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Ballads from the Old Bailey

2010-07-22T12:34:16+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t0dbn

If only we could hear voices from the past: the other couples whispering in our bedroom, the other children shouting up the stairs. As a radio producer I often think about what the past sounded like. That's why I was excited when I realised there is a way of hearing those voices: the records of criminal trials in the Old Bailey. Thanks to the court short-hand writers we have records of everyday speech from the 18th century: teenagers, servants and prostitutes and scholars and highwaymen, all recorded.

I had no idea this rich resource existed until I worked with Amanda Vickery on her last Radio 4 series, 'A History of Private Life'. She brought me vivid material - ordinary people describing their everyday lives - and some of it from the Old Bailey archives. From that came the idea for this series. Amanda is a leading social and cultural historian, and we have used the archive to explore everyday life in London, the streets, the parks, the shops, children's homes. The programme in which poor children speak about their lives is very moving.

I'm indebted to the two wonderful founders of the Old Bailey Online, Professor Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) and Professor Bob Shoemaker (University of Sheffield), who helped me at every stage of the production process, explaining everything I didn't understand. Queries about the courts - what did a judge say when he sentenced someone to death? - were answered by Professor Peter King (Open University) & Professor John Styles (University of Hertfordshire). Musician and scholar Jeremy Barlow tracked down ballads, and singers Gwyn Herbert and Tom Guthrie, and fiddler Sharon Lindo, brought them to life. We did try to sing outside for a more authentic sound but were bedevilled by planes, sirens, and local workmen joining in... Jon Calver recorded the music, Hannah Marshall found the locations, Jo Coombs helped develop the format, and David Smith mixed the sound.

We needed a lot of readers to bring these voices from the Old Bailey to life: some are actors, but some are the modern counterparts of the people speaking in the 18th century. So, the children's speech (in next week's programme about children appearing as witnesses, victims and defendents) is read by local school children; the voice of the wonderfully camp Italian scholar in the last programme is read for us by an Italian lawyer working in London, and so on. And the really interesting thing was how easily and quickly it came to life: 18th century speech is astonishingly modern.

Elizabeth Burke is producer of Voices from the Old Bailey

Here are two ballads from the period, recorded for the series: both are touching and the second is rather frank in its description of the hardships of the time:

Episode two of Voices from the Old Bailey was on Radio 4 this morning (repeated tonight at 2130). Listen again and read more about the series on the Radio 4 web site.
Search the Old Bailey archive for yourself. See if an ancestor appeared there.
The picture shows a handbill about workhouse cruelty from the period: "Being a full and true account of one Mrs Mary Whiftle, a poor woman..." There are more pictures from the period in the Radio 4 group on Flickr.

Roger Bolton on the London Season

2010-07-16T12:55:00+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/london-season/

If Dr Johnson was right in saying that "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life", then a lot of Feedback listeners are pretty exhausted. The cause is the two week London Season which has just finished on Radio 4. Let me give you a flavour of the reaction of some out of London listeners.

"This programme (The London Story) summed up the kind of smug self satisfied attitude that makes Londoners so unpopular throughout the rest of the UK. The entire programme amounted to a 45 minute pat on the back about how wonderful it is to live there."

"I keep hearing adverts for a Radio 4 season where they will be focusing on London. Most of us thought that they had been doing this for the last 50 years."

"The new London series is just another symptom of the fundamentally metropolitan outlook of Radio 4 and the BBC in general."

One listener even wrote "Bring me the head of Radio 4, Roger." Well that won't be necessary because Mark Damazer has already announced he is stepping down and going off to run an Oxford College.

His successor, Gwynneth Williams was announced on Thursday and she of course starts with a clean slate. New Controllers of Radio 4 are usually asked to try and increase the listenership outside the south east, the numbers decline the further north you go, and you may have noticed more on air regional accents in recent years. (Mine is basically Cumbrian, corrupted by years living in the Great Wen).

It would appear from the reactions of Feedback listeners that there is a lot more to do.

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

Listen again to the whole programme, get in touch with Feedback, find out how to join the listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
Visit the London: Another Country? homepage for details of all the programmes in the season and to listen to those that are still available.
Radio 4 hosted a live chat here on the blog and on Twitter for the Greatest City debate. You can read the conversation here and the tweets here.
Some listeners enjoyed London: Another Country? Scroll through tweets about the season for a fairly even mixture of pro and anti.
The picture is by Steve Bowbrick.

Bringing the voices of the Old Bailey to life

2010-07-15T14:45:50+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t0dbn

The job of the historian is to make the long dead speak again - we take dusty, unpromising documents and breathe life back into the faded hand-writing. It can be a magical craft, akin to necromancy - trying to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Scribbled love letters, desperate diaries, accounts and lists are all grist to my mill.

But what of the vast majority of people in the past who could not write? The unlettered and unsung. Beneath the tip of the iceberg of literacy, lies the hulking majority who could not record their struggles and successes on paper for posterity. But there was one special place where the words of the poor and the illiterate were recorded verbatim - the criminal court. Read court transcripts and you can hear at last the hubbub of the people.

This is why historians are so excited about court records. At the Old Bailey fifty thousand cases were heard in the eighteenth century alone. A great cast of characters had their day in court, the snooping neighbour, the innocent by-stander, the local gossips, as well as the beleaguered victim and accused criminal. Some are witty, some wily and some wistful - but all reveal the very rhythm of life in the salty vernacular - all taken down in shorthand by the clerks.

The Old Bailey was the principal court for London and Middlesex, but it tried cases from much further afield. London doubled in size over the eighteenth-century from half a million to a million souls. The metropolis drew people like a magnet, from all over the UK, from Ireland, but also from Africa, America and South Asia, as well as continental Europe. It was Europe`s biggest capital, a heaving city of migrants, particularly young women looking for work. The whole country flowed through the city: half of the entire urban population experienced London life at some point in their lives. So, the Old Bailey records are not in any way narrowly London-centred, they are a window on a booming nation.

Historians use the records of the Old Bailey to study criminal justice and the criminal underclass, but you can also use them to recreate work and play, relationships and attitudes, street-life and shopping, the list goes on and on. I am awed by the magical access they give to a world we have lost - and could recapture in no other way. I use them in this series, to offer pin-sharp impressions of ordinary people - under pressure, acting out the most dramatic episode of their existence, sometimes arguing for their very lives.

I first used the Old Bailey Online for my book Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England to re-imagine the interiors of London lodgings. I looked at theft cases to chart the pans, tea pots and boxes ordinary people had in their possession, and at burglary cases to think about privacy, rebuilding the boundaries that Georgian people, rich and poor alike, sought to defend. However as I read the cases I was struck again and again by the panorama of characters and the juiciness and grip of their stories. Here is the first script for that perennial staple - the court room drama. The dialogue is so fresh. It was just asking to be made into radio.

Professor Amanda Vickery writes and presents Voices from the Old Bailey

Voices from the Old Bailey began on Radio 4 this morning with episode one of four: 'Highwaymen' (repeated tonight at 2130). Listen again and read more about the series on the Radio 4 web site.
Search the Old Bailey archive for yourself. See if an ancestor appeared there.
There are more pictures from the period in the Radio 4 group on Flickr.

London: World City?

2010-07-12T15:14:37+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/london-season/

Editor's note: Tony Travers is Director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics and a contributor to Radio 4's London: Another Country. Here, he responds to this morning's #GreatestCity debate with a short essay about London's status as a 'world city' - SB

London can be a difficult place - the scale of vast cities can challenge human comprehension. It is also incredibly spread out, with its eight million people covering about 700 square miles of land. But what makes it so rewarding is its extraordinary mixture of people and history, combined with a relentless capacity to rejuvenate and re-create itself.

Between two and three million of today's Londoners were born overseas - the number is inevitably imprecise. There are dozens of national and/or ethnic groups from each continent. Having so many people from different countries makes the city almost unique. Given the short period over which many of them have arrived and their epic diversity, London remains tolerant and, overwhelmingly, peaceful.

Such numbers of people from so many different starting-points inevitably creates opportunities for an endless series of experiences and experiments for anyone who lives in or visits the city. London is also a big Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English town, creating powerful (if complex) links to the rest of the UK.

The city's history is etched in its buildings and streets. Dozens of beautiful books are published each year about London, making it possible to access more and more detail about what happened in the past in these same buildings and streets. Films are also an easily-accessed way of reliving modern history: for anyone who wants to be reminded what 'docklands' looked like before Canary Wharf and about the way in which developers can change the face of the city The Long Good Friday is an entertaining way to do so.

In recent years, the creation of a directly-elected mayor for London has further enhanced the city's image and importance. Given this power and epic size, it is hardly surprising people elsewhere in the UK often see London as too dominant and too powerful. However, once London had been allowed - during the 1920s and 1930s - to become a city of eight million people within a super-region of almost 20 million, there was no way back. The economic benefits of being so populous and with such a large entrepreneurial economy within a relatively small geographical area have given London massive economic importance both within Britain and overseas.

In recent years, an academic literature has emerged about 'world' or 'global' cities. London has always featured as one of the top two or three locations within any list of such places. In terms of its economic importance, its links to the rest of the world, its political/social tolerance and the extraordinary 'world within a city' make-up of its population, it can rationally be compared with Paris, New York, Tokyo, Mumbai or Shanghai.

Other British urban centres have significantly redeveloped in the past 20 years, narrowing the gap between them and London. The UK has a large number of major cities, creating an 'urban system' where each can benefit from the other. Complementary development rather than negative competition is undoubtedly the best way for all to succeed. City life is not for everyone, but for those who do like it the rewards can be enjoyed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. London is, and has always been, a place of opportunity.

Tony Travers is an academic specialising in London and a contributor to Kwame Kwei-Armah's The London Story

Listen to episode one of The London Story on the Radio 4 web site. The second episode is on Tuesday morning at 0900. Find out about all the programmes in the season on the London: Another Country? page.
Play back this morning's live chat about the Greatest City debate on the Radio 4 blog and listen to the programme itself here.
Visit LSE London's web site for more about Tony's work.
The picture shows a crowd at London Zoo. It's by Steve Bowbrick. Used under licence.

The Greatest City Debate

2010-07-12T07:30:00+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t5l7f

The #GreatestCity debate took place this morning at 0900 and hundreds of you joined in here on the blog, on Twitter and on Facebook. Four World Cities squared up for the big fight. Laurie Taylor chaired, four city lovers made the case for their favourites - London, Mumbai, New York and Istanbul - and an audience in the Radio Theatre (in the heart of London, it goes without saying) decided. And the winner was Mumbai.

You can now 'replay' the chat while listening to the programme on the iPlayer.

And once you've listened, please do us a favour and leave a comment on this blog post (using your BBC login) to tell us what you thought of the chat and the programme.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Listen to the Greatest Cities Debate at 0900 this morning and to the other programmes from the season on the London: Another Country page.
City Pictures: New York, by Dhilung Kirat (licence); Istanbul, by Tim O'Brien (licence); Mumbai, by Danial Chitnis (licence); London, by Dimitry B (licence) and Cobbles, by Ogoco (licence).

Four World Cities - which is greatest?

2010-07-11T10:19:19+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t5l7f

Laurie Taylor wants to know which of these four cities is the planet's greatest: Istanbul, Mumbai, New York or London. The big debate is on Radio 4 tomorrow morning (Monday 12 July) at 0900 but we want your opinion now. Leave a comment here on the blog or tweet using the hashtag #GreatestCity, then - here's the important bit - come back to the blog during the programme and join a live chat with other listeners and contributors to the London Season (we're hoping, for instance, that London expert Tony Travers from LSE will be able to join us). See you there!

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Listen to the Greatest Cities Debate at 0900 tomorrow morning and to the other programmes from the season on the London: Another Country page.
The picture is a press photo of Scutari in Istanbul during the early twentieth century, from the Library of Congress collection via the Wikimedia Commons.

Live blogging Front Row from Maida Vale

2009-10-30T19:00:00+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nds0r

1900 Studio MV5, Maida Vale. All around me is the organised chaos of the studio's 75th anniversary celebration. We're on-air in 10 minutes. Bill Paterson, soprano Jane Manning and composer Anthony Payne are in the studio already.

1910. Listen live to the programme here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nds0r.

1915. On air. Presenter John Wilson is walking down from the street talking into a mike. We expect him in the studio about...now.

1918. Poet Paul Farley arrived carrying a sheaf of notes - he claims not to have finished the poem yet!

1924. If you're tweeting about the event, use the hash tag #maidavale.

1930. In the next studio, a funk act is playing for Craig Charles' 6 Music show. Pic here.

1936. We're listening to a tape about the Radiophonic Workshop. Bill Paterson, Jane Manning and Anthony Payne are remembering Delia Derbyshire. "What a character she was..."

1940. Paul's poem is hand-written in a big blue manuscript book.

1943. An incredibly evocative tape of Maida Vale history. Joy Division, Ivor Cutler really stood out for me - my Peel legacy.

1945. Paul Farley tells me he's only feeling the stress of producing his poem now. He looks exhausted.

2012. In the green room. Production team and guests winding down. Taxis arriving. Not sure if live blogging a short programme like Front Row really works. What do you think? Is it worth doing again?

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Front Row is Radio 4's nightly arts review programme - on at 1915 Monday to Friday. Listen again to the Maida Vale special. And scroll to the bottom of this page for a short video of John Wilson at Maida Vale.
Maida Vale's 75th anniversary was pretty busy. The hash tag was #maidavale

Got a question for Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell?

2009-10-27T09:12:57+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/youandyours/coming_up.shtml

Paul Scoins, who works on You & Yours, emailed me: "I wondered if this might be worth flagging up... We've got Tessa Jowell on today to take calls on people's views on the 2012 Olympic legacy."

The programme looks like this:

First half:

Are you still as enthusiastic about the Games as you were when they were won?
What kind of impact do you think the Games will have on the whole of the UK?
What will be the economic impact of the Games? Should the money be spent elsewhere?
Are you concerned that there is a metropolitan bias to the Games?

Second half:

Is the infrastructure needed for the Games to be a success in place?
What will be the legacy of the Games - long term jobs, investment in sport, culture?
Where is the 'added value' to be had? Is the UK making the most of the tourism opportunities?

If you'd like to join in and question the minister, the lines are open now. Call 03700 100 444 or fill in the form on this page. Full details are on the You & Yours home page.

Paul is particularly interested to hear from people directly affected by the Games construction and people who live in Stratford or the other affected areas of East London.

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

Today's You & Yours is presented by Julian Worricker and starts at 1200. You'll be able to listen again here after the broadcast.
The picture, London 2012 Olympic Stadium, is by Mat and is used under licence.

Peter White's week

2009-09-18T11:24:17+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mjr9v

One of my delights over the past few years has been following the so-called 'children of the Olympic bid'. If you've missed it let me fill you in.

These are the youngsters who back in 2005 played a key but little known role in snatching the games for London from under the Parisian nose. Aged between twelve and sixteen at the time, they were selected from east end schools to demonstrate the diversity that London would bring to the games.

Up on stage, as Sebastian Coe put the London case to the International Olympic Committee. Their contrast with 'the suits' that the other cities had on show might just have made all the difference.

I was in Singapore at the time, but I have to admit, it was my producer who cooked up the idea with our commissioning editor at Radio 4 that we should follow these youngsters all the way through to the games themselves and see how their lives were shaped by the event they'd done so much to bring about.

It's been a joy! The first in the current series went out last Monday. We've spent a good deal of this week editing and scripting the second programme.

The great thing about these youngsters is that they have been so welcoming, so frank, so un-phased by having microphones thrust in front of them. There's a presumption that teenagers between about thirteen and seventeen are loathe to utter more than a monosyllable, but nothing could have been further from the truth with this group.

They've welcomed me into their homes, let me watch at close quarters their disasters, sporting and otherwise, and then politely answered questions about them! Talked about their love lives, their beliefs, their ambitions, without a hint of defensiveness. None of this "lessons will have been learned from this". When things go well for them, they share their uninhibited delight; when they screw up, they tell you what went wrong! Anyone with a jaundiced view of today's younger generation should listen to them; they could learn a lot!

You and Yours has also thrown up two particular delights for me this week: first of all my guest on Monday was Margaret Mountford, the businesswoman who has become something of a heroine to viewers of the BBC's 'Apprentice' for her withering look when dismissing the antics of Lord Sugar's most excruciating job applicants.

The You and Yours team have had quite a lot of fun trying to explain to me what a 'withering' look is; one of the great advantages to having been blind from birth, is that withering looks can be safely ignored!

I think Margaret must have got most of her withering looks out of the way while she and the producer negotiated over what she would, and wouldn't answer questions on!

By the time she got to me, she was all smiles (one of the joys of being a presenter; we're a cosseted bunch). She was only too happy to talk about women in the city, the fact that a lot of people came on The Apprentice just to secure a career in television, and even what she thought of a man whose nose was ensured for five million pounds, because it was so good at grading cheese.

But an even higher point than that was my trip on one of the first Greyhound buses to make a scheduled journey in Britain, from Southampton to London.

The iconic American company (actually now British-owned) reckons it can make a go of it here, but we probably haven't helped! And it was all going so well: barrelling up the motorway, Managing Director giving me his pitch, American studies academic waxing lyrical about the music the Greyhound had inspired! In fact, my worry was that this could all turn into far too much of a puff for the company!

I needn't have worried: somewhere near Windlesham in Surrey, so far not a subject of popular song, a keening, whining sound impinged on my interviewing. It quickly became apparent that we were losing power: Soon, with a nifty bit of piloting, the driver slid us to a halt on the hard shoulder! We'd broken down! It's the moment a company dreads

I have to be fair; they took it on the chin, fronted up for the inevitable interview, and summoned taxis to take everyone on to their final destinations. In fact, judging by the response to our programme, its probably done them less harm than they think; but, given that one of their great selling-points was tickets for a pound, I did rather treasure the pay-off: the lady who phoned her son to tell him what had happened, only to receive back this text: "you get what you pay for, mother".

Series four of Children of the Olympic bid is on-air now.
The picture shows Ashley Mitchell whose 'light-touch organisational unorthodoxy' features in episode two of Children of the Olympic bid.
Peter's Greyhound Bus item was on Friday's You and Yours and Margaret Mountford's on last Monday's.

On the fourth plinth

2009-07-22T14:56:07+00:00

Editor's note. When Margie Tunbridge wrote to Radio 4 asking for a flag to unfurl on the fourth plinth we leapt at the chance. Here she writes about the experience - SB

Like nearly every other Plinther I like Gormley's work (did he know he had so many fans?) - I've seen the Field for the British Isles several times, the exhibition which came to Tate St Ives a few years ago and other pieces by Gormley at Chatsworth House and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I've followed (some of) the controversies about other pieces of his work. I've been affected by his work, for example, Still IV from 1994, a cast of his daughter, aged six days, which apparently so affected the gallery attendants at Tate St Ives that they reportedly had to do shorter shifts in that room.

I had quite a difficult slot - it was 0200 to 0300 on Sunday 19th. So there was a sizable crowd in Trafalgar Square who were not terribly sober... they wanted to be entertained (is everything Britain's Got Talent?). I knew that the weekend night slots were likely to be more difficult but when you are allocated a slot your only option is to accept it or refuse it - there is no chance of swapping it. So I had decided to do it. A family member had said that the evening weekend slots were "skittles for drunks", and so it partly proved.

I had not planned to engage with the crowd. I did not 'do' a performance - I had collected together objects which represent important things to me - so I unfurled banners from Cornwall Council and the University of Exeter, both of whom work for; also Radio 4 and The Guardian which are important to me for news, arts, entertainment and so on. I also had a banner from the British Psychological Society which is the professional organisation for psychologists to which I belong.

To represent my family, friends, and colleagues, I signed pre-prepared postcards to send the next day, and put out about thirty little clay figures which I had made which were in the style of the Antony Gormley figures in the Field for the British Isles - they were a respectful nod to Gormley and another way of representing people I know.(Though a colleague wanted to know later why I had a chess game up there!)

I read three poems by Charles Causley, who was well known to my husband's family in Launceston, and taught my husband at primary school. I read The School At Four O'clock which is about the old National School at Launceston which perches on the side of the hill, under the castle. The poem has a notion of the school as a ship setting off for the day and then coming back to the harbour at the end of the day at four. I also read one about the moorland near here - Trethevy Quoit, and one I dedicated to my husband, called My Young Man's a Cornishman. He is, I'm not.

I flew some paper aeroplanes which had questions and possible answers on them from psychology - when they were unfolded the answer was at the apex of the plane - I chose questions which had less obvious answers and might be surprising. I saw people with their planes discussing the answers and words.

I also had brought some food and drink with me - not a pasty, I'm afraid - I'd asked Locanda Locatelli, a very excellent restaurant which I've been to a couple of times in London, to provide me with some food which they very kindly did, and I took a half bottle of wine from a favourite place in France, and had a glass of wine.

I took a little chair and sat to read the most recent edition of The Psychologist, Educational Psychology in Practice and the book we are currently reading in my book group. I think that because I did not respond to the shouty, sweary people in the Square, and because the police and the 'Heritage Wardens' in the Square moved some of them on, in the latter twenty minutes it became quieter and calmer, and I had a better look at the Square and the people in it. Some people waved and smiled and the tone changed from the rather more combative and shouty tone of earlier in the hour.

It was an interesting and unusual thing to do - in the event it was quite hard to do. The admin team at One and Other said that there are some much easier slots to fill. They were quite concerned about how I had managed it and were keen to check I was OK when I finished. A very different experience.

Because I'd asked Radio 4 to help me they were keen to be helpful and invited me to the studios of the current affairs programme and I went to watch the Broadcasting House programme being broadcast on Sunday morning.

And why Radio 4? - because it's my nourishment and entertainment. I listen to a lot of the output either when I'm at home or in my car travelling between meetings. (Today, PM, Broadcasting House, The Archers, In our Time, Woman's Hour, Front Row, Saturday Review, Poetry Please, Material World, Thinking Allowed, Loose Ends, The Now Show, The News Quiz and so on).I quite often plan journeys to be able to listen to favourite programmes. I'm the target listener the programme makers are thinking of when they make the programmes.

Antony Gormley's One and Other project puts 2400 people (the 'plinthers') on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, one hour at a time for 100 days. There's a web site where you can watch the plinth live, round the clock and there are still places available for September and October. Book here.
You can watch all of Margie's hour on the plinth on the One and Other web site.
Diligent Guardian staff are keeping an eye on the plinth 24/7 and posting their observations to Twitter. The hashtag is #oneandother.
Some pictures taken in Trafalgar Square during Margie's hour on the plinth.
Charles Causley picture from the BBC web site, Rock beach by Dean Kerrigan (used under licence), Picture of Radio 4's illuminated waterwall at Latitude 2008 from the Radio 4 Marketing department, red wine by Matthew Rogers (used under licence).