OTD in early British television: 19 June 1939
John Wyver writes: Mid evening on Monday 19 June 1939 AP offered episode 3 of Rough Island Story, a six-part history of Britain with Harold Nicolson and J.F. Horrabin, who we have already encountered in these blog posts as the host of News Map. Radio Times detailed this 25-minute studio broadcast as ‘the story of Britain’s rise to the status of an Imperial Power’ (note the caps).
Horrabin is an especially fascinating character who was familiar to audiences of the time not only from News Map but also from numerous radio broadcasts. He was the author of the popular book An Atlas of Current Affairs, for which he also drew the maps, as he did with chalk and brush live on television. But as the 1921 map from The Communist reproduced above suggests, Horrabin’s politics were strikingly radical.
Per Wikipedia, Horrabin was
an English socialist and for some time Communist radical writer and cartoonist. For two years he was Labour Member of Parliament for Peterborough [from 1929 to 1931]. He attempted to construct a socialist geography and was an associate of David Low and George Orwell.
He wrote and drew the comic strip The Adventures of the Noah Family from 1919 onwards, first for the Daily News and later for the News Chronicle. In 1927 he co-wrote The Workers History of the Great Strike with Raymond Postgate and Ellen Wilkinson MP, with whom he had a lengthy affair. In 1932 he joined the national council of the Socialist League, becoming editor of its journal The Socialist and Socialist Leaguer. He was also well-known as a supporter of Trotsky, arguing for his right to asylum.
His politics seem not to have concerned producer Mary Adams when she booked him regularly for AP broadcasts, and News Map was highly regarded in the last year of pre-war programming. But he seemingly failed to match the success of that series with his follow-up, Rough Island Story.
Reviewing the first show in the series in May 1939, Grace Wyndham Goldie felt it ‘remained school-book stuff’.
Of the best kind, I grant you. It was put over with a brilliant lucidity, with remarkable precision, with all Mr. Horrabin’s strong personality and all Mr. Nicolson’s urbane charm. Yet it remained school-book stuff and not the kind of thing that viewers expect as part of a short evening’s entertainment.
Why not? Why object to Rough Island Story if we enjoyed the News Maps? For two very good reasons. One is that the News Maps were hotly topical ; they dealt, after all, with the current European problems upon which our lives may yet depend.
But the second reason is even more important. The News Maps made us feel that we were well-informed adults being talked to by experts. Rough Island Story made us feel uninformed children being instructed by cultured grown-ups.
Was this due to any difference in treatment? Not in the least. The treatment was identical. lt was directly due to the difference in subject. The latest developments in Poland or Rumania are matters about which even the well-informed may easily be ignorant and glad to hear expert opinion. But the well informed adult is supposed to have learnt the outlines of British History in youth.
I don’t for a moment suggest that we know them. But I do suggest that we resent being treated as though we don’t. Put Rough Island Story into a special morning programme for children and thousands of adult viewers will enjoy it. Put it into the evening programme and we feel that we are being condescended to.
Header image: Production & Distribution: A Map of the World, A.D. 1921 by J.F. Horrabin, The Communist, 17 December 1921; public domain, source Marxists Internet Archive; portrait by Howard Coster – original publication: Horrabin, J.F., Gregory, James S., An Atlas of the U.S.S.R. West Drayton, New York: Penguin Books 1945.
[OTD post no. 184; part of a long-running series leading up to the publication of my book Magic Rays of Light: The Early Years of Television in Britain in January 2026.]
Leave a Reply