Radio Girls(121)

Hunger.

Maisie wiped her eyes and went on reading. There wasn’t much left. He had a brother, Maxwell, invalided home in 1916, living in York. A clerk for the county. Two children, Peter and Hannah. Each married. Two grandchildren, Gerald and Samuel.

She closed the folder so as not to let tears drip on it and rested her head in her hands.

She had a family. An uncle Max. Cousins. And she was from Yorkshire, just like Phyllida.

She could write to them. They might know nothing about her, but she could write. Maybe go to York. It would be good to travel more anyway. There was a lot to see. Phyllida might take a holiday with her. And maybe she would come away with a family.

She wiped her face again and tucked the folder into her holdall—stuffing it in with the newspapers, notebooks, pencils, two novels, and a primer on beginner’s German.

Hilda hated being thanked.

I’ll send her tickets to a concert. Something very lively and modern. She’ll love that.

Maisie sauntered off into the evening, swinging her holdall beside her.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


It perhaps goes without saying that I wanted to write this book because of Hilda Matheson. She was such an extraordinary woman, and seemed to embody the adage of truth being stranger than fiction. If I have made her a bit too perfect, well, that was hard to help. According to many who knew her—admittedly writing after her untimely death—her flaws were an excess of passion and a determination to see through what she felt to be right, despite strenuous opposition. Even though this led to her downfall at the BBC, she never wavered—and it didn’t hurt her throughout her (too few) remaining years.

Because the real history was so fascinating, I wanted to use as much of it as possible. However, it was imperative that the story itself come first, this not being a literary biography, and so I strove to weave fact and fiction together as seamlessly as possible.

While there are some sources that begin Hilda’s tenure at the BBC commencing in 1927, I decided to have her start in 1926 (per some other sources) because I liked the energy of her coming in to change the BBC soon after the national General Strike.

I knew I wanted to fold in Hilda’s real-life membership in MI5. The facts that she had been recruited to MI5 by T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia); helped set up the MI5 office in Rome in 1918; and was there when they hired a young Italian journalist with a gift for propaganda to help keep Italy in the war—a certain Benito Mussolini—were just too delicious to leave out. While she wasn’t really involved with the organization after World War I, she apparently kept a hand, or at least an ear, in. As my story developed, with the fictional Maisie a budding journalist, it felt right that Hilda, so engaged with current events and always thinking toward the future, would take heed of quality propaganda and that she and Maisie would ultimately work together as they discovered the intents of the Nazis were intertwined with the agenda of the British Fascists and aimed at taking over the BBC. This last is pure fiction, extrapolating from Goebbels’ real comment that a takeover of German radio in 1923 would have forwarded the Nazi cause immeasurably. The British Fascists may not have specifically mentioned the BBC, but it felt reasonable that they would have seized the inspiration and seen the opportunity to consolidate their message and power through this powerful new medium.

The fear of foreign spies was indeed paramount during this era. The 1920s in Britain were deeply complex times, as the nation had been financially and emotionally devastated by World War I, and many of the returning soldiers found that they could not secure employment. Economic uncertainty remained high, and there was a lot of anxiety surrounding societal changes. The lines were drawn between tradition and progressivism, as exemplified so neatly by Hilda and Reith, despite their being contemporaries and both children of Scottish Presbyterian ministers.

The spies people feared in the 1920s were Russian, and the panic was about Bolshevism. Though trade unions and the Labour Party were not communist—and in fact, the Communist Party of Great Britain at its peak enjoyed a membership of about sixty thousand—it was common practice to associate the push for unionization with communism. This of course was a useful straw man for fascists.

As I read about concerns of spying, both genuine and trumped up, I became convinced that this concern, combined with the rise of the BBC and some people’s fears of it, was a thread I must weave into the narrative. It seemed natural that Hilda, thanks to her involvement in Italy, would have spotted the brilliance of the early Nazi propaganda and wondered if it was something worth worrying about, especially as Fascism garnered interest in Britain. I was inspired by a few real-life MI5 operations during World War II, particularly the Jack King sting, and chose to use threads of this story for my rising journalist and producer, Maisie, and her mentor, Hilda.

I particularly wanted to highlight the early complicity of corporations. The 1927 propaganda pamphlet Road to Resurgence was felt to make some headway in attracting corporate money to the Nazi Party at a time when they were considered marginal at best. It did lay out that the Nazis, despite calling themselves socialists and using proworker rhetoric in speeches, were in fact antiunion and would do much to assist corporations become richer. I chose Siemens and Nestlé as companies whose business relationship with the Nazis is well-known, although they did not establish ties until later than the timeline I present. I wanted to use more than one company to indicate that it was the involvement of many people with money and influence who helped fascism take hold, and did so primarily in the hopes of garnering yet more money and influence.