Robert Saxton
'The Nightingale Broadcasts'
Beatrice Harrison, who lived in a remote house in woodland
south of Oxted, Surrey, was a distinguished cellist.
She was thirty-one when she tried to persuade Lord Reith to sanction
the BBCís recording, to be broadcast live, of a tryst
she was planning in her garden, with nightingales
in a copse, accompanied by herself on the cello
playing Elgar, whose favourite soloist she was ñ if it happened,
this would be the first ever live outdoor radio
broadcast. In May 1923, on a bench in a sea of bluebells,
sheíd been playing ëChant Hindouí by Rimsky-Korsakov
when a nightingale had swollen into song ëin thirds,
and always in tuneí with her, from deep in a nearby grove.
It was the following spring, while making her broadcasting debut
as soloist in Elgarís concerto with Elgar
conducting, that sheíd first hit upon the idea of nightingales singing
for the nation. Lord Reith supposed theyíd be real prima
donnas ñ costly and unpredictable ñ and was also chary
of packaging nature, of making birdsong ësecond-handí.
But Miss Harrison pleaded the case of the poor ñ all those
Without motorcars, in cities and the north of England.
A rehearsal went well. The broadcast, planned for 19th May,
would interrupt the Savoy Orpheansí Saturday night dance
music programme just as the Oxted nightingales started
their evening crescendo. What a performance! ñ
the summerhouse filled with amplifiers, engineers swarming
in the undergrowth. Miss Harrison played in a ditch ñ
Elgar, Dvorak, ëDanny Boyí. Silence. Then, fifteen minutes before
the station went off the air, a nightingale cadenza, which
gargled and trilled from the oak leaves, flowered through
a million radios and crystal sets, some of them outdoors,
themselves setting off nightingales, or building in the night air
a city of song in alien habitats ñ cornfields, moors,
mountains, housing. For twelve years the BBC broadcast
Miss Harringtonís nightingale concerts (one of them, set up near
a pond, featuring a chorus of frogs). After she moved house,
the birds were recorded solo, not every year
but certainly in 1942, when engineers captured a nightingale
outsung but not silenced by a fleet of Lancasters
droning overhead, the first of the ëthousand bomberí raids,
targeting Cologne, archived though never broadcast.
The RAF had discovered that two out of three bombs dropped
in night raids on Germany had missed their aim
by more than five miles. Area bombing would be much more accurate.
In the event, both sides turned out to have the same
problem: the average number of days at work lost
through bombing was only five. Although often
workersí homes were destroyed, morale stayed high: men and women
still worked, for their country and their distant children.