OTD in early British television: 6 January 1939
John Wyver writes: on the evening of Friday 6 January 1939, after one of this year’s return visits to Bertram Mills’s Circus, Alexandra Palace offered the eigth edition of News Map, in this case with the journalist and scholar Elizabeth Monroe speaking about ‘the interests of Great Britain, France and Italy in the Mediterranean. Maps drawn live by J.F. Horrabin (to whom we will return in a future OTD) were complemented by film clips, including ‘Italian colonialists in Libya’ from British Movietone, and a handful of photographs, among them ‘three Mediterranean views’ lent by Monroe.
As can be seen from the BBC Handbook 1940 image, which is from a different programme in the series, with Peter Fleming on China, the set-up involved the guest speaking to camera while seated at a desk, and Horrabin sketching at an easel before another camera.
After graduating from Oxford, Monroe (for those with access, her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry is here) worked in the secretariat of the League of Nations in Geneva before joining the information department of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House in 1933. A Rockefeller Foundation grant meant that she could travel across the Middle East and she published her widely acclaimed The Mediterranean in Politics the year before her television appearance.
The News Map series, which made occasional appearances in the schedule, started in September 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, with an edition about Czechoslovakia. Peter Fleming’s China episode was the second, and later ones included Patrick Balfour on the African colonies, Kenneth Williams on Palestine, Bruce Lockhart on ‘Rumania’, Lilo Linke speaking about Turkey, W.J. Rose on Poland, and, following Monroe, a script about Spain, read in his absence because of illness, by Arnold Toynbee.
There were also programmes devoted to Germany, Italy and France, and the series included John Hope Simpson speaking on ‘The Refugee Problem’. Series producer Mary Adams also persuaded celebrated cartoonist David Low to present a programme featuring his character Colonel Blimp contributing to News Map.
A second News Map series was to have begun on 6 September 1939, with Inside Europe John Gunther contributing, with a second programme planned on Japan and China. But the war-imposed closedown on 1 September meant that these editions were never realised.
Grace Wyndham Goldie was a fan:
The News Map series… is excellent television anmd Mr Horrabin is an excellent exponent of News Maps. Here television is doing something that it can do better than the theatre or the films. Here was a moment when we felt that a living expert was talking naturally and easily directly to each one of us at that very moment. (The Listener, 13 April 1939)
Here too was the start of television’s serious coverage of foreign affairs.
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