New Exhibition Charts History of Radio Using Unpublished Notebooks and Ephemera

The Bodleian Libraries’ new exhibition Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home will tell the story of the advent of radio in the UK, placing listeners rather than broadcasters at its heart. 

The exhibition looks at the period from 1922 (when the BBC was founded and radio had 150,000 listeners) to 1939, as radio united households on the brink of war and its listenership reached 34 million. Listen In coincides with the centenary of the Daventry Transmitter which when it opened on July 27 1925 vastly extended the reach of broadcasts and truly started the ‘radio craze’.

Drawing on books and ephemera from the Bodleian archives including magazines, cartoons, educational pamphlets and advertisements, the exhibition explores how the arrival of radio affected family life, shifting dynamics between children and adults, and women and men. 

The exhibition is curated by Beaty Rubens, a BBC Radio producer for 35 years and now a freelance producer, presenter and writer. When searching through the Bodleian’s archives, she discovered two notebooks containing largely unpublished interviews with early radio listeners, providing rare first-person testimony about the impact of the new technology on ordinary people’s lives. 

Initially, the BBC did not engage in any audience research at all. However, in 1938 it commissioned Winifred Gill and Hilda Jennings to conduct interviews in Barton Hill, a working-class area of Bristol. The research was published in a 40-page BBC pamphlet but much material was not included such as stories of male control of the wireless. The exhibition will share this material publicly for the first time, with actors voicing interviews from the notebooks to create a soundscape within the gallery. 

Although radio did not necessarily transform women’s lives, Listen In considers how it enriched home life and made it less lonely, as captured in beautiful covers for the Radio Times magazine. Beginning at a time when the majority of women did not have the vote, the wireless gave them access to a wider world with advice about cookery, parenting, and gardening but also, once all women obtained the right to vote in 1929, to information about politics and public life. However, these benefits masked the ongoing gender imbalance, including coercive control and domestic abuse. For example, the Gill research tells of a husband who turned up the wireless to drown out his wife’s complaints about his financial control, and who would disconnect the machine each time he left the house, preventing her from ever accessing it.

Contemporary cartoons form a key part of the exhibition, often providing a more truthful narrative of radio’s adoption, from technical problems to neighbourly rivalry. A 1922 Radio Times cartoon demonstrates a familiar struggle to peel people away from their devices with guests at a dinner party sitting in silence with headphones on instead of speaking to one another. In addition to cartoons, the exhibition also displays stunning color images, including rare early magazine covers and the centrefold of the 1922 Illustrated London News depicting Christmas party guests listening in to a wireless.

Alongside the early history of the BBC, the exhibition also tells the story of the growing power of the broadcaster’s commercial rivals and the battle that ensued for the ears of British listeners. European commercial stations were dependent on advertising, with Radio Luxembourg developing a sponsored programme in the 1930s to promote the sale of Ovaltine. As radio became more accessible, listeners began to realise that they could actively seek out their own content.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the book Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home which will be published by Bodleian Library Publishing on February 7.