OTD in early British television: 1 June 1938
John Wyver writes: For nearly 50 minutes on the afternoon of Wednesday 1 June 1938 viewers in London were transported to Epsom for Derby Day scenes including limited shots of the race itself. But the broadcast was not seen solely on domestic receivers, since it was one of the first BBC broadcasts to be relayed to two large-screen ‘cinema projection’ systems.
‘The greatest thrill since we heard Al Jolson’s voice in the first talkie,’ was one journalist’s verdict after seeing, thanks to a Baird projector, the climax of the race from the comfort of a seat in the Tatler Theatre in London’s Charing Cross Road.
Across town, some 600 invited guests, seated in the Deco splendour of the Derry & Toms department store, also watched the unfancied Bois Roussel, making only the second start of his career, produce an astonishing burst of speed in the final furlong to win by four lengths. This rival Kensington screening employed the Scophony system, and was received similarly positively, despite one of the BBC’s three cameras having failed and a second operating well below its best.
Horse racing’s status was, as historian Ross McKibbin observed of these years, ‘a sport which successfully and consciously bridged England’s rural past and its urban-industrial present’, and the classic contest at Epsom was traditionally the focus for a carnival that brought together the working-classes and the aristos. Restrictions imposed by the horse racing authorities, however, meant that the 1938 Derby and that run in 1939 were the only pre-war outside broadcasts of a horse race.
The Baird company had broadcast the finishes of the 1931 and 1932 races both as part of the company’s experimental domestic service and in a London cinema. And the entangled history of the race and the moving image went back much further. First filmed in 1895, by Birt Acres working for producer Robert Paul, and then again by Paul working alone in 1896, the race was a mainstay of early cinema actualities. Moreover, in 1896, when the race was won by a horse owned by the Prince of Wales, Paul was able to process his film overnight and, sensationally, project it in a London cinema the next day.
The BBC first broadcast a radio commentary in June 1927, but the idea of viewing the race away from the course as it was happening was one of the potent fantasies associated with the new medium of television. Indeed, an article from 1923 about John Logie Baird’s earliest experiments conjured up the alluring idea of watching from home ‘the finish of the Derby’.
In the spring of 1938 the Epsom Grand Stand Association granted the permission for an AP mobile unit to be present, and the results were described in detail by Peter Purbeck for The Listener,
Three cameras were used at the Derby, and the programme divided ihelf into three section,. First there was a period of half-an-hour or so during which we watched the crowd and the arrival of the King and Queen. Then there was the race; and finally the leading in of the winner and the unsaddling.
The first part of the programme, the crowd scenes and the fair, we saw largely through the eyes of a camera on the roof of one of Alexandra Palace’s vans. This camera did exceptionally good work and any viewers who did not know that only one was in use would have imagined that a battery of at least six cameras must have been busy to produce such a gay kaleidoscope of fair scenes, tipsters, tic-tac men, bookies and race-goers from the wearers of cloth caps to august grey toppers – in fact the whole paraphernalia which goes to make Derby Day the greatest racing occasion in the world…
Television cannot, and never will be able to give to viewers quite that spirit of mass happiness which comes to the man who is standing in a crowd, a spirit akin to the excitement of a hive of bees about to swarm. The world would be liable to become a very dull place if it could. But television can do something instead of that.
It enables us to watch the crowd, lo feel its excitement and happiness, without actually being part of it. We viewers on Wednesday of last week, looked down upon the Derby”s thousands with the amused detachment with which the gods sun eyed mankind from Olympus. Only when the event began did we step down from the heights and watch Bois Roussel win his great race, sharing all the breathlessness of the other mortals on the course.
Purbeck noted that two cameras were used for the coverage of the actual race, although this was because the BBC’s third Emitron had failed by this point.
The first of the two cameras focussed on the race showed us the horses lining up at the start, giving, no doubt, to those who had never watched a race before, a very vivid impression of the difficulty of gelling a score or so of excited thoroughbreds off at one and the same time; and finally the start itself.
From that moment we followed the horses away around the curve of the [horse]shoe [of the course] until Tattenham Corner was reached, and then the other camera took over, and we watched the little group racing up the straight for the finish, a group from which Bois Roussel detached himself so suddenly and unexpectedly to win by four lengths.
Because of its unexpectedness, the finish must have been one of the most dramatic that the race has ever produced, so television’s first Derby had all it could have hoped for in that respect. The weather, which had been kind up to a few minutes of the start, did its best to spoil things by turning into rain at the critical moment.
But this time Alexandra Palace beat the weather, and there can be little doubt that the OB of the Derby was the best thing of its kind that we have yet seen. Give us one or two more programmes such as this and there will surely be many people whose budget permits either a television set or a car, who will be thinking, with good reason, of giving up their cars.
The Times commented on the, at times, disappointing picture quality, but was ultimately similarly enthusiastic:
Up to [the start], the visibility had been good, but as the race began so did the rain, and the pictures were much less clear. But from Tattenham Corner on, where the third camera came into play at much closer range, the pictures were excellent in spite of the rain, and the finish of the race was as thrilling as anyone could wish, so that the whole transmission must be judged a great success.
From those watching on the large-screen systems there were comments that the definition improved significantly once the BBC feed from Epsom switched back to AP for a cabaret with trick unicyclists. Nonetheless, coming just before the annual conference of the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association in Folkestone, the presentations stimulated further film industry interest in large screen television.
To give you a sense of the scene, here’s a mute assembly of British Pathé shots from the day, which follows the structure of the broadcast as Purbeck described it. If the embedded video is not visible, it is available on Youtube here.
[OTD post no. 166; 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.]
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