The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media Volume 2 Number 3. © Intellect Ltd 2004. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/rajo.2.3.131/1 British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain: the work of Charles Parker Paul Long University of Central England Abstract Keywords There has been little academic consideration of the life, work and ideas of the BBC radio producer Charles Parker. Where he is remembered it is for his work on the prize-winning series known as the Radio Ballads. Beginning with ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ in 1958 the series addressed the lives and work of working-class people, and was one of the first programmes to use ‘actuality’ incorporating original, spontaneous testimonies. The author values Parker’s work as an expression of the mentalités of welfare-state Britain and that wider project evinced by his colleagues and collaborators that sought to challenge the circumscribed lineaments of class, culture, history, education and language. However, an appreciation of Parker and his role in the process of democratizing the cultural sphere also lends itself to a critique of the assumptions behind categories such as class, authenticity and experience that proved to be so useful in this moment. Charles Parker British radio BBC features post-war Britain cultural politics ‘And the individual, powerless, has to exert the Powers of will and choice And choose between enormous evils, either Of which depends on somebody else’s voice’ Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal Introduction: a case for Charles Parker In a recent meditation on the autobiographical impulse, novelist Martin Amis comments that We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience - so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed. Experience is the only thing we share equally, and everyone senses this. (Amis: 2000: 2) While this observation might be a useful addition to understanding the RJ–ISBAM 2 (3) 131–152 © Intellect Ltd 2004 131 Charles Parker in typical pose. [Photographer – Bob Ethridge] [Published courtesy of the Charles Parker Archive Trust – thanks to Pam Bishop] 132 Paul Long contemporary ubiquity of genres such as docu-soaps, docu-dramas and reality TV programmes, this ‘loquacity’ has a history. Indeed, if one listens for how particular perspectives have been lent authenticity and authority over others - in the past and present - it is apparent that what ‘experience’ is has not always been assumed to be either self-evident or so egalitarian. A sense of the democratization of experience, of the increasing sound of a plurality of social and personal narratives in a British context can be illustrated by turning to the relatively recent past. On the eve of the 1960s for instance, a precocious university graduate by the name of Dennis Potter suggested that the majority of working-class people and their values and perceptions were still excluded from any place in the nation’s cultural life. Considering the obvious benefits of post-war affluence, he wrote that ‘it has become ... hard to comprehend any method by which a more satisfactory common culture can be realized. How are people to begin seeing themselves as people and not digits in the huge machines of the admass soporifics?’ (Potter 1960:121, emphasis added). Potter was a good example of the new post-war social type that was worrying radicals such as E.P. Thompson, preoccupied as they were with culture to the neglect of ‘politics’. Potter, for instance, argued that in view of the post-war settlement and the proliferation of mass communications, the economic focus of socialism now seemed outmoded, on the verge of ideological defeat. For him, it was in the cultural sphere where there was cause for optimism and a possible ‘revival on the Left’ was signalled by a concatenation of events. These included the staging of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956), the publication of a range of essays by leading radicals collected by Tom Maschler under the title Declaration (1957), the appearance of the journal Universities and Left Review (1957) and Richard Hoggart’s bestseller The Uses of Literacy (1957). Representing a renewal of concepts such as involvement and commitment in the arts, such work represented a new ‘oblique’ approach to social problems, and a recognition ‘that the quality of our whole culture, particularly as expressed and exploited by the mass media, is a potent factor in creating that better and more noble society which is the one constant quality of the Socialist vision’ (Potter 1960: 101). Aspects of this ‘oblique’ approach are revealed in the work and ideas of BBC producer Charles Parker who, alongside Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, created the seminal series known as the Radio Ballads. Eight programmes appeared on BBC radio over a period from 1958 to 1963, beginning with ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ and ending with ‘The Travelling People’. A minor controversy surrounded the series and its eventual cancellation by the BBC, ostensibly on economic grounds. Its creators insisted that this was a politically motivated move, a consequence of the radical nature and promise of a form which investigated aspects of ordinary life, utilizing original, unscripted testimony (‘actuality’) melded to musical commentary. Scant as it is, any attention afforded the Radio Ballads has tended to pinpoint the contribution of Ewan MacColl and his radical politics and British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 133 1. There is little recognition of his part in the historiography of oral history. Paul Thompson in his landmark work The Voice of the Past (1978), provides an exhaustive list of ‘The Achievement of Oral History’ (pp. 230-36), but finds no place for Parker. As far as I can tell, neither is there an acknowledgement in his allusively titled Living the Fishing (1983). 2. See http://www.topicrecords.co.uk/topic_r ecords_tscd801808_the_radio-ballad s.html and www.media.bournem outh.ac.uk/charlespar ker.html. 3. Biographical sources: Paul Shilston (1997), ‘Charles Parker - Man With a Microphone’, Queens’ College Record, p. 18; Donnellan (1980); Anon. (1988), ‘Richard Groves - A Tribute’, Charles Parker Archive Trust Annual Report, November; Calthrop and Owens (1971). His degree is registered under ‘Historical Tripos Division (Dsc Parker, H.C. Queens’ 1948)’ in The Cambridge University Calendar for the Year 1948-49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 246. This conflicts with the accounts of Philip Donnellan (unpublished (draft) biographical entry for the National Dictionary of Biography, loaned by Mary Baker to the author) and Shilston, who suggest that Parker graduated in English Literature. Given that F.R. Leavis was at the height of creative lineage (see Laing 1986; Porter 1998; MacColl 1990; Paget 1990). However, friends, colleagues and supporters claim a place for Parker himself as a pioneer of media and cultural studies as well as the field of oral history (Groves, Baker and Donnellan 1983). These are grandiose claims, implying that Parker is something of a forgotten yet important man, good reasons to explore and evaluate such a life.1 And this life has begun to be recognized and celebrated. The Radio Ballads were recently released on CD by the Topic record label while 2004 saw the launch of an annual conference in Parker’s name where radio practitioners such as Piers Plowright and Simon Elmes of the BBC acknowledged his continued influence.2 Parker’s personal development was certainly intriguing, described by himself as ‘how a liberal bourgeois journalist became a socialist artist’ (Parker 1975: 98). He worked and corresponded with some key figures from the period, including Richard Hoggart, Arnold Wesker, Stuart Hall, E.P. Thompson and the oral historian George Ewart Evans. Here, I outline how his engagement with their projects situates his work within a wider field of achievement. Focusing upon claims about the quality, meaning and uses of the English language in relation to class, his ideas about culture questioned the circumscribed role of the BBC in British life, as well as guiding assumptions in the study of history, educational imperatives and practices. In turn however, the terms of his triumphs and ideas offer a mode of historicizing a range of concepts shared with his contemporaries and informing their achievements. Of late, cultural commentators and historians have begun to critique and interrogate the solidity and endurance of the very tools upon which their insights have traditionally been built. As has been suggested, foundational concepts such as culture, class, consciousness, the social and indeed ‘experience’ are no longer taken to be the unalloyed categories they once were (for instance, see Butler and Scott 1992; Bourke 1994; Boyd and McWilliam 1995; Eagleton 2000). Here then, I wish to celebrate Parker but also recognize the limits of his work and the wider discourses he engaged with and contributed to. Into ‘life’: origins of the Radio Ballads Hubert Charles Parker was born on 5 April 1919 to a middle-class Bournemouth family. Although the family had fallen on hard times he attended the town’s grammar school and upon leaving took a job with the National Physical Laboratory where he trained as a metallurgist. A Royal Navy reservist, he was called up when war was declared in 1939 and for the duration of hostilities served as First Lieutenant on the submarine HMS Sceptre, later commanding HMS Umbra and winning a DSC in the process. After demobilization he pursued a degree in History at Queens College Cambridge, graduating in 1948. Taking a new career direction he applied to and was taken on by the BBC, initially working for the North American Service, at home and in the United States itself. In 1953 he was appointed Senior Features Producer for BBC Radio in the Midlands Region, which took him to the city of Birmingham.3 134 Paul Long Two significant events from this period informed Parker’s personal outlook and approach to work, leading directly to the first actuality ballad of 1958. The first concerns technological innovation in the development of newer, smaller yet efficient means of tape-recording which entailed new practices and freedoms for programme-makers. Of the encounter with the EMI portable tape recorder, first produced in Britain in 1952, Parker’s colleague and occasional collaborator Philip Donnellan has claimed that ‘For many of us it was a radicalising experience, technically, politically and socially’ (Donnellan 1980: 11). Hitherto, broadcasting producers and their creative teams had been bound to the studio or limited by the financial burden imposed by the large vehicle and cumbersome equipment necessary for field trips or outside broadcasts. From now on the pursuit of material would not be subject to the formality and mystique of the studio and the scrutiny of professional technician and presenter. For Parker, it meant that ‘you could go into “life”’ (Parker 1975: 98, emphasis added), and what was meant by ‘life’ and who best expressed it is a key issue here. A second galvanizing event occurred in 1957 when Parker received a tape of an American radio broadcast of The Lonesome Train, a cantata written by Millard Lampell and Earl Robinson. This told the story of the transportation of Abraham Lincoln’s body to its resting place through the use of song and the testimony of witnesses. Robinson (1910-91) was a left-wing American composer (subject to a House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisting in 1952) who collaborated with Woodie Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter, Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, for whom he had collected various folk and blues recordings. Writer of the seminal ‘Joe Hill’, he joined the Workers’ Theater Project, conducted the American People’s Chorus and took part in various American folk-music radio shows (see Hardy and Laing 1990: 676; Denning 1998). This was work that was well known in Britain amongst cultural progressives. Robinson’s Ballad for Americans, written with Jack La Touche and starring Paul Robeson, drew enthusiastic notices when it was broadcast in December 1940 on the BBC Home Service. The Daily Worker praised it for its ‘fresh, uncommercial spirit’, suggesting that it was of and for ‘the people’ (Anon. 1941a: 5). Such work was valuable because it offered a template for a democratic culture, and as one correspondent to the BBC commented, ‘A similar piece of work would find a place in this country, since it expresses the desire of the common people to make the country their own’ (quoted in Anon. 1941b: 3). The Lonesome Train itself was the fruit of song-collecting, oral history and the creative interpretation of such material. Its creators were described as having: wandered over the country, listened to the people sing, watched them dance; they steeped themselves in the rhythms of the American people, on the field, in the factories, in the mines and in the tall cities. They live and understand this music of ours. (Fast 1945: n.p.). British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 135 his powers and influence at Downing College, and with people like Raymond Williams there at the same time, it would place Parker within a formidable intellectual milieu. 4. Charles Parker, ‘John Axon and the Radio Ballad’, sleevenotes to Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, The Ballad of John Axon, original broadcast released as Argo Recording RG 474, 1965: n.p. 5. Parker, ‘John Axon and the Radio Ballad’. 6. Quotes here from City of Birmingham Central Library, Charles Parker Archive (Hereafter CPA) 2/64/2/1, ‘Charles Parker: Programmes and Projects’; ‘BBC Audience Research Department. LR/58/1051, Week 27, “The Ballad of John Axon” (Wed. 2 July 1958)’, document dated 16 July 1958. The main file is indicated by the first two numbers (e.g. 1/3). The main title of the file is given in each initial citation. The philosophy and practice of such work and the progressive, welfare culture of the New Deal that endorsed it, were acknowledged inspirations for the Radio Ballads, the post-war folk revival and the development of oral history. Broadcast before Today in Parliament, ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ originally appeared at ten o’clock on the night of Wednesday 2 July 1958. It told the story of the eponymous railwayman who had died in the previous year while trying to halt a runaway train and had been awarded a posthumous George Cross. The programme was unusual enough in form and content to warrant some justification. It had been commissioned in autumn 1957, quite soon after the driver’s death: ‘still early days for a programme which could be placed in the “obituaries for distinguished personages” category’.4 Despite his heroic sacrifice Axon was after all just an ‘ordinary’ working man. Trailing the programme in an article for the Radio Times, Parker wrote of the deliberately eclectic nature of the music and form, warning that ‘you will find that we take liberties with conventions you may cherish ... relying upon the real people ... to tell their story simply and directly’ (Parker 1958: 330). This liberty lay in the fact that it eschewed conventional narration by an authorial Corporation voice. Commentary and guidance was provided by original songs and music, the direction of which was guided by the words and voices of the participants themselves. The source material appealed to Parker’s tastes due to its similarities with American folk songs such as ‘Casey Jones’, which he enjoyed performing to delighted dinner-party audiences. However, the point of departure from traditional BBC practice occurred when he went on a research trip to Axon’s home town of Stockport, accompanied by MacColl and armed with his midget recorder, then still used mainly as a tool for radio journalism. The intention was to record conversations with locals in order to provide source material for the development of a script that would be laced with occasional direct quotes, giving a little local flavour. As was the convention then, actors would voice these quotes. However, after several hours of interviews Parker was taken with what he perceived to be the idiosyncratic speech of locals and railway workers, of how it conveyed a ‘built-in oral charge’ that ‘held an authenticity of a quite different order from that attainable in a studio’.5 Based upon the raw field recordings, the resulting programme went beyond the heroic individual narrative to examine the reasons for John Axon’s selfsacrifice, his fealty to the job and his colleagues. As Parker later put it in the argot of the period, it sought to portray the work of the railwayman as part of a ‘whole way of life’ (Parker 1963: 25). Responses to the Radio Ballads: new voices, new sounds A BBC survey of listeners revealed plenty of criticism in response to such daring. Nonetheless, praise was of a high order too, recognizing that here was ‘a real break into a new art form’; it was welcomed for being ‘unconventional, untraditional, but all completely right’.6 Amongst newspaper 136 Paul Long critics the programme received extensive coverage as an ‘event’ as well as universal praise for its innovations and as an artistic success. The Evening Sentinel, held to be the most important outlet for radio criticism by the BBC, found the programme both gripping and humbling. The Daily Mail afforded it a double-page feature, concentrating on its ‘ruthlessly realistic’ tone, commenting that it was ‘weird, shocking’. Paul Ferris of The Observer found the BBC tones of presenter John Snagge that bookended it to be an intrusion. The Daily Worker found it one of the few things in that year’s radio output to be worthy of celebration.7 Tom Driberg in the New Statesman noted the ‘Gilpinesque colloquialism of the narrative’ (i.e. the linking songs), generously commenting that: ‘Fletcher’s dream of being read by a poet living a thousand years hence is unlikely to be realised! But a generation from now - I would even say centuries from now - listeners will surely still be moved by the recording of The Ballad of John Axon’ (Driberg 1958: 46-47). For Philip Henderson in The Listener there was a congruence of the tone of worker and work, the ‘flat Lancashire accents went well with the clang and hiss of the engines themselves’ (Henderson 1958: 68). William Webb of the Manchester Guardian opined that, ‘This really was some of the characteristic poetry of the idiom of the people’ (‘W.L.W.’ 1958: 3). Despite reservations about the music, most memorable and worthy or remark were the ‘gentle reminiscing Northern voices’ of the people themselves. This contemporary commentary suggests that despite some liberalization during the war, the presence of working-class voices and experiences was still a rarity on British radio. For instance, when the BBC’s charter came under review in 1949 it was an issue barely acknowledged by Lord Beveridge’s Broadcasting Committee. However, one of the Committee’s members, A.L. Binns, Director of Education for Lancashire, bemoaned the fact that British broadcasting was too ‘high-brow’. As Asa Briggs reports, Binns sought to communicate the views of ordinary people of the north to the southerners of the Committee, explaining ‘that somebody had told him in a Yorkshire pub that broadcasting consisted of “posh voices talking down to us”’ (Briggs 1979: 301). After the advent of commercial television, Richard Hoggart offered a similar observation by way of explanation for the significant losses in audience figures experienced by the Corporation. Commenting on its public image he enlisted his description from The Uses of Literacy to suggest that, ‘Great numbers of people simply assume that the BBC is “Them”’ (Hoggart 1958: 33). Of course, it had high standards and produced remarkable programmes, yet this quality also pinpointed its enduring weakness: that they do not have a sufficiently wide sense, or one sufficiently sensitive outside recognised intellectual or ‘cultured’ areas, of the strengths of British life. One is repeatedly struck by their lack of closeness to the ‘thisness’ of people’s lives, the communications missed through a narrowness of tone. (Hoggart 1958: 35) British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 137 7. Reviews quoted in CPA 2/64/2/1, ‘Charles Parker: Programmes and Projects’, memos, BBC Midland Region Publicity Department, 3 and 10 July 1958. The problem lay in the way that the Corporation spoke at, rather than with the majority. One remedy for this situation that had been offered by Binns was that ‘more use should be made of the voices of intelligent working men speaking as “authorities in their own right”’ (Briggs 1979: 301). Despite such critiques, the BBC was by no means homogenous in its ‘Themness’. In fact, Parker came to see himself as the inheritor of a particularly innovative tradition, what he termed the ‘liberal dispensation’ exemplified by figures such as Olive Shapley, Archie Harding, Val Gielgud, Lawrence Gilliam, D.G. Bridson and especially Louis MacNeice (Parker 1972: 17). As with many of these figures, Parker’s work was a product of the regional structure of the Corporation that allowed a producer some independence. It certainly allowed him some space for experimentation with this new form and over the next few years Parker managed to produce several more programmes with fluctuating artistic and critical success. ‘Song of the Road’ (broadcast on 5 November 1959), for instance, dealt with the building of Britain’s first motorway and the men who made it: We built the canals, we laid the tracks Of railways here to hell and back, And now we’re going to have a crack At the London-Yorkshire Highway. This was followed by ‘Singing the Fishing’ (broadcast on 16 August 1960), about the fishing industry (this won the prestigious Prix d’Italia). Thereafter came ‘The Big Hewer’ which was about mining (broadcast on 18 August 1961); ‘The Body Blow’ about polio and disability (broadcast on 27 March 1962); ‘On the Edge’ about young people (broadcast on 13 February 1963); ‘The Fight Game’, about boxing (broadcast on 3 July 1963) and ‘The Travelling People’ which concerned Gypsies (broadcast on 17 April 1964). From radio practice to cultural theory and social action In his self-aggrandizing autobiography, MacColl suggests that his producer was at best somewhat naïve about the import of the matters they were dealing with in the series. Evidence suggests that, on the contrary, Parker launched himself into the promotion, theorization and application of the work in a manner indicating that he was highly conscious of its cultural implications. In that first Radio Times article, he indicated the issues and questions it raised for him about national identity, race, tradition, the atrophy of popular culture and the need for its reinvigoration. As the series developed he became increasingly committed to locating it as a contribution to contemporary cultural debates. In a variety of outlets he expended much effort elaborating on the series as a new cultural form. Involving enormous amounts of fieldwork and the recording of ‘conversations’ (never ‘interviews’) the task was to overcome social prejudice, communi138 Paul Long cating a belief in the speech and experience of ‘ordinary people’ that was so often devalued or completely ignored. The imperative for the intellectual therefore, was to go back to the people - fishermen, travellers and construction workers - to be educated in a new way, in front of language ‘on the lips’, in use. Parker’s technique for eliciting articulate expression, for disarming the suspicions of his subjects was indeed to sit at the feet of his subjects, literally. The impetus for his enthusiasm was a personal volte-face, after all this was a man who would recall in his later years that, upon hearing of the election victory of Atlee’s Labour party at the end of the war, he felt that all he had been fighting for was lost. Of those who became his subjects, he later confessed before one audience that, I was brought up to believe that everywhere North of Winchester was an industrial wilderness of wife-beaters and insanitary slums, and my formal education did little to disabuse me of such an attitude to the true quality of my countrymen.8 It says something of the nature of the history of class relations in Britain to note that an individual like pioneering oral historian George Ewart Evans could vividly recall (in 1987), ‘My first acquaintance with the thoughts and opinions of ordinary people ... over half a century ago’ (Evans 1987: 1). Likewise, and despite the apparently levelling experience of the Second World War, Philip Donnellan, who like Parker was of petit-bourgeois origin, said of a meeting with one Charlie Andrews of Lowestoft in 1951, that ‘It was the first time I had come face to face with a working man’ (quoted in Gilbert 1999: 16).9 Often physical or geographical, this kind of encounter often lead to a kind of mental journey outside of a metropolitan mindset - George Orwell’s being the most celebrated. Parker himself traced a move that had been made by his inspiration and colleague in the BBC Features Department, Louis MacNeice. In the 1930s, the poet had taken up a post in Classics at the university of this ‘hazy city’, discovering that Birmingham had its own refreshing intellectual character, ‘free of the London trade-mark’ (MacNeice 1996b: 154). His students were drawn from the locality and he found that they lacked the political obsessions of his Oxbridge peers, particularly the fashionable ouvriérisme of 1930s radicals: ‘coming from the proletariat themselves, they were conscious of the weaknesses of the Prolet-Cult’. This encounter challenged his inveterate snobbery, and he found that it ‘reconciled me to ordinary people’ (MacNeice 1996b: 145). Like so many before him then, Parker ventured into the wilderness and encountered a genuine humanity where he had thought there was none, reacting with humility and often guilt about his social prejudice and what he felt to be his own middle-class inadequacies. Recalling his research amongst various mining communities for ‘The Big Hewer’, he wrote that, ‘It was always with a sense of shock that, meeting with such men on the British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 139 8. CPA 1/3/1/16, ‘Lectures Given by Charles Parker’, ‘The Missing Link: John B. Sheldon Annual Memorial Lecture, 30 September 1966’, mss, p. 2. 9. Peripherally involved with the original Ballads, Donnellan developed three of them for television ‘Shoals of Herring’, ‘The Fight Game’ and ‘The Big Hewer’ (1972-73). Working mainly in television his concerns echoed Parker’s and he continued the venerable documentary tradition of John Grierson through his films. ‘Private Faces’ (1962) caused a fearful reaction in his boss, Grace Wyndham Goldie, and the film was suppressed. It was a study of a Durham miner who epitomized the qualities that Donnellan valued but which worried his bosses. He described his subject as ‘an absolutely stunning man, eloquent, committed, humane, unfaultable in terms of his integrity, his stance in the community, his conscious sense of having learnt from life what life had to tell him, his atheism, his socialism’ (quoted in Gilbert 1999). For an account of Donnellan’s work see Mardy (1998) and Pettitt (2000). 10. Transcript: Charles Parker, The Tape Recorder and the Oral Tradition (broadcast on 11 September 1971, Radio 3, produced by Michael Mason). Copy loaned to the author by Helen Lloyd, BBC Radio WM. 11. Parker, The Tape Recorder and the Oral Tradition, pp. 1-2. surface, fresh from the pithead baths, I found seemingly ordinary, quiet spoken people much like other men’ (Parker 1961: 51). Unlike MacNeice however, Parker’s perception had all the traits of the romantic convert. In his encounters something new and extraordinary occurred, resultant of asking questions about particular experiences that had not been asked before. For Parker, speakers themselves experienced a kind of reverie when turning to contemplate anew the routine of their lives - a miner collecting his lamp and docket as he goes down the pit, for instance. Thus, ‘they take off into moments of extraordinary almost oral exaltation if you like, in which the language really becomes incandescent, and you are sort of washed away’.10 Unexceptional experience is conjured up as something else when treated with the passionate speech of people newly aware of a power and poetry of their words. In this manner the ‘ordinary’ was afforded significance and as a result (in theory at least), ‘ordinary’ people assumed a position of authority over the narration of their own lives. Parker reflected on the implications of this for BBC practice. An inhouse document, Principles and Practice in Documentary Programmes, outlined the nature of authority as claimed for and constructed by the Corporation. Parker reported that it asserted that a speaker: must be someone whom the audience recognises as having the right to express a personal opinion, and whom they clearly understand as doing so as himself and not as the BBC ... an expert, a scientist or politician, or professional man ... Equally a journalist or broadcaster can rise (sic) to a stature in which he is expected to express judgment of his own ... like Malcolm Muggeridge. (Quoted in Parker 1973: 134) Parker dismissed any claim to an overall, reassuring or commanding authority in his work. For him working-class language had its own authority and value because it was informal, unfettered, ‘real’ and organically connected to the individual. This was speech imbued with ‘life’. This was something that for him was understood to be outside of a certain kind of educational process whose results were evinced by a stagnant elite, ‘preoccupied with manners, with beauty, with aesthetics ... with polite usage, grace’, qualities which ‘turn on themselves and become sterile’. Middle-class talk was ultimately ‘a barrier to hide behind, not ... a means of communication’. The vernacular was that ‘which satisfied’, it was ‘rich ... accurate, economical’. At its most effective this could be found at the margins of the nation - amongst the speakers of Gaelic and Welsh, but also in the ways that they used English. It was particularly evident amongst groups such as the miners who spoke in a manner ‘in which every syllable, every vowel is, so to speak, caressed by the voice, and the concepts are felt with a passion’.11 In turn, the incorporation of this kind of talk into the Radio Ballads lent the form the authority of authentic art, that it: 140 Paul Long makes something of the same imaginative demands upon its audience as does the traditional ballad ... While the radio form is much more complex, it retains that quality of authenticity, of concrete and direct utterance which the ballad proper shares with the best of documentary.12 And the Radio Ballads were understood as serious art. In an article drawing attention to the decline in BBC listeners Tom Driberg placed ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ alongside a production of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood as broadcasts of ‘artistic importance’ and in need of encouragement (Driberg 1958b: 142). In their influential appraisal of poplar culture Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel suggested that alongside The Goons the series represented ‘the only truly imaginative attempt to use sound broadcasting creatively’ (Hall and Whannel 1964: 259). When Argo - a subsidiary of the Decca label - issued the Radio Ballads on record, they were sold alongside traditional folk records, classical music, recitations of contemporary poetry and Shakespeare’s plays. The project of working-class culture We can further understand the significance of Parker’s approach and the response to his work, then, by situating them within a broader project in post-war Britain that was concerned with the lineaments of class and culture. Robert Hewison has suggested that the boundaries of national identity were at issue in this period. The work of Raymond Williams, especially, suggested a redefinition of the social that would account for marginalized cultural traditions such as ‘the communitarian values of the working class as opposed to the individualism, tempered by the notions of “service”, of the bourgeoisie’ (Hewison 1997: 99). The rethinking of cultural imperatives and absolutes also contributed to official policy, which, as Francis Mulhern observes, ‘sponsored a vision of classlessness - through equality of opportunity - but, precisely in doing so, instated the working class as a real cultural presence and topic’ (Mulhern 1996: 28). Alongside the Thompsonian recovery of ordinary experience from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ (E.P. Thompson 1979: 13), a broad range of sociological investigation and pedagogical theory was prompted by the category of ‘working-class culture’. For instance, the Education Act of 1944 had endorsed a reappraisal of pedagogical imperatives and the identification of working-class children as both ‘culturally deprived’ and as the inheritors of ‘very real values of their own, values which are perhaps essential to civilization, and yet which do not flourish in other reaches of society’ (Jackson and Marsden 1973: 245). Recognizing the scarcity of serious and humane treatments of workingclass life in the broadcast media, on completion of ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ Parker had transcripts of the extensive actuality forwarded to the obvious expert of the day - Richard Hoggart. Similarly, he initiated a correspondence with archetypal ‘Angry Young Man’ and proletarian artist - Arnold Wesker that would ultimately lead to their collaboration in the grandiose mission of British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 141 12. Parker, ‘John Axon and the Radio Ballad’. 13. CPA 1/6/8, ‘Publications’, Charles Parker, ‘Social Change in the 50s and 60s: “The Media and the Masses”’, mss, 31 July 1974. p. 2. 14. CPA 1/3/1/7, Letter, 20 November 1962, Charles Parker to Geoffrey Hodson (London County Council Education Officer’s Department), p. 2. the Centre 42 project that sought to bring culture to deprived working-class communities (see Watt 2003). In his exchange with such individuals Parker engaged with the intensifying post-war debate about the perceived effects of mass culture, encapsulated in the idea that, ‘Educated people are forever asking other educated people, in a worried tone of voice, questions which amount to “What do you think about popular culture?” (or “mass culture” or “popular art” or “the mass media”, terms commonly interchanged)’ (Cannon 1963: 23). Despite the insights and contribution of Hoggart and Raymond Williams, these were, of course, questions that concealed abiding fears and assumptions about the tastes and nature of the ‘mob’ and the generally negative quality of the culture of affluence. For many commentators and interpreters Hoggart and Williams identified and validated what was acceptable and authentic about working-class life in the face of the threat of commercial culture. Parker’s work was offered and understood in this manner. Thus, he argued that in their proper unaffected speech, working-class people exhibited a quality and an innate creativity. Once recognized, and in tandem with ‘the fundamental potential of the new technology’ of the media, this creativity promised ‘a popular cultural renaissance of Elizabethan proportions’.13 Alongside, if not superseding the vibrancy of the contemporary folk revival, this conjunction offered a reinvigoration of a common culture for the modern age. Thus, ‘The essential genius of tape recorded actuality is it seems to me in its insistent reassertion of the oral tradition and the use of language which gives us back a type of truly popular poetry’.14 This implied a reappraisal of the identification of English, as an academic subject, with the literary tradition and of the way in which educational imperatives actually inhibited word-of-mouth communication. Indeed, for Parker as with many others, his project was a didactic and missionary one, to return people ‘back’ to their authentic traditions that could be opposed to the synthetic, Americanized versions conveyed by the mass media. The end of the Ballads and the end of radio? One way of accounting for the appreciative critical reception of Parker’s work was its status qua radio and for its privileging of the word. Of all the modern media, radio as a form, and as locus of practices directed by Reithian values, accorded with a particularly puritan approach to culture. Reflecting on contemporary prejudices, veteran documentary film-maker John Grierson observed that in outlets such as The Times, the potential and achievement of television was regularly sniffed at, implying ‘that “steam radio” is a purer medium altogether, with “therapeutic and restorative” powers to which television cannot aspire’ (Grierson 1963: 220). Essentially iconoclastic, this kind of rhetoric was echoed by generations of intellectuals schooled in the critique of mass culture formulated by F.R. Leavis. As Leavis’s collaborator Denys Thompson wrote: ‘Pictures are a coarse medium, and as Sir George Barnes has noted, “in a picture age the use of language must be coarsened”’ (Denys Thompson 1961: vii). 142 Paul Long The preference for radio among the cultured as the acceptable technological medium was articulated in reactions to publication of the anticipatory BBC report of 1969, Broadcasting in the Seventies. For many, this document heralded the end of the great age of sound broadcasting. With familiarly puritan overtones, oral historian and broadcaster George Ewart Evans later commented of this moment that: ‘Television was now completely in the saddle and the Third Programme was effectively scrapped. Before long it would have only the occasional feature and would be filled with music. The word was being demoted’ (Evans 1987: 144, original emphasis). The institutional and cultural disaster precipitated by the report was sketched in human terms with Parker playing a central and symbolic role when he was prematurely ‘retired’ by the BBC in 1972 as a direct result of these changes. His ousting generated a considerable amount of protest. Unions, celebrities and academics voiced their support while journalists constructed the arguments of his case around wider attempts to stem the perceived decline in cultural standards. The case was even raised in the House of Commons and discussed in these terms. MP Phillip Whitehead suggested that Parker’s ‘main fault seems to be that he wishes to go on producing creative programmes rather than being a cog in a machine creating mass-produced ones’ (Hansard 1972: 1308). Several notables signed a letter of protest in The Times. They wrote that ‘As writers concerned with education, culture and the mass media, we question the wisdom and justice of this decision’ (Abbs et al. 1972: 17). They argued that via his career and particular concern with vernacular speech, Parker had shown what radio could achieve as a creative medium. The Radio Ballads provided ‘a valuable body of materials which are being employed more and more extensively in our schools to reveal, among other things, the power of the spoken word’. Endorsements such as these temper any tendency to dismiss Parker’s perception of the extraordinariness of ordinary speech as idiosyncratic or even eccentric. Not entirely exceptional, his aestheticization of workingclass life and language can be placed in the context of changing attitudes towards the nature of spoken English in the post-1945 era, an expression of the mentalités of a welfare state culture. Parker and the politics and pedagogies of speech Some traditionalists in post-war Britain continued to champion ideas and versions of ‘proper’ speech despite the interventions of more progressive educational ideas. A confused conception of Standard English speech was still offered as innately superior to any other accent, amongst which ‘the urban accents are the worst offender against good speech, especially in the large cities which have grown up as a result of the industrial revolution’ (Hill 1953: 135). Such evaluations were based on a pathological fantasy. ‘Urban’ dialects - for which read ‘working-class’ - were felt to be false, lazy, harsh and ugly. They were the products of environments where shouting British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 143 15. CPA 1/3/3/1, Charles Parker, ‘Why Can’t the Educated Speak English?’, mss, 1969. in smoky atmospheres had been required, where the hurried pace of city life had demanded speedy communication and thus a diminution of form and meaning. Amongst those who expressed scepticism about such conclusions were progressive and radical teachers of English, receptive as they were to the more relativistic arguments of modern linguistics as they filtered into the educational sphere. Felicitously, ‘The Ballad of John Axon’ was broadcast in the same year that Basil Bernstein first advanced his controversial sociology of speech and formulation of ‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes (see Bernstein 1971; Labov 1972; Rosen 1972). In short, the elaborated code is abstract, explicit and independent of context. In contrast, the restricted code is descriptive, based upon narrative and avoids analysis and abstraction. It is predictable, simple and limited in its meaning and variety. Context bound, it relies upon the understanding of speaker and listener, and ‘arises whenever the culture of a group emphasizes we rather than I and occurs to reinforce social relationships and create social solidarity’ (Reid 1984: 183). Despite the finesse of Bernstein’s argument the elaborated code became equated with the middle classes and the restricted code with the working classes. Ostensibly, this work was offered as an observation on the continued and general academic failure of working-class children. Bernstein suggested that this group was disempowered by the need to negotiate between the ‘restricted’ code of the home and the ‘elaborated’ code of school and the academic world - which favoured the middle classes. Described as ‘perhaps naïve’ in his approach, certainly vague in method, Bernstein’s conclusions were taken by some as attributing the failure of working-class children to a collective cognitive defect (See Burke et al. 2000: 444). This was particularly attractive to those who were ill-disposed towards egalitarian impulses and particular modes of education designed to alleviate the ‘cultural deficit’ of a class-ridden society. For them, Bernstein codified and supported familiar prejudices about the low intelligence of the majority. For progressives, Bernstein failed to take account of these prejudices, provided a superficial analysis of class, and over-emphasized the values of the ‘elaborated’ code at the expense of those of the ‘restricted’ - not least of all in his choice of terms. As Raymond Williams has suggested: ‘A definition of language is always implicitly or explicitly, a definition of human beings in the world’ (Williams 1977: 21). Predicated upon an analogy of ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ with ‘oral’ and ‘literate’, Parker’s was one of the earliest voices raised in protest at the implications of Bernstein’s ideas, and on at least one occasion he shared a platform with him. His own position was articulated in the title of one paper, which asked ‘Why Can’t the Educated Speak English?’15 As we have seen, in his celebration of its ‘realism’, veracity and lack of abstraction, his validation of working-class speech was based upon the very aspects that Bernstein highlighted as social impediments yet were taken to be qualitative defects. 144 Paul Long ‘Oracy’ was one name given to the pedagogy of talk (see Atkinson et al. 1964). This was the subject of a landmark conference held at the University of Birmingham in Easter 1965. It was here that Parker held forth on the superiority of vernacular speech, and while not every one was in sympathy with his inversion of existing prejudices, there were many who were prepared to accept that it was at least as equally valid as ‘Received Pronunciation’ or concepts of ‘Standard English’ (see Parker 1965; Halliday 1965). Keynote speaker Andrew Wilkinson underscored this position. In his address, he condemned as shameful the neglect of a vibrant oral culture, how children spoke and what they spoke about. Advocating that language work should be based upon precepts of creativity, rather than the repetition of the ideas and words of others, he stated that acceptance of the concept of Oracy implies a reorientation in our educational practice which in places will need to be drastic. The key word in our school disciplinary system has been ‘Shut up!’; we have been obeyed only too well. (Wilkinson 1965: 4) Parker’s contribution to debates about society, language and education was initially recognized and encouraged by individual schoolteachers. They sought copies of the ballads and advice about how properly to go about investigating talk with children in order to make teaching relevant and meaningful to them. A great music: the Long March of Everyman After the cancellation of the Radio Ballad series Parker’s cultural project was one that he increasingly posed as part of a wider radical struggle on behalf of working-class identity and consciousness. To this end he helped establish the Birmingham and Midland Folk Centre in 1965 in order to collect and disseminate traditional folk material. He was also a founder member of the highly popular Grey Cock Folk Club (established in 1966) in Birmingham, which boasted E.P. Thompson as its honorary vice-president.16 His collaboration with individuals such as MacColl, A.L. Lloyd and others in the folk movement brought him into contact with Communist Party cultural analyses and in 1965 he joined a Marxist Study Group in Birmingham that was guided by the influential critic and theorist George Thomson. Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, Thomson had been a key figure in the Cultural Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) since the 1930s. His work had a clear social and political purpose. His Marxist reading of the Classics was a world away from that of the public school tradition and the rarefied atmosphere of academia. His work was aimed at ‘the people’ in order to ‘rescue the poet from ... scholasticism’ (Thomson 1966: viii). His own observation that ‘the historian of the past is a citizen of the present’, was an idea echoed in the British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 145 16. Source: Mike Turner, ‘The Grey Cock’, Charles Parker Archive Trust Annual Report 1984. ethos of the CPGB Historian’s Group and the projects of individuals such as Christopher Hill, John Saville, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Parker himself became interested in the traditions of oral culture and linked his work directly to the project of ‘History from below’. Thus, he met with the work of contemporary historians directly in the landmark Radio 4 series The Long March of Everyman (1971-72) where, despite ‘retirement’, Parker was employed as ‘Producer for the Voices of the People’. Raymond Williams was enlisted as a literary consultant while contributors included Asa Briggs, George Rudé, Gwyn Williams, Stuart Hall, Christopher Hill and Raphael Samuel. Running for 26 weeks, the series was conceived as ‘an exploratory act of faith’ into the possibility (pace Tolstoy) of developing a history of the ‘swarm life’ of society’s ‘unknown soldiers’ (Barker 1975: 295). Without recordings of historical accounts from the perspective of ordinary people beyond living memory, suitable material was sought in works like Dorothy Thompson’s The Early Chartists (1971) and A.L. Lloyd’s folk song treatises such as Come all Ye Bold Miners (1952). Folk songs were sung by renowned performers, and other lines spoken by ‘ordinary’ people to convey the experience of those of the past. For producer Michael Mason this programme was an attempt to give back to the people as a whole a sense of their history, fulfilling a need to revivify national traditions and roots that had been cut since 1945. He waxed lyrical over the technique of the series, that the marshalling of this material conveyed a ‘Great Music’. Voices, music and sounds gave a historical texture, conveying an impressionistic portrait of historical events at a micro level. Echoing Parker, he talked of great new popular art forms developing from such work, This gradual emergence of Everyman’s voice is something which the series must itself enact in its early programmes - and it must also show how the split between elitist poetry and common speech is a feature of later literate society rather than earlier oral tradition. (Mason 1971: 684) Mason’s assistant Daniel Snowman suggested that a view of history ‘from the bottom up’ qualified a democratic pedagogical imperative that, in the hands of teachers, pupils might be allowed ‘to think of the past, not as a forced diet of “Them”, but as a banquet of “Us”’ (Snowman 1971: 685). Evaluating and critiquing Parker’s achievement I do not wish to devalue this wider project of cultural democratization, which is truly one of the considerable and undervalued achievements of the postwar period. However, we should not ignore some of the problems underwriting the assumptions that prompted such projects, which can be illustrated in Parker’s own work. His approach to sound, for instance, was consistent with that of the British documentary tradition in the cinema. For John Grierson 146 Paul Long the documentary form was creative in the same manner as music hall, ballet, post-impressionist painting or the blank verse of Shakespeare, but could claim something more as a result of its subject matter: when we come to documentary we come to the actual world, to the world of the streets, of the tenements and the factories, the living people and the observation of living people ... We have to give creative shapes to it, we have to be profound about it before our documentary art is as good or better than the art of the studio. (Grierson 1998: 76-77, emphasis added) He wrote that it was important to make a distinction between ‘a method which describes only the surface values of a subject’ and that which ‘more explosively reveals the reality of it. You photograph the natural life, but you also, by your own juxtaposition of detail, create an interpretation of it’ (Grierson 1966: 148). Such work was not about mere reproduction but about the correct kind of mediation and interpretation of the world. This was based upon the notion that the subject, i.e. ‘ordinary people’, was itself the guarantor of truth, qualifying a particularly prescriptive interpretation of the world. As Parker revealed: I am concerned politically and culturally at this moment with expressing what I consider to be positive and assertive and revolutionary in workingclass experience. I consider that the role of any artist seriously committed to the working class is that of eliciting from the working class in its many aspects those areas in which it triumphantly demonstrates the potential for a true proletarian consciousness and culture which sections of the working class are capable of creating. (Parker 1975: 102, emphasis added) Parker’s argument (echoing Grierson and resonating in the ideas of many of those others mentioned in this article) is that ‘criteria for selection’ must be applied a priori, for it is not possible to appreciate the nature of consciousness from hours of unedited speech gathered in research. An idea of political consciousness is distilled from that speech, ‘which may be ahead of the everyday awareness of the working-class audience you then play it to’ (Parker 1975: 103). Assuming the benign authority of the theorist and convinced of the essential qualities of working-classness, he dismissed ‘other’ interpretations of life and the world, the understanding and perception of banality and the common-place, the everyday contingent existence that he termed ‘the manipulated awareness of the working class that just wants a quiet life’ (Parker 1975: 103). Parker’s perception of language was the result of his concentration on particularly ‘authentic’ working-class sites. While they branched out into coverage of the disabled, travellers, boxers and ‘youth’ it is noteworthy that the first and most successfully executed of the Radio Ballads dealt with British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 147 17. CPA 1/8/12/1, Charles Parker, ‘Miscellaneous notes to group meeting 7 January 1967’, n.p. 18. Phillip Donnellan, ‘A Tribute to Charles Parker (1919-1980)’, Programme of Commemoration, 11 December 1981, n.p. (emphasis added). highly traditional, masculine, working-class occupations: in rail, labouring, fishing and mining. At a time of substantial change in the nature of work these fields were ossified and romanticized for the evidence they provided of a genuine and enduring working-class consciousness. These professions involve a highly visible and self-evident form of labour, the aestheticization of which enjoins with a strong lineage. William Morris, for instance, said that ‘the thing which I understand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour’. Similarly, at George Thomson’s Marxist Study Group, Parker learned that ‘Art is a form of mental labour, and is creative in the sense that all human labour is creative i.e. creates value’.17 Of course it validates the necessary activity of a majority yet at the same time identifies this as the defining character of life, self-evident from the term ‘workingclass’ which itself becomes limited in its application. Similarly, Parker’s claims to validate ‘experience’ are limited. What resulted was a constant disavowal of individuality - literally so in the fact that respondents whose voices comprise the actuality of the Radio Ballads remained uncredited and generally anonymous. When figures such as fishermen Sam Larner and Ronnie Balls were lauded, it was as representative men. Their idiomatic expressions became examples of ‘collective’ expression, not their own property as such. This was a characteristic of the series that drew some criticism as it drew to a close. A critic at The Times noted that any ‘everyday independent-minded statement’ when merged with folk-song was used to ‘transform the speakers from individuals into absolute representations of the working-classes’ (Anon. 1963: 5). Such discoveries and representations of the working classes, descriptions of their positive or negative qualities, have been a curiously recurrent and instructive event in British life. I would argue that consistent features in such descriptions, whether from ‘within’ or ‘without’, involve claims for the authenticity of what is exhibited, the authority of the ‘explorer’, and the implication, explicit or otherwise, that the working class is an object that never knows itself. What is known or knowable proves problematic too, always derived from the nature of the distance between observer and observed and the curious relationship that is entered into. As MacNeice observed, ‘Educated people in England, if they consort with members of the working classes, tend to think of them as ‘characters ... all the time the yokels are on the stage and you are in the stalls’ (MacNeice 1996b: 140). Conclusion According to Philip Donnellan, Parker’s story is that ‘of a genuinely honest man who, largely by accident found himself confronting Reality. All artists seek such a confrontation: in paint, in print, in film - but very few pursue it to the end with such unrelenting persistence or at such personal cost. He was indeed a man to be remembered’.18 The cost was met in the increasingly desperate vision of a cultural utopia and his over-extension in a dizzying array of projects that contributed to his premature death in 1980. When he died both The Times and Morning Star carried obituaries, 148 Paul Long celebrating his artistry and in the latter, his status as a true champion of the working class (see Cohen 1980; Bishop and Wrend 1980). Clearly, there are reasons for celebrating his life and his contribution to radio but also to the intellectual work and democratic changes that have taken place over the last half-century which have accorded respect to each and every life. By the same degree, it is important to understand the limits of how the ‘ordinary’ was (and is) validated in relation to particular definitions and demands of ‘authenticity’, ‘experience’ and ‘culture’. Acknowledgement This article has been developed from ‘Parker’s Politics - Charles Parker and Society’ presented at the first Charles Parker Day hosted by the Bournemouth Media School on 5 April 2004. I would like to thank those individuals who offered comments and suggestions on this work, particularly Seán Street. Thanks also go to Sîan Roberts and Fiona Tait of the City Archives at Birmingham Central Library. Works cited Abbs, Peter, Inglis, Fred, Bantock, G.H., Morris, Ben, Calthrop, Kenyon, Thompson, Denys, Holbrook, David, Evans, George Ewart, Hall, Stuart M. (1972), (Letters to the Editor) ‘Leaving the BBC’, The Times, 15 November. Amis, Martin (2000), ‘I’ve been name dropping, in a way, ever since I first said: “Dad”’, The Guardian (G2), 9 May. Anon. 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British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain... 151 Thompson, Paul (1978), The Voice of the Past: Oral History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Paul, Wailey, Tony and Lummis, Trevor (eds) (1983), Living the Fishing, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thomson, George (1966), Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama, London: Lawrence and Wishart. First published 1941. ‘W.L.W’ (1958), ‘Radio Notes: A Modern Ballad Opera and Folk Hero’, Manchester Guardian, 3 July. Watt, David (2003), ‘“The Maker and the Tool”: Charles Parker, Documentary Performance, and the Search for a Popular Culture’ in New Theatre Quarterly, 19: 1. Whitehead, Kate (1989), The Third Programme: A Literary History, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilkinson, Andrew (1965), ‘Some Aspects of Oracy’, NATE Bulletin: Some Aspects of Oracy, 2: 2 (Summer). Williams, Raymond (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suggested citation Long, P. (2004), ‘British radio and the politics of culture in post-war Britain: the work of Charles Parker’, The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media 2: 3, pp. 131–152, doi: 10.1386/rajo.2.3.131/1 Contributor details Paul Long is Course Director at the University of Central England in Birmingham where he teaches media history and theory. His recent publications concern the redesign and image of this city as a cultural destination. In relation, and in conjunction with Tim Wall, he is in the process of establishing a new research centre Urban Cultures: Popular Music, Radio, and the Politics of the City. Contact: Department of Media and Communication, University of Central England, Perry Barr, Birmingham, B42 2SU E-mail: paul.long@uce.ac.uk 152 Paul Long