ABSTRACT
As part of its tenth anniversary special edition on 19 January 1939, The Listener published three pages of brief congratulatory notices by a representative sampling of the age’s Great Men, notable personalities in fields ranging from art to biology, education, literary journalism, politics, and religion, as well as broadcasting. Two keynotes reverberate throughout these encomiums on The Listener’s achievements over its first decade of existence. Many of the writers note the magazine’s national importance as-–like the BBC itself, with which it shared a close connection-–a vehicle of high cultural ideals and “social purpose” (125-6). Some of these same letters, and several others, also note the cultural, educational, and social importance of a weekly journal devoted to rescuing the spoken word from the oblivion otherwise consigned to it by the inherently fleeting nature of sound broadcasting. More specifically, to look ahead a few years in recording technology, these letters celebrate the publication’s effort to wrest the spoken word into permanence, or at least a provisional stability, from the ephemerality of broadcasting before the cumbersome impracticalities of disc-recording were surmounted by the advent of the more wieldy technology of magnetic tape in the years following World War II. “The trouble” with listening in, as the Archbishop of York writes, “is that we cannot go over the ground again, as we can when reading. The word is spoken, heard, and gone. So it is a great aid to serious listening when opportunity is given to read what has been heard” (123). In another contribution, Viscount Stankey, President of the British Institute of Adult Education, with which the BBC was closely involved, begins with the “old Latin line which says that ‘The written word
‘Masters of the Microphone.’ Published in The Listener’s tenth anniversary number on 19 January 1939, this two-page photo-collage, set in the art deco lobby of Broadcasting House, celebrates the radio careers of several of the BBC’s best-known broadcasters, including Desmond MacCarthy (third from
left), George Bernard Shaw (seventh from left), William Butler Yeats (tenth from left), Winston Churchill and H.G. Wells (center), Stanley Baldwin (tenth from right), and Harold Nicolson (sixth from right).
