Siepmann fixed her in a hot glare, and she smiled back, placid and almost bored.
“You’re not only angling to stay, but you want to be a producer, don’t you? Do you think I’d let you on anything other than The Week in Westminster?”
“‘Let’? No, but I think I’ll earn my way onto more shows.”
“And I suppose you want that Yorkie girl as your Talks assistant.”
“Miss Fenwick? I would, but Lady Astor has just engaged her as her new political secretary and protégée, despite their being of wildly different parties. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure she sees that Lady Astor still has plenty of time to come and broadcast for us. You know how popular she is. The Talks Department will start getting good press again, I’m sure.”
“Your first failure, little lady, and you’re out,” Siepmann hissed.
“Good job I’ve got no intention of failing,” she assured him.
In fact, she’d just scored a success. He called me a lady, not a girl. Before he knows it, he’s going to stop calling me “little.”
Lady Astor fought hard to have Hilda appointed to the BBC board of governors, but Hilda declared herself sick of broadcasting. At least for a while.
“You know, Lady Astor’s coaching me to stand for office,” Phyllida confided as Lady Astor was giving her broadcast. Her new role as Lady Astor’s political secretary had bought her a tweed suit and attaché case, but she was still her pretty and pugnacious self. “Bit tricky, as I’ve been living down here, I want to represent the North properly, you see.”
“You always have,” Maisie said, but her voice was shaking. She would have rather Phyllida had stayed at the BBC a little longer.
“None of that now, you dozy cow,” Phyllida warned, though her voice wasn’t as steady as it could be. “We’ll still have lunch three times a week at least, and larks at the weekend. Onwards and upwards, remember?”
“Onwards and upwards.”
“And anyway, not all change is bad, is it?”
“No. No, it’s not.”
EPILOGUE
1932
Hilda leaned back in the chair and smiled around the pretty pub back garden.
“I can’t believe I thought life would be more restful after the BBC, but here I am, traveling all over Africa with Lord Hailey, and oh, did I mention? A publisher is interested in the little book on broadcasting, so it’s back to that as well. I’m doing revisions now.”
“I suppose you don’t need a typist?” Maisie asked. Hilda laughed, shaking her head.
“A producer at the BBC, a columnist for the Listener, and how many magazines have you written for now?”
“Five.”
“Yes, I can just see you making time to type my notes for me.”
“Also I’ve probably forgotten how to read your handwriting.”
Hilda laughed again.
It was really too early in the year to be sitting outside, but it was a bright day and the pub garden was very pleasant and they had it all to themselves. It had been several months since she’d met with Hilda, and Maisie was pleased to see her looking so happy. Besides doing work on the African Survey with Lord Hailey, and some work in independent radio—so much for being sick of broadcasting—and the book, she was also involved with Dorothy Wellesley, the Duchess of Wellington.
“Seems it’s you who has the taste for the aristocracy more than I ever did,” Maisie teased her.
“Yes, I’m quite the social climber,” Hilda agreed, raising her eyebrow.
She asked, so Maisie told her about Broadcasting House, where they were about to move, and how Siepmann was still upset because the Talks director’s office had been designed to Hilda’s specifications, down to the furniture, and no one would give him the money to change it.
They were still laughing when a distant church bell rang.
“Goodness, I’m afraid I have to get on,” Hilda said. They each looked at their watches—Hilda smiled to see Maisie still had the lilac one she’d given her.
“I have almost an hour before I’m meeting Cyril,” Maisie said.
“Ah. He grew up nicely, didn’t he?”
“Well, we’ll see,” Maisie said, but she was smiling. This was only their third proper date. She didn’t count the one from 1927. She had told him not to get any ideas about her, and she had come a long way from being the marrying kind. He said he’d take her company however he could get it.
Hilda paid the bill, waving away Maisie’s money.
“Stay and have another drink. I know you. I know you don’t relax enough.” She squeezed Maisie’s shoulder, dropped a green folder on the table, and was gone.
Maisie stared at the folder. She knew Hilda was still involved with MI5. Was it a lead, maybe? Maisie was constantly chasing stories these days. It was always nice to have one handed to her.
She opened the folder and read.
“Musgrave, Edwin. Born 1881, Selby, Yorkshire. Died 1915, Belgium.”
He had immigrated to Canada in 1900, worked as a painter in the theater. Which must have been how they met. “Married Georgina Allen, 1902. Issue: Maisie Edwina, born 1903.”
Edwina? Georgina had always told Maisie to be grateful enough just to have one name. Edwina. For her father.
“Divorced: 1904. Returned to England: 1904.”
A year. Or less. He had been there that long. Known her. But maybe not. It only opened up more questions.
Worked as a joiner. And joined the army, even though he was thirty-three and could have done his bit from a safer locale. And died before she’d joined the VAD and was stationed to the hospital in Brighton. Died in Belgium, so she wouldn’t have seen him anyway.
There was a photo. Rare, in those days, for a man to have his photo made. Had it been for Georgina?
He was young, with stick-straight hair and Maisie’s prominent nose. His eyes were solemn, chin pointy. His expression was appropriately placid, but there might be something behind his eyes that suggested he was interested in hurrying off to do something else.
Hunger.
Maisie wiped her eyes and went on reading. There wasn’t much left. He had a brother, Maxwell, invalided home in 1916, living in York. A clerk for the county. Two children, Peter and Hannah. Each married. Two grandchildren, Gerald and Samuel.
She closed the folder so as not to let tears drip on it and rested her head in her hands.
She had a family. An uncle Max. Cousins. And she was from Yorkshire, just like Phyllida.
She could write to them. They might know nothing about her, but she could write. Maybe go to York. It would be good to travel more anyway. There was a lot to see. Phyllida might take a holiday with her. And maybe she would come away with a family.
She wiped her face again and tucked the folder into her holdall—stuffing it in with the newspapers, notebooks, pencils, two novels, and a primer on beginner’s German.
Hilda hated being thanked.
I’ll send her tickets to a concert. Something very lively and modern. She’ll love that.
Maisie sauntered off into the evening, swinging her holdall beside her.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It perhaps goes without saying that I wanted to write this book because of Hilda Matheson. She was such an extraordinary woman, and seemed to embody the adage of truth being stranger than fiction. If I have made her a bit too perfect, well, that was hard to help. According to many who knew her—admittedly writing after her untimely death—her flaws were an excess of passion and a determination to see through what she felt to be right, despite strenuous opposition. Even though this led to her downfall at the BBC, she never wavered—and it didn’t hurt her throughout her (too few) remaining years.
Because the real history was so fascinating, I wanted to use as much of it as possible. However, it was imperative that the story itself come first, this not being a literary biogr
aphy, and so I strove to weave fact and fiction together as seamlessly as possible.
While there are some sources that begin Hilda’s tenure at the BBC commencing in 1927, I decided to have her start in 1926 (per some other sources) because I liked the energy of her coming in to change the BBC soon after the national General Strike.
I knew I wanted to fold in Hilda’s real-life membership in MI5. The facts that she had been recruited to MI5 by T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia); helped set up the MI5 office in Rome in 1918; and was there when they hired a young Italian journalist with a gift for propaganda to help keep Italy in the war—a certain Benito Mussolini—were just too delicious to leave out. While she wasn’t really involved with the organization after World War I, she apparently kept a hand, or at least an ear, in. As my story developed, with the fictional Maisie a budding journalist, it felt right that Hilda, so engaged with current events and always thinking toward the future, would take heed of quality propaganda and that she and Maisie would ultimately work together as they discovered the intents of the Nazis were intertwined with the agenda of the British Fascists and aimed at taking over the BBC. This last is pure fiction, extrapolating from Goebbels’ real comment that a takeover of German radio in 1923 would have forwarded the Nazi cause immeasurably. The British Fascists may not have specifically mentioned the BBC, but it felt reasonable that they would have seized the inspiration and seen the opportunity to consolidate their message and power through this powerful new medium.
The fear of foreign spies was indeed paramount during this era. The 1920s in Britain were deeply complex times, as the nation had been financially and emotionally devastated by World War I, and many of the returning soldiers found that they could not secure employment. Economic uncertainty remained high, and there was a lot of anxiety surrounding societal changes. The lines were drawn between tradition and progressivism, as exemplified so neatly by Hilda and Reith, despite their being contemporaries and both children of Scottish Presbyterian ministers.
The spies people feared in the 1920s were Russian, and the panic was about Bolshevism. Though trade unions and the Labour Party were not communist—and in fact, the Communist Party of Great Britain at its peak enjoyed a membership of about sixty thousand—it was common practice to associate the push for unionization with communism. This of course was a useful straw man for fascists.
As I read about concerns of spying, both genuine and trumped up, I became convinced that this concern, combined with the rise of the BBC and some people’s fears of it, was a thread I must weave into the narrative. It seemed natural that Hilda, thanks to her involvement in Italy, would have spotted the brilliance of the early Nazi propaganda and wondered if it was something worth worrying about, especially as Fascism garnered interest in Britain. I was inspired by a few real-life MI5 operations during World War II, particularly the Jack King sting, and chose to use threads of this story for my rising journalist and producer, Maisie, and her mentor, Hilda.
I particularly wanted to highlight the early complicity of corporations. The 1927 propaganda pamphlet Road to Resurgence was felt to make some headway in attracting corporate money to the Nazi Party at a time when they were considered marginal at best. It did lay out that the Nazis, despite calling themselves socialists and using proworker rhetoric in speeches, were in fact antiunion and would do much to assist corporations become richer. I chose Siemens and Nestlé as companies whose business relationship with the Nazis is well-known, although they did not establish ties until later than the timeline I present. I wanted to use more than one company to indicate that it was the involvement of many people with money and influence who helped fascism take hold, and did so primarily in the hopes of garnering yet more money and influence.
The BBC was very progressive in the 1920s and urged to be less so following the economic downturn. Reith was very ready to comply with this. However, the BBC, despite Reith’s Puritanism, was one of the few entities where women could hold positions higher than clerical staff and men and women received equal pay. While it did institute a marriage bar, this was only nominally put into practice. Mary Somerville, the Director of Schools, was both married and a mother during her tenure at the BBC, and indeed took maternity leave. I deliberately kept the directorship of Schools Broadcasting nebulous, as Mary Somerville was its first director but was not given the title until 1931. She was, however, one of the first women to work as a producer at the BBC, and she was in Schools all that time.
One of my biggest changes regards Charles Siepmann, whose initial position was actually in Adult Education Programming. As the nature of the programming seemed so close to both Schools and Talks, I felt it read more clearly to have him in Schools and thus streamline the narrative. This was especially the case as the whole idea of “shaping the minds of the youth” runs lightly through the book and Siepmann’s willingness, as I portray it, to toe the more conservative line made it feel right that he would be specifically in Schools, one of Reith’s most prized departments in my rendition. I was also very imaginative with Siepmann’s characterization, using his conservatism and his preference for hiring men (as noted in an internal memo) over women to inform his behavior and speech.
While the relationship between Reith and Hilda began to decline not long after Hilda’s tenure at the BBC began, Hilda herself thought that Lionel Fielden, himself gay, “accidentally” outed her to Reith, which thus marked her for dismissal before the Harold Nicholson incident. The journalistic coup is wholly fictional, but Hilda’s determination to resign rather than submit to censorship is real.
My only composite character is Ellis, whom I based loosely on Maxwell Knight, the head of MI5 and, apparently, one of the models for M in the James Bond series. I chose to make him a composite because Knight was said to have Fascist sympathies.
Maisie is a wholly fictional character, as is her initial job straddling the two offices. I wanted to place someone at the center of these volatile characters, with Reith, the traditionalist, and Hilda, the progressive. In one of Hilda’s letters, she refers to her need for a capable young woman to whom she could readily delegate. She did secure a fine secretary and assistant, but I preferred to keep my character free of any of their qualities so as to allow her to follow her own inclinations and instincts.
I was fairly inventive in my rendering of the studios, as most of the controls were not so close to the microphones, but I wanted to keep the engineers more in the mix.
Nearly all of the Talks programs mentioned are real titles. This is especially true for The Week in Westminster, developed by Hilda in 1929 and broadcast to this day on Radio 4, though it is now more of a summation of political events of the week.
If there are things I have forgotten to mention, or details I have left out or mistaken, these are all faults of the author for which apologies should be considered duly made.
A brief biography:
HILDA MATHESON, OBE
(1888–1940)
Hilda Matheson attended what was then called the Society of Oxford Home Students, now called St Anne’s College. She was not technically a graduate, as women were not allowed to obtain degrees until 1920. She worked for MI5 during the war and afterward became political secretary to Lady Astor. After her wildly popular tenure at the BBC, and in the wake of her much-discussed resignation, Lady Astor attempted to have her made a BBC governor. Hilda declined, instead becoming a radio critic and columnist, and then writing the first comprehensive book on broadcasting, Broadcasting (1933), alluded to in this novel. This remained the only textbook in use on radio broadcasting until the late 1960s (some say early 1970s). She later worked with Lord Hailey on producing the African Survey, published in 1938, taking on most of the work when Hailey became ill. This garnered her OBE in 1939. She became involved with Dorothy Wellesley, the duchess of Wellington, beginning in 1932, and it was by all accounts a long, stable, happy relationship. Hilda returned to MI5 at the commencement of World War II, workin
g as director of the joint broadcasting committee. Among other work, she prepared instructions in wartime broadcasting including propaganda. Despite her unexpected death during surgery in 1940 (she died of Graves’ disease), these instructions were so thorough, they were used throughout the remainder of the war.
You can find more biographies of real people mentioned in this book at www.sarahjanestratford.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researching and writing this book was a joyous yet arduous experience, and I cannot fully enough express my gratitude for the many people who gave me such tremendous help in a variety of ways as I crawled to the finish line.
As Maisie says, librarians are an endless source of assistance. Three libraries in particular were invaluable to me: the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, and especially Barbara Blumenthal. The Bienecke Collection at Yale, whose invaluable staff was also so kind as to mail back the hat I accidentally left in the locker. UCLA library—where a certain lovely mother (mine!) is happily one of the librarians—was especially terrific in allowing me a long loan of Hilda’s book, Broadcasting, which was a wonderful talisman to keep at hand while I worked.
I spent a lovely two weeks researching in Britain, where I was hosted by one of my oldest and dearest friends, the writer Allie Spencer, and her wonderful husband, Christopher Daniell, and their two fantastic sons, Matt and Jamie.
Enormous thanks are due the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham and Archives Researcher Jeff Walden. The wealth of material was such that I could have happily wallowed in it for weeks.
The generosity of Kate Murphy, author of Behind the Wireless: An Early History of Women at the BBC, is simply unparalleled. Not only did she invite me into her lovely London home, where we spent a wonderful day discussing Hilda and the BBC, but she also allowed me to access what was nothing less than an absolute gold mine of information, photographs, recordings, and ephemera. For anyone who wants to learn more about Hilda and other real pioneering women at the BBC, Kate’s book is a treasure.
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