivid and popular, giving a human face to the misery and hopeless condition of three million men and women. A second series was commissioned in April 1934, transmitted at peak listening time and causing a nationwide furore on the eve of the final reading of the Unemployment Bill. Angry questions were asked in Parliament, with MPs citing SPBâs talks to mock the governmentâs claims that the unemployed were better off. The BBCâs prickly director-general John Reith was summoned to Downing Street and ordered by the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to desist with the programmes. Reith replied that he would order S. P. B. Mais to report on air that the half-hour silence about to follow was owing to the Governmentâs refusal to allow the unemployed to express their opinions. The programmes continued.
When SPB travelled to America the following winter, he was the first to transmit a series of live weekly programmes from the United States, or indeed from anywhere outside Britain. He invited Priscilla to come as his secretary, but to Priscillaâs everlasting bitterness Doris refused to allow this. The ground-breaking talks, aired simultaneously on NBC, were introduced by the American ambassador, with this impressive claim: âIt is the first time in the history of broadcasting that such an effort has been made, in which a national of one country will visit another country, study its people, and try to interpretthem to his own nationals.â His discursive method worked, and trail-blazed the way for, thirteen years later, Alistair Cookeâs Letter from Americ a. Billed as âa modern Columbusâ, SPB toured fourteen states in three months, and President Roosevelt granted him an audience. âI had been called the Ambassador of the English Countryside,â SPB wrote in the inevitable companion volume. âI was now to be regarded as the Ambassador of the English People.â I have not been able to listen to the recordings, but the talks were incorporated into his book A Modern Columbus , and reading them I understand his popularity. Unsnobbish, he approached everything with excited curiosity.
SPBâs correspondence fills two trolleys at the BBCâs sound archives in Caversham. His producers, who included George Orwell and Graham Greeneâs cousin Felix, experienced the same problems with his handwriting as did Priscilla, and routinely had it typed out. âDear Petre, Thank you for your brief illegible letter,â is a typical complaint.
So atrocious was his handwriting that when invited to lecture at Bomber Command he sent back a letter asking if he could bring his wife. A telegram came by return: DELIGHTED BRING BITCH BUT STATE SIZE BECAUSE OF RATIONING . He answered that his wife was not a bitch, weighed 9 stone 6 pounds and stood 5 foot 7½ inches. The reply this time: SOME MISTAKE SURELY
His message for people to go out and explore what lay on their doorsteps, preferably on foot, held a powerful appeal to those who could not afford the cost of travelling abroad, still less a car. The public responded in huge numbers. In July 1932, he was joined by 16,000 people â including Priscilla â on the Sussex Downs to watch the sun rise over the Iron Age fort at Chanctonbury Ring. Four special trains had to be laid on for this midnight excursion.
E. M. Forster praised his broadcasts, suggesting that for his next venture he might visit âthe Unknown Tyne, Mersey and Clydeâ, and, rather than winkle out beauty spots, examine âthe quite intolerable horror of the unemployed manâs lifeâ. SPB jumped at the challenge, persuading the BBC to let him deliver a series of eleven talks on the unemployed. The series was introduced by the Prince of Wales, and proved vivid and popular, giving a human face to the misery and hopeless condition of three million men and women. A second series was commissioned in April 1934, transmitted at peak listening time and causing a nationwide furore on the eve of the final reading of the Unemployment Bill. Angry questions were asked in Parliament, with MPs citing SPBâs talks to mock the governmentâs claims that the unemployed were better off. The BBCâs prickly director-general John Reith was summoned to Downing Street and ordered by the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to desist with the programmes. Reith replied that he would order S. P. B. Mais to report on air that the half-hour silence about to follow was owing to the Governmentâs refusal to allow the unemployed to express their opinions. The programmes continued.
When SPB travelled to America the following winter, he was the first to transmit a series of live weekly programmes from the United States, or indeed from anywhere outside Britain. He invited Priscilla to come as his secretary, but to Priscillaâs everlasting bitterness Doris refused to allow this. The ground-breaking talks, aired simultaneously on NBC, were introduced by the American ambassador, with this impressive claim: âIt is the first time in the history of broadcasting that such an effort has been made, in which a national of one country will visit another country, study its people, and try to interpretthem to his own nationals.â His discursive method worked, and trail-blazed the way for, thirteen years later, Alistair Cookeâs Letter from Americ a. Billed as âa modern Columbusâ, SPB toured fourteen states in three months, and President Roosevelt granted him an audience. âI had been called the Ambassador of the English Countryside,â SPB wrote in the inevitable companion volume. âI was now to be regarded as the Ambassador of the English People.â I have not been able to listen to the recordings, but the talks were incorporated into his book A Modern Columbus , and reading them I understand his popularity. Unsnobbish, he approached everything with excited curiosity.
SPBâs correspondence fills two trolleys at the BBCâs sound archives in Caversham. His producers, who included George Orwell and Graham Greeneâs cousin Felix, experienced the same problems with his handwriting as did Priscilla, and routinely had it typed out. âDear Petre, Thank you for your brief illegible letter,â is a typical complaint.
So atrocious was his handwriting that when invited to lecture at Bomber Command he sent back a letter asking if he could bring his wife. A telegram came by return: DELIGHTED BRING BITCH BUT STATE SIZE BECAUSE OF RATIONING . He answered that his wife was not a bitch, weighed 9 stone 6 pounds and stood 5 foot 7½ inches. The reply this time: SOME MISTAKE SURELY
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