Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts by Michael Carney and Kate Murphy

If literary radio studies, in its first couple of decades, anointed a hero, it was probably Hilda Matheson. The first Head of Talks at the BBC, not only an accomplished bureaucrat but a practical theorist who developed the style of “intimate address” by which the broadcaster artificially produced the impression of naturalness, Matheson was a perfect candidate for celebration: lover of Vita Sackville-West, booster of literary broadcasting, martyr (or so the story goes) to the patriarchy, as represented by Director-General Sir John Reith, for her championship of modernism. Her proximity to Bloomsbury (though Virginia Woolf’s diary and letters are, unsurprisingly, scathing about her) led to her being read as inherently iconoclastic, though her career was largely grounded in her superb managerial skills. Similarly, while Matheson’s politics remain somewhat oblique,[1] her drive to expand the range of both News and Talks to include controversial issues and multiple viewpoints is often itself conflated with political progressivism. Todd Avery’s groundbreaking Radio Modernism influentially positioned the intimate style—despite its integration across the range of BBC Talks—as inherently suited to “oppositional politics” and subversive of the Reithian model; more recent work often reproduces this characterization as axiomatic.[2]

What’s disturbing about the hagiographic treatment of Matheson’s BBC tenure[3] is certainly not any want of importance or innovation on her part—her insightful volume Broadcasting, written for the Home University Library after she had left the Corporation, makes clear how fully she had thought through both the pragmatics and the praxis of broadcast talk—but the slim reed of research on which much of it rests. Michael Carney’s self-published 1999 book on Matheson, Stoker, serves as the main source for many of these judgements, and, as its recent reissue by Handheld Press (augmented by an essay from BBC historian Kate Murphy) makes clear, Carney’s volume is less a satisfying biography than an indication of how vitally one is needed. Carney, neither a trained historian nor an expert in radio, encountered Matheson through Britain in Pictures, the important World War II propaganda series she set in motion shortly before her death in 1940, of which he published a bibliographical appreciation.[4] In the absence of both family papers and Matheson’s BBC personnel file, his biography leans heavily on previous work on the BBC, especially Asa Briggs’s official histories,[5] on a memorial volume of reminiscences assembled by Matheson’s mother, and on the sheaf of letters Matheson wrote to Sackville-West during their affair.

Carney’s reliance on these letters is underscored by an unsubtle reliance on parallels between love and work, with chapters entitled “In Love With the BBC,” “Love Affair With Vita,” “The End of Both Affairs.” And although Matheson’s prolixity during the affair, one can’t help but feel, drove the allocation of textual space, with these three of the biography’s six chapters covering Matheson’s five years at the BBC, they also seem often to drive its conclusions, as Matheson’s dislike for many of those in the Corporation hierarchy spills over into Carney’s text. Determined to prove Matheson’s centrality, he often overstates the case to the extent that he interferes with the story that he’s telling—saying of Director of Programmes Roger Eckersley, for instance, that “anyone reading his autobiography would be bound to conclude that he was a nitwit,” while relying on that same autobiography to establish facts.[6] Carney’s limning of the various early tensions within the BBC bureaucracy (over external regulation of the BBC’s ability to broadcast on controversial subjects, over the proper “brow” for broadcasts, over artistic innovation) tends to be flattened into Matheson versus her opponents—so much so that sometimes he appears to be depicting the deeply Arnoldian Reith as an advocate of serving the popular taste. He builds entire readings of institutional moves—even in wartime—on unsupported speculations about animus towards Matheson that center around the words “must have been.”[7] And often his depictions of BBC policy shifts assume her role to be central even when—or perhaps even because—contemporary accounts omit her.

Carney does succeed in making this and other stages of Matheson’s career—her stints in intelligence work during both world wars, her post-BBC management of the Royal Institute of International Affairs’s African Survey—compelling enough to warrant a fuller treatment. It was a wise move on the part of Kate Macdonald, Handheld’s editorial director, to bolster, rather than simply reissue, the biography. Murphy’s essay helpfully fleshes out some of the episodes sketched by Carney with the clear agenda of making a case for Matheson as a feminist in practice, if not by self-identification. She establishes through references in Matheson’s correspondence that she had at one point been a member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS); she emphasizes Matheson’s work for Lady Astor in organizing the Consultative Committee of Women’s Organizations; she points to “warm” (200) relationships with other public women cemented through her letters on Lady Astor’s behalf; she documents virtually every program in any way aligned with women that Matheson promoted at the BBC.

Though the essay is marred by clunky transitions that point up the lack of a compelling through-line, Murphy successfully emphasizes Matheson’s acumen and political savvy—in, for instance, her “ability to appease and pacify” the Plymouth Conservative Party agent, Christopher George Briggs, on behalf of Lady Astor (196). And it’s at its most convincing when it documents the growth and elaboration of talks for women during Matheson’s BBC tenure. Murphy names a plethora of programs “initiated” by Matheson (some still running today) that “demonstrate her commitment to bringing enrichment and improvement to women’s lives” (215), though these examples often lack the context both of the surrounding programs and of the rest of Matheson’s agenda.

What these examples do show is the importance of women’s networking. Murphy’s essay is particularly valuable here in making deeper use of the Astor Papers than does Carney in order to demonstrate how Matheson continued to build on prior friendly contacts during her BBC years. Stressing “the fluidity of Hilda’s BBC correspondence, the mixing of the professional with the personal,” and the continuing bond with Lady Astor virtually until Matheson’s death, Murphy gives a vivid picture of the operation of female professional networks in the inter-war period (218).

Yet through all of it, Matheson herself still remains oddly indistinct, with the most memorable descriptions of her those—like Sackville-West’s, in her Spectator obituary, as a “sturdy pony”— that also seem to diminish her or render her slightly absurd.[8] A fuller and more thoughtful biography, however meager the extant documentation,[9] might manage to reconcile the effusions of her private letters and the informality of her BBC office (to which she often brought her dog) with the combative intensity with which she pursued her agenda within rigid and male-dominated institutions. Was she merely, as Woolf had it, an “earnest aspiring competent wooden . . . middle-class intellectual,” or, in Carney’s terms, a “woman buccaneer”? (65, 146). For now, this tantalizing and imperfect volume is all we have to go on.