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BBC News
27-07-2025
- Science
- BBC News
How voices from Daventry travelled the world
This years marks the centenary of the opening of the BBC transmitting station at Daventry in carried the BBC World Service to countries across the world from 1932 to 1992 and was also the site of the world's first national radio how did this small town in the Midlands become a famous name across the globe? Why was Daventry chosen as a transmitter site? When the BBC sprung into life in 1922, radio broadcasts could only be made over short company's chief engineer, Peter Eckersley, believed it was possible to create a long wave transmitter that would serve most of the BBC decided to find a site for a transmitting station that was situated north of a line between the Severn and the Wash, surrounded by as much land as locations were explored and Borough Hill in Daventry turned out to have the best coverage of BBC bought 58 acres (23 hectares) of the hill and started work on constructing the station. There was no road to the top, so it built a rack and pinion railway to haul building materials up the 128m (420ft) masts were erected with a lattice of copper wires and aluminium transmission equipment was housed in a spacious hall with cathedral windows in what became known as the 5XX building. What was the first radio service to be broadcast from Daventry? The station opened on 27 July 1925, with a poem called The Dane Tree written by the-then poet laureate, Alfred first broadcasts, for the BBC's National Programme, mainly originated in London and included plays, like The Glittering Gate, the story of two dead was also music, including popular songs and orchestral items. When was the BBC World Service first broadcast from Daventry? The BBC governors had been considering the idea of broadcasting beyond the shores of the United Kingdom for some corporation's engineers knew that short wave radio signals could travel long distances by reflecting off the ionosphere, part of the Earth's atmosphere, making international broadcasting in 1932, they expanded the site at Daventry and installed two short wave transmitters to send out the Empire Service, as the World Service was then called, to four zones across the a speech to mark the opening on 19 December 1932, the BBC's director-general John Reith warned that the early programmes "will neither be very interesting nor very good", but he also said the launch of the service was "a significant occasion in the history of the British Empire".He predicted that "broadcasting is a development with which the future must reckon and reckon seriously". How big did the international operation at Borough Hill become? As time went on, more services were launched to different countries, and complicated schedules of frequency changes were needed to keep the radio stations on air as atmospheric conditions changed during the engineer John Barry recalls services being broadcast in about 38 languages in the added that most of the languages were for eastern countries, as "in Asia, there are various vernaculars of Chinese, Indian, etcetera whereas, if you broadcast to the west, it was mainly Spanish". What impact did the transmitting station have on Daventry? People living in Daventry reported hearing programmes through metal items in their houses, such as taps and kettles, as well as chimneys and Viveash, another retired engineer, said other aspects of daily life were affected: "When TV started, [the radio signals] did cause a lot of interference with TV, so we went through a bit of a period being unpopular."When cars started to get in-built burglar alarms, you'd get the sound of the programme coming out of the car when you got into it."BBC sports teams were created and a BBC club was opened in Sheaf Street.A number of the men who came to work on Borough Hill ended up marrying local women. Why did the BBC station at Borough Hill close? There were two main reasons why the BBC vacated the Cold War, a period of tension between the USA and the Soviet Union , was over so the USA's international radio service, the Voice of America, moved out of the BBC's site at Woofferton in Service transmission could then be transferred from Daventry to modernising the Daventry facility would have involved constructing a large number of self-supporting towers on Borough Hill in place of masts held up by would have been expensive, and may not have enhanced the Daventry Bird, who worked on the hill for nearly 50 years, was given the honour of switching off the last transmitter on 29 March exhibition is currently open at Daventry's museum telling the story of the BBC's time in the town. Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home review – the wonder of the wireless revolution
One hundred years ago this summer, from high above Daventry in Northamptonshire, voices began to beam into the homes of 20 million people. They came from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter – truly revolutionary technology in 1925 – which opened with a new work, Daventry Calling, by the poet Alfred Noyes. 'Sitting around your hearth/Ye are at one with all on earth,' the poem concluded, giving a utopian flavour that recurs often through Beaty Rubens's meticulously detailed, engaging book. Exploring how radio transformed the lives of Britons between the two world wars, it's a striking read in our smartphone-dominated world, as we witness another radical invention quickly becoming part of everyday life. A portal into other places from your own house was also an easy concept to sell. Take the cover of the first Christmas issue of Radio Times from 1923, one of many fascinating images in the book, showing a rapt family gathering around their small set. Rubens, a BBC producer for more than 35 years, is keen for her book to show how radio affected people's lives – 'the shift in household habits, the awakenings of new tastes, the alterations and adaptations of attitudes'. Evidence for this was minimal before she discovered the work of two pioneering audience researchers, Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, whose 1938 explorations into radio's effects on working-class people in Barton Hill, near Bristol, was published, and quickly overlooked, in the week Britain declared war on Germany. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion In a box in the Bodleian Library, Rubens found the pamphlet and Gill's original notepads, full of rare examples of early feedback. These included radio's effects on a man who was once drunk and abusive ('his wife used to tremble when he came home at night, but now he never goes out on Saturday nights even… he used to keep pigeons, now he breeds canaries'), a Welsh grocer obsessed with the news ('I've even neglected the bacon machine') and a husband who tunes the radio to foreign-language stations when he leaves for work, so his wife can't understand it, then disconnects it completely when he goes away for a conference. 'She's left him now,' trills the interviewee on this subject. Rubens's findings may have been the book's impetus, but other stories around the development of radio put flesh on these bones. We learn about a forerunner, the 19th-century Electrophone, which played performances and shows over phone lines (in a gorgeous piece for the Strand magazine, children's writer Arthur Mee calls it the 'pleasure telephone'). We're also told about wireless communications more broadly: they may have saved some lives on the Titanic via an SOS call, but they also hampered them (richer passengers on board were invited to send wireless communications back to shore, which jammed the channels, meaning several ice warnings were missed). Fabulous characters crop up too, such as Nellie Melba, the Australian opera singer who gave the first live broadcast performance in 1920. She initially declined the invitation in a diva-like fashion ('my voice is not a subject for experimentation') before, Rubens notes, she was offered '£1,000 (about £45,000 today) which, even by her standards, must have seemed easy money for a 20-minute recital'. The book's most moving moments offer radio as a lifeline. A Mrs Ettery reported that there was now 'much more to talk about… there are so many interesting things on the wireless'. What a joy, too, to read about director general Lord Reith's first director of talks, Hilda Matheson, who informed the BBC's style ('she was passionately committed to the novel idea that broadcaster should not speak at listeners but make them feel that they were in the room together'). She also launched weekly discussions with female MPs and a show called Questions for Women Voters in 1928. A year later, 10 more women MPs were elected, raising the number to 14. The finest testimony, however, comes from a 1928 letter to the BBC from a 'clerk in a provincial city'. His life is 'a tram-ride to the office, lunch in a tea-shop or saloon bar, a tram-ride home' and he can't spend much money, 'because you've got your holidays to think of'. But, he adds: 'Please don't think I'm complaining. I'm only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It's a real magic carpet.' Almost 100 years later, despite our world being so very different to his, radio, at its best, continues to be. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home by Beaty Rubens is published by Bodleian (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
