Folkways and Airwaves: Oral History, Community & Vernacular Radio
FOLKWAYS AND AIRWAVES: ORAL HISTORY, COMMUNITY & VERNACULAR RADIO
IEUAN FRANKLIN
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Bournemouth University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
November 2009
This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and due acknowledgement must always be made of the use of any material contained in, or derived from, this thesis.
Abstract
This thesis investigates a variety of uses of actuality (recorded speech), oral history and folklore (vernacular culture) in radio broadcasting in Britain and Newfoundland (Canada). The broadcasting of vernacular culture will be shown to foster intimate and interactive relationships between broadcasters and audiences. Using a theoretical framework that draws upon the work of communications theorists Harold Innis and Walter Ong, the thesis will explore the (secondary) orality of radio broadcasting, and will consider instances in which the normative unidirectional structure and ‘passive’ orality of radio has been (and can be) made reciprocal and active through the participation of listeners. The inclusion of ‘lay voices’ and ‘vernacular input’ in radio broadcasting will be charted as a measure of the democratization of radio, and in order to demonstrate radio’s role in disseminating oral history, promoting dialogue, and building and binding communities. The thesis will predominantly focus on local and regional forms of radio: the BBC Regions in the post-war era; regional radio programming serving the Canadian province of Newfoundland both pre- and post-Confederation (which took place in 1949); and the community radio sector in the UK during the last five years. A common theme of many of the case studies within the thesis will be the role of citizen participation in challenging, transgressing or eroding editorial control, institutional protocols and the linguistic hegemony of radio production. Conversely, close attention will be given to the ways in which editorial control in radio production has circumscribed the self-definition of participants and communities. These case studies will provide evidence with which to investigate the following research question - is the democratization of radio possible through the incorporation of citizen voices or messages within radio production or programming, or is it only possible through changing the medium itself through citizen participation in democratic structures of production, management and ownership?
Acknowledgements
This study was undertaken as a Studentship at Bournemouth University. I would like to thank my supervisors Sean Street, Hugh Chignell and Christine Daymon for their invaluable guidance and input. I would particularly like to thank Professor Street, who has been unfailing and unstinting in his support and encouragement for my work throughout the last three years. I would also like to thank all members of the Centre for Broadcasting History Research at Bournemouth University and all members of the Southern Universities Broadcasting History Group. In 2007 I received a Bournemouth-Memorial Travel Bursary to conduct research in Newfoundland for the period of one month, which represented a very valuable opportunity and useful experience. In Newfoundland, Patti Fulton of the Memorial Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA) at Memorial University in Newfoundland was hugely supportive and a true friend, and Jeff Webb of the History Department and Philip Hiscock and Peter Narváez of the Folklore Department at Memorial kindly gave up plenty of their time to be interviewed and to share their considerable knowledge of Newfoundland radio. I would also like to thank the former CBC producers and presenters Dave Quinton, Dave Gunn, Des Browne and Anne Budgell, the freelance radio producer Chris Brookes, and the documentary producer Paul McLeod. Thanks also to Ivan Emke, Fred Campbell and Ryan Hermens for providing interesting information on community radio developments in Newfoundland. Back in Britain and Ireland, the radio producers Alan Dein, David Prest and Ronan Kelly gave up their time to be interviewed about the oral history dimensions of their work. Thanks to Phil Gibbons, Carlton Romaine and Mary Ingoldby for discussing their memories of Commonwealth FM with me. Thanks are due to the staff of various archives – Patti Fulton at MUNFLA; Paul Wilson and staff at the National Sound Archive in the British Library; Jeff Walden and colleagues at the BBC Written Archives in Caversham; Ken Puley and colleagues at the CBC Programme Archives in Toronto; Ken Dahl at the Saksatchewan Archives Board in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; staff at the Charles Parker Archive in Birmingham Central Library; Francis Jones and colleagues at the BBC Northern Ireland Archive in Cultra, near Belfast; Luke Kirwan and colleagues at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin; Mike Weaver and colleagues at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford; and Alison Fraser at the Orkney Sound Archive. Canadian archivists/historians Ern Dick and Denis Duffy provided valuable information about CBC’s oral history work and archives. Thanks to Sara Beth Keough for sharing her research on Newfoundland music radio and to Helen Gubbins for providing me with information about the use of Radio Éireann’s Mobile Recording Unit. Thanks to Armin Medosch for sharing unpublished work on the Hidden Histories project, and for uploading my short article on Hidden Histories to his excellent Next Layer website. Thanks to Marjorie Ruse for sharing her memories of working as Denis Mitchell’s secretary in the BBC North Region during the 1950s. Thanks to Peter Cox, Ben Harker, Paul Long, Mike Rosen and Francis Hywel for help in researching the work of Charles Parker. Thanks to Padmini Broomfield for supplying me with oral history publications relating to the Southampton area. Thanks also to Derek Paget, Janet Graves, Lesley Borzoni, Mary J. Brody, Alex Gray, Keith Skipper, Gerry Harrison, Beth Lloyd, Frances Wilkinson, Fiona Julian and Sue Newhook. To Syd Lewis and colleagues – thanks for giving me a fantastic welcome to the world of Cape and Islands National Public Radio on that drizzly day in Woods Hole, Cape Cod. Thanks to Gary Noel, Sheldon Stone and Gary and Joni in Norris Point, Newfoundland and the Mayo family in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Last but not least, thanks to Céline for her support.
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Table of Contents
1.0 Rationale 4
1.1 The Spoken and the Written 10
1.2 Radio and Orality 17
1.3 The Space-Bias of Radio 27
1.4 The Professionalization of Speaking 29
1.5 The Emancipation of the ‘Common’ Voice 40
1.6 Broadcasting as Social Contact 48
1.7 Broadcasting and Mass Observation 50
1.8 Knowable Communities 54
Chapter 2: From Paternalism to Participation? The Post-War BBC Regions 66
2.0 Radio Research Methodology 66
2.1 Radio Features in the Post-War Climate 71
2.2 Brandon Acton-Bond’s Micro-Local West Region Features 83
2.3 Sound and Subcultures: Denis Mitchell in the North Region 93
2.4 An Antiphony of Voices: Sam Hanna Bell in Northern Ireland 114
Chapter 3: Newfoundland’s Vernacular Radio Culture 138
3.0 Folklore and Popular Culture 138
3.1 The Barrelman 144
3.2.0 The Gerald S. Doyle News Bulletin 154
3.2.1 The Bulletin’s Creation of an Imagined Community 161
3.2.2 Humour, Folklore and Vernacular Usage 164
3.3 The Fisheries Broadcast 170
3.4 The Chronicles of Uncle Mose 182
3.5 Between Ourselves 188
3.6 Challenge for Change 195
3.7 The Fogo Process 198
Chapter 4: Editing and Editorial Control 213
4.0 The ‘Weaving Medium’ 213
4.1 Fieldwork, Poetry & Ethnography 217
4.2 Urban Soundscapes 221
4.3 Between Two Worlds: Five Generations 227
4.4 Shared Authority and the Radio Ballads 234
4.5 The Ethics of Editing 244
4.6 Charles Parker: The Admissibility of Montage after the Radio Ballads 251
4.7 New Horizons: The Wheeler/Prest Collaborations and The Reunion 256
4.8 Micro-Local Radio Features: Alan Dein (BBC) and Ronan Kelly (RTÉ) 266
4.9 Oral History and Authority 271
Chapter 5: Oral History, Local and Community Radio and Social Gain 284
5.0 Introduction 284
5.1 The Millennium Memory Bank and The Radio Research Project 286
5.2 The Linguistic Mapping of the UK for Broadcast Purposes 290
5.3 The Preservation of Local and Community Radio 297
5.4.0 Commonwealth FM 301
5.4.1 Technology, Oral History and Participation 304
5.4.2 Programming: Empire, Free Speech and Traditions 306
5.4.3 ‘Steam Radio’: Bridging the Past and the Present 309
5.4.4 The Relationship between Commonwealth FM and the Museum 311
5.5 The Philosophy, Funding and Social Gain of Community Radio 315
5.6 Connecting Histories 319
5.7 Community: A Contested Term 323
5.8 Conclusion: Communication as Ritual 328
Appendix A 347
Orality and Presence 347
Appendix B 350
The BBC’s Talks on Unemployment During the 1930s 350
Appendix C 356
The CBC’s Use of Oral History 356
Imbert Orchard 359
Appendix D 369
Notes Towards a Communication Dialectic 369
Telephone Trottoire 375
Hidden Histories 382
References 392
Chapter 1: Radio and the Orality and Literacy Debate
Radio, the new tree of speech, is capable of rekindling the key tradition of oral expression in which speech builds the village (Aw, quoted in Moore 2008).
1.0 Rationale
This thesis sets out to investigate the uses of oral history or forms of vernacular culture in radio broadcasting in Britain and in Newfoundland (Canada). This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the convergence of oral history and radio broadcasting, as this would be an extremely difficult task to pursue, even if it were to be confined only to the broadcast output of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). BBC producers have long collected forms of oral history for utilization in programming, although the BBC has not (until relatively recently) used the term ‘oral history’ to describe such activities (the BBC has instead made use of the term ‘actuality’, see below). Therefore, identifying or sourcing radio programming which features forms of oral history is a difficult enough task, let alone determining whether or not they exist in the form of recordings, gaining access to them and charting their relative importance (see Chapter 2.0). Given the wealth of archived broadcast output, such a survey could not hope to be definitive, and it would therefore be prone to a stipulative or categorical approach to the inclusion of certain programmes above others. A survey approach would not afford much scope for reflection on whether a given programme or programme format constitutes oral history (see the discussion of StoryCorps, Chapter 4.6), or has made use of any elements of oral history methodology. Finally, to undertake such a survey would involve so much archival research that there would be little room to accommodate theoretical perspectives in order to cast light on the cultural and artistic significance of the convergence between oral history and radio production.
In beginning to conceptualize this convergence I was interested in both the concept of convergence itself and the number of levels or domains on or in which this convergence might be said to operate. This had a great influence on the theoretical concerns of the thesis. For example, it occurred to me that an exploration of the topic might consider:
1. The convergence between oral history and radio production as fields of cultural production or aural preservation.
2. The convergence between oral history and radio production in terms of the development and convergence of technologies (of ‘capture’ and ‘transmission’, analogue and digital).
3. The convergence between oral history and radio production as an example or index of the convergence between interpersonal interaction (the interview encounter) and mediated communication (the communications medium of radio).
4. The convergence between oral history and radio as an example or index of the convergence between orality (the capture of oral testimony in sound) and literacy (radio as a broadcast medium that has historically relied on scripting, and which ‘publishes’ audio through dissemination).
We will explore some commonalities and differences between the work of an oral historian and that of a radio producer, and the synergies which can result from collaboration between radio practitioners and local history groups, museums, libraries or archives (both of which fall under point 1) in Chapters 4 and 5 respectively. The second and third points represent recurring themes that we will return to at various points throughout the thesis. This first chapter will begin to investigate and elaborate the third and fourth points of discussion - the convergence of (or dialectic between) orality and literacy or interpersonal interaction and mediated communication in radio broadcasting – to create a theoretical perspective that will inform the rest of the thesis. The broad theoretical concern of the thesis is to consider the (secondary) orality (Ong 1988) of radio broadcasting, and the role that (the promotion of) vernacular oral culture can play in the democratization of society. The inclusion of ‘lay voices’ and ‘audience input’ in radio broadcasting will therefore be charted as a measure of the democratization of radio. The thesis will work towards a social and cultural understanding of radio’s oral/aural basis or bias, which will prove useful in considering radio’s role in disseminating oral history, promoting dialogue, and building and binding communities.
There is a scarcity of material on the conjunction of oral history and radio broadcasting, and what little extended analysis there is can predominantly be found in articles or book chapters (albeit very useful ones) by North American radio producers who have also undertaken oral history work (Orchard 1974; Dunaway 1984; Spitzer 1992; Hardy III 2001; Hardy III and Dean 2006), or in the memoirs of ex-BBC staff (Bridson 1971; Shapley 1996). Some social scientists interested in cultural preservation have considered how local media link indigenous communities with their (oral) traditions (Rada 1978; Spitulnik 2000; 2002), although discussion of ‘community memory’ (Klaebe and Foth 2006) has tended to be supplanted by the rigour of particular methodologies employed in anthropology, or in studies of radio’s role in development. There are also several penetrating studies of the politics and intellectual philosophies that have underpinned the BBC’s mission to enlighten and educate, which help us to understand its historical reluctance to ‘open up’ the microphone to non-professionals (LeMahieu 1988; Avery 2006). Some of the most incisive approaches to the study of ‘vernacular culture’ in radio programming, however, can be found in texts that explore British culture, heritage and language in a broader context, making use of archival material to consider radio’s role in consolidating regional or national identity (Samuel 1994; McIntosh 1999; Mugglestone 2003; Rose 2003).