This New Noise

by Charlotte Higgins

  The following week, on 10 January, the arrangements were still being fought over: ‘One final effort to secure my politicians – for the hundredth time of asking – thank heaven they’re all fixed now – for the first big political discussion we’ve yet had … they’re all as nervous as cats.’ The listings deadline for the Radio Times had been missed (it is partly for this reason that the politicians who actually spoke are lost to history, though the government spokesman is likely to have been Neville Chamberlain, then health minister, who was behind the bill). The debate, in the end, was ‘a great success’. The politicians were ‘so very sweet in their passionate desire to be strictly honourable about their allotted time’. Not an impulse, perhaps, that survived long into the broadcast age. The format, too, would surprise current audiences for broadcast political debates. Each speaker was allowed to speak for 20 minutes, with the government spokesman allotted a further 10 minutes at the end. ‘It honestly wasn’t dull,’ promised Matheson. Listeners’ letters, she wrote a few days later, were ‘pouring in’ and they were ‘quite amazing’. There was ‘a common admission that they hadn’t been interested in these things before, but the discussion made them want to know more’.

  Matheson, who was born on 7 June 1888, was, like Reith, a child of the manse: her father was a Presbyterian minister in Putney, south London. When she was a teenager he suffered a nervous breakdown, and the family had a spell in Switzerland while he recovered. Matheson was also sent to spend time with families in Stuttgart and Florence. On their return, her father became the first Presbyterian chaplain to students at Oxford, and she studied history as a home student – this in the days before women were officially recognised as members of the university. It was perhaps in Oxford that Matheson made the contacts that led to her recruitment into secret work during the First World War. She was posted to Rome where ‘she had the task of forming a proper office on the model of MI5 in London’, remembered her mother. Italian officials turned up simply to marvel at her – they were ‘very incredulous about the capacity of a young girl, for she did look absurdly young then, to do such work’. (She was twenty-six on the outbreak of war in July 1914.)

  After the war, she became political secretary to Nancy Astor, the first woman, in 1919, to take up a seat in the Commons. Astor remembered: ‘Those first years in Parliament were only made possible by her unremitting work and service, not for me, but for the cause of women … I might describe it as my zeal and her brain.’ As part of her work for Astor, Matheson organised a series of receptions where MPs might meet significant women, ‘in whom’, remembered her mother, ‘they had got suddenly interested because they had just got the vote. It was to one of these gatherings she invited Sir John Reith, and he was clever enough to realise that if he could get Hilda, who knew everybody, to come to the BBC he would be doing it a good turn.’

  She did indeed know everyone; she was firmly plugged into a network of writers, intellectuals, social reformers and politicians, including some of the most impressively high-flying women of her generation. And if Matheson asked you to broadcast, clearly it was hard to refuse. Her unassailable charm leaps off the page in her letters. One of her greatest catches was H. G. Wells. Various unsuccessful attempts had already been made to get him to the microphone. Matheson tried a new tack: she had a friend of hers, Eileen Power (who was soon to become professor of economic history at the London School of Economics), organise a party at which they would both be present. The morning after it, 14 June 1929, Matheson was in full flow by letter to him – almost flirtatiously berating him for, perhaps, forgetting to give her a lift home (she had to rely on the mercy of philosopher Bertrand Russell, she writes). Then she moves to the kill: ‘I have always felt it to be pretty devastating that an internationalist like yourself – perhaps you are the only real internationalist? – shouldn’t be making use of the most internationalist means of communication there is.’ She goes on to explain that the ban on controversy has been lifted and asks him to go ‘on the air’ in July. ‘It is most awfully important just now, at this moment, that you should say yes, because the stars in their courses are favourable and there is a breath of greater freedom in the world … It is fun to address 12 million or so British Islanders and some dozens of millions of Europeans all in one breath – I do assure you it is. You will be bound to enjoy the full possibilities of broadcasting sooner or later – only why not sooner!’

  Wells obediently promises to broadcast on world peace. Power sends Matheson a postcard: ‘I’m so glad you snared HG.’ He clearly required a deal of looking after. The day before the broadcast she is writing to another contact, Rachel Crowdy, who had been principal commandant of the voluntary nursing operation in the war, and was now heading two sections – one on opium smuggling, another on social reform – at the League of Nations: ‘Dear Dame Rachel – This is an absolute SOS … could you possibly come and dine with me at 7.30 at the Savoy Grill tomorrow night with H. G. Wells, who is broadcasting at 9.15? This is a remarkable reconciliation, because he has always been a great opponent of broadcasting, and I am sure it will make all the difference if there are one or two people he likes to cheer him up before hand … I really do beseech you to say yes.’ Also of the party were the Woolfs, Power and Julian Huxley. (Virginia Woolf was no great fan of Matheson. She wrote in her diary that summer of Matheson’s ‘earnest aspiring competent wooden face … A queer trait in Vita – her passion for the earnest middle-class intellectual, however drab & dreary.’)

  Matheson did not hesitate to draw Sackville-West into her professional dilemmas, consulting ‘the big stride of your mind’ – and persuading her to do more broadcasting. On 23 January 1929 she is manoeuvring for her lover to become a regular broadcast drama critic. ‘I have got the evidence of all the people who say you have got the only decent voice on the wireless of any woman. My own young men I’m not sure of; they will perhaps be amused! However I think I can get away with it quite easily and I should enjoy doing it … Oh darling do go on thinking favourably about it – it would be so perfect from my point of view – excuse for your coming to MY OFFICE, benefit untold to my listeners, prestige of the most exalted kind for my BBC. Oh please do.’ (The portentous capitals of MY OFFICE are a frequently recurring private jest.) The following week she is asking for Sackville-West’s help in suggesting names to contribute to a ‘symposium’ on modern literature:

  You understand so absolutely about broadcasting and the strangeness of our funny public – bless your heart. It is like you and so clever of you to see that we oughtn’t to have a pure Bloomsbury symposium on the novel. Rebecca West is such a devil to deal with and has such a temper, and I don’t think she writes good novels, do you? But she is very amusing. Aldous Huxley won’t broadcast he says, but of course he might in this series. Clemence Dane has such a nice voice, she might be good, only she has rather hived off to plays. Rose Macaulay? Margaret Kennedy has an annoying voice and manner rather. Well, we must think.

  Clemence Dane was the author of Regiment of Women and co-wrote the screenplay of Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo; Kennedy was the author of The Constant Nymph and The Ladies of Lyndon.

  One of Matheson’s most enduring achievements was her invention of Week in Westminster, which still runs on Radio 4 today, and which she began as a programme delivered by women MPs for the benefit of the newly enfranchised female electorate. It had a curious passage to the airwaves. One of Matheson’s responsibilities was for household talks. (A reasonably long trail of memoranda in the BBC archives, for example, concerns Matheson’s seeking guidance from Reith on whether it is permissible to include recipes for fruit wines in broadcasts, since ‘from an economy and food preservative point of view there is much to be said for it’. A note in her handwriting records: ‘The DG … told me personally that no intoxicants should be included.’) At the start of 1929 a series of programmes was broadcast at 10.45 a.m. in collaboration with the Empire Marketing Board. In one of the programmes it was mentioned that listeners could send off f
or a free recipe sheet. To everyone’s surprise, 5,280 requests were made for the leaflet, sufficiently noteworthy for Matheson to write about it to Reith: ‘There is nothing at all remarkable about the recipes – various ways of cooking cheese.’

  This rudimentary piece of audience research clearly prompted some further thinking. By the summer of that year, she was writing to Megan Lloyd George, David Lloyd George’s daughter and, since that May’s election, the Liberal MP for Anglesey. Matheson’s letter of 10 July began with an outline of the response to the cookery programme and recipe-sheet offer, explaining that she believed there was a ‘large public of housewives’ who make a practice ‘of taking a short pause for a cup of tea in the middle of the morning’ to listen to the wireless. This mid-morning slot, usually devoted to household matters, could be given a broader purpose, she suggested. ‘It might stimulate a greater interest in Parliament if during the session these weekly talks were given by one or two women Members of Parliament who would give a simple account of the week at Westminster. I believe that this would help perhaps to bring home to listeners that they had a stake in the Government of the country.’ It took Matheson several tries to squeeze a ‘yes’ from Lloyd George. In November she wrote again: ‘I am afraid you will think I am a great botherer …’ A fortnight later: ‘I feel you must think of me as an absolute pest.’ Lloyd George finally gave way and began to broadcast – most successfully. The format settled into a pattern: when parliament was sitting, women MPs from the main parties, including Nancy Astor, would speak in weekly rotation. Fielden’s memoirs record that, in his view, ‘women were (and are) almost never good broadcasters. I don’t know why this should be, but it is a fact.’ With the single exception, that is, of Lloyd George, whom he rated as ‘not only a naturally good broadcaster, but also a person of great charm and gaiety’.

  Fielden’s certainty about the inferiority of women as broadcasters is a reminder of what Matheson was up against, both as a high-ranking woman within the BBC and as a lesbian. There was no doubt support from her circle of successful women contacts, many of whom came of age during the war. Harold Nicolson thought of her as the very ideal of the competent, ambitious professional woman – his first novel, Public Faces, contains a splendid character called Jane Campbell, a superlatively efficient and unruffled parliamentary secretary of foreign affairs, who, he noted in his diary entry of 11 April 1932, was a ‘woman … of the type of Hilda Matheson’. In the novel, he sketched the character thus: ‘a woman of tact, gaiety, and determination … a confident woman. She regarded it as quite natural that a person of her attainments … should … have reached so garish a position’. Campbell ‘liked being female: she displayed this liking in every curve of her trim body’. And yet the assumptions at play were greatly alien from those of our own time. In the talk that Sackville-West gave the night she and Matheson became lovers, she had argued (according to the account she gave in a letter to Nicolson) that ‘Women cannot combine careers with normal life … They love too much; they allow love to override everything else. Men don’t.’

  Sackville-West was underestimating her new lover. Matheson’s letters show that love, desire and work mingled seamlessly in her head and heart; but nothing got in the way of her doing her job. Nor was she unduly worried about BBC gossip. She told Sackville-West about the possibility that Fielden was on to them (he is ‘as sharp as a ferret and I am told a complete homosexual himself’). But she was, on the whole, defiant: ‘I think my position in the BBC and yours in the great world are both far too strong for anyone to do anything to us.’ Above all, she was gloriously unashamed of her sexuality. ‘What we feel for each other is all good – that as far as I am concerned I know it is part and parcel of anything decent in me – of the best parts of me, not at all of the worst – that it makes more of me, not less … I cannot feel one shred of shame or remorse or regret or anything dimly approaching it … I loathe the need for furtiveness and secrecy – I find it’s incomprehensibly absurd – I have to keep reminding myself that it’s considered anti social and immoral – and it makes me fairly blaspheme. There – that’s a good explosion.’

  Relations between Matheson and Reith gradually began to cool. She was entering bolder and more adventurous territory, and was increasingly falling foul of the director general. In a letter posted on 22 June, and written on BBC headed writing paper, she described in detail to Sackville-West a long ‘argument – hammer and tongs – about “controversial subjects” and their treatment’ with Reith and the director of programmes, Roger Eckersley. In so doing she laid bare one of the problems of the BBC’s principle of impartiality – that it all depends on where you start from: ‘He tends to regard as controversial and partisan and therefore inadmissible a talk about which any of his business magnates complain or disapprove, e.g. [critic] Osbert Sitwell, because his on art were objectionable and because all modern art is objectionable and therefore can only be discussed if there is also somebody to put the case for the Victorians or the classics. The fact that all talks on art hitherto have been given by spokesmen of the old school and that Osbert, however tiresome, was therefore evening things up, wasn’t regarded as relevant.’

  Matheson continued: ‘What it really amounts to is this – that he only classes or admits as controversial subjects on which he or his friends have views … All our sermons are controversial but the DG won’t admit it because he agrees with them …’ The nature of the talks themselves came under discussion: ‘They … said that all my talks had been getting more and more “educational”, and that they were supposed to be “topical” and that talks on current ideas and current topics of speculation or discussion were not topical – only talks on events, not on problems of the day, like saving the countryside, or the future of the theatre …’ Matheson detected a suggestion towards what we would now call restructuring of her department. And, in a narrative that many professional women will find depressingly familiar, she remarked, ‘They are always so damned ready to say to any woman who disagrees with them that it is unreasonable and shows a lack of balance – I do honestly think that … afterwards when Roger began to say (a) that they highly valued my work but (b) that I was getting a name for unreasonable truculence I … got a choke in my throat which made me so angry and humiliated I couldn’t bear it.’

  Soon enough she was speculating about whether she would have to resign. In his diary for 6 March 1930, Reith noted that he was ‘developing a great dislike of Miss Matheson and her works’. That year, she began working on a series of talks with Nicolson on modern literature. This became a battleground, according to Michael Carney’s biography of Matheson. Reith loathed the moderns. A sticking point was whether Nicolson would be allowed to mention the banned texts Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A very BBC fudge was agreed: there was to be no mention of the texts by name but Nicolson was allowed to say that the BBC had forbidden him to mention them. There were other problems. Fielden, in his memoir, perceived that Reith began to regard Matheson as too left wing. ‘Gentlemen in the Athenaeum Club were soon whispering to Reith that he was being “run by a Gang of Reds”’, he recalled. ‘Reith began to turn an enquiring eye upon the talks department, and sent sharp little notes to Hilda suggesting that so and so held eccentric or subversive or atheistic or anarchistic views and was not a suitable person for the microphone … the battle was on.’

  In December 1931 Matheson finally did resign – a big enough story for the Manchester Guardian to cover it two days in a row. (In the edition of 4 December the wireless correspondent noted ‘an air of mystery about the resignation of Miss Hilda Matheson … it may be taken … that differences of opinion have existed for some time at Savoy Hill for some time past between two opposing schools of thought’.) Fielden recalled that nine members of the department threatened to hand in their notice en masse in protest. Lambert later paid her tribute: ‘It was Hilda Matheson, toiling single-mindedly night and day, who “made” the talks department a live, energetic and humane department of the corporat
ion.’ She had ‘provided listeners with an informed criticism of books, films, plays, music and farming, opened up the field of debates and discussions, improved and expanded the news, and sought even to train the politicians to make better use of broadcasting’.

  After leaving the BBC, Matheson’s next big job was running the Africa Survey for Lord Hailey – a major colonial project that studied the geography, ethnography, economics and politics of the entire continent. Later, in November 1939, her mother remembered, ‘a mysterious man began calling her up but would give no name. Finally they met. When she came back from lunching with him, she told me laughingly that he was a man who seemingly knew everything she had done all her life.’ Once again, Matheson was being recruited into secret work, this time editing books and directing broadcasts for the purposes of propaganda aimed at audiences overseas. But she was not able to finish her work there. Philip Noel-Baker – the MP, Olympic medallist, Nobel prizewinner and Megan Lloyd George’s lover for twenty years – ran into Matheson one day in June 1940 as he left the Ministry of Information, and remembered realising that she seemed terribly ill; he urged her to rest, but she told him that she needed to go on working, or ‘everything may smash’. By this time her affair with Sackville-West was long over, and she had been living with Dorothy Wellesley, the poet. In October 1940 she was dead, at fifty-two, of Graves’ disease – an autoimmune disorder affecting the thyroid. The Hogarth Press produced a short obituary volume, in which H. G. Wells paid tribute to a woman who was ‘courageous and indefatigable in her work for that liberal thought and free expression which is the essence of democratic freedom. She maintained a steady fight against Sir John Reith, who was inspired by a loyalty to influences above him far stronger than any sense of duty to the greater possibilities of his position.’ Composer Ethel Smyth wrote of the ‘blending of her intellectual grip with what one may call the perfect manners of her soul’.