TY - JOUR
AU - Long, Max
AB - Michael Guida’s book Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio & Modern Life is a fascinating account of how modes of listening to the natural world were configured in Britain between the First and Second World Wars. The book’s overarching thesis is that listening ‘brought nature closer’ (p. 12) to the everyday lives of ordinary British people between 1914 and 1935. To make his case, Guida has marshalled an impressive range of archival sources including poetry, newspapers, journals, films, and radio broadcasts. The literature on the history of sound, a sub-field of the wider study of sensory history, has until now focussed principally on urban modernity, especially in the work of Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Thompson and more recently in the British case, James Mansell. Guida, however, argues that ‘natural’ sounds, often romantically associated with rural England, performed an equally significant role in British culture during the 1920s and 1930s. These formed part of the sonic fabric of the modern world, even if they were often explicitly treated in direct contradistinction to the din of urban living. This tension—between nature’s association with tradition and the past, and listening experiences that presented nature in a ‘modern’ context—recurs across the book’s five chapters. The first two chapters of the book are firmly rooted in the context of the First World War and its aftermaths. The book opens with a discussion of soldiers’ writing—including poetry and letters sent home—arguing that even when confronted with the horrors of total war in European trenches, British men found solace in the natural world. Chapter 2 continues this story by following some of these men back home in the years immediately following the war, exploring how natural sound was conceived as a therapeutic respite for a generation of war-ravaged soldiers, including in the case of shell-shock. Especially interesting is Guida’s discussion of the Enham Village Centre in Hampshire, where countryside ‘peace and quiet’ (p. 59) was prescribed for recovering ex-servicemen. In the third chapter of the book, Guida turns to the phenomenon of radio broadcasting, and especially the BBC’s attempts to broadcast natural sounds to its listeners practically from its inception in 1922. This is one of the book’s strongest chapters, offering a detailed examination of the corporation’s reasons for providing the public with a sonic portrait of nature through a medium that to many signified the pinnacle of urban modernity. Guida argues that broadcasting natural sounds fit well with contemporary understandings of how radio functioned—especially the idea that waves travelled through an invisible ‘ether’. For John Reith, the corporation’s founding Director-General, natural sounds corresponded with his fundamental vision of radio’s role in society—bridging the camps of ‘education’ and ‘entertainment’ was the idea that radio should offer transcendental experiences such as that offered by the famous nightingale broadcast which was relayed from the bottom of a Surrey garden belonging to the cellist Beatrice Harrison in 1924. The fourth chapter deals with the popular enthusiasm for rambling and hill-walking that took off in the years following the First World War. This departs somewhat from previous chapters by focussing not only on sound, but on ‘all senses working together’ (p. 93). This seems like a sensible approach chiefly because, as Guida shows, descriptions of outdoor experiences like rambling rarely focussed on a single sense. Instead, a range of writers on the topic, including rural preservationists, trespassers, and others emphasised the richness of sensual experience to be gained from communing directly with the natural world. The fifth and final chapter returns to radio. The bulk of it centres on the output of Ludwig Koch, a German sound recordist who settled in England in 1936. Koch’s recordings of birdsong were released as a series of ‘sound-books’ with accompanying gramophone records, and during the Second World War, his work was broadcast to millions on the BBC, including on Children’s Hour. These sounds, Guida argues, symbolized a calming, civilizing respite at a time of heightened national anxiety. Although the choice of bookending the narrative with the First and Second World Wars adds chronological clarity, some readers might question the emphasis placed on a ‘mordbid age’ historiography of the period. Deriving mostly from the work of Richard Overy, this interpretation of interwar Britain as one characterized by doom and gloom is nevertheless more contested than Guida seems to acknowledge. Most important is the fact that Overy’s text is based principally on the writing of elite intellectuals—even if we allow for the claim that these beliefs reflected wider societal attitudes, Guida’s book does not set out to make a similar top-down argument. Making space for a more expansive definition of the national mood during the interwar years might paint a different picture of the way that natural sound was perceived in Britain at the time. For instance, while many listeners expressed their joy at hearing the nightingale’s call on the radio, many others wrote to the Radio Times to complain at the fact that it interrupted the usual evening dance music schedule. Readers may also be left wanting a more comprehensive exploration of what ‘nature’ and ‘natural sound’ was taken to mean in the period. Guida identifies key changes in interwar attitudes to the natural world, such as the growth in conservation movements or outdoor pursuits like rambling. He also highlights how notions about nature stemmed from a longstanding, largely romantic, and pastoral, vision of the English countryside. In the interwar period, these ideas became firmly entrenched in cultural and political life, and Guida is right to identify these ideas as they were reflected in the sonic landscape of the time. One overarching belief shared across many of Guida’s sources was that nature was characterized by quietude and even silence. However, occasionally Guida appears to share with his historical actors a sense of consensus about what nature was and was not: it might have been interesting to interrogate some of these assumptions, perhaps by focussing on more examples where definitions of ‘nature’ were contested. One way to do this could be to examine more closely whether Britain’s ongoing imperial presence changed expectations about the types of natural sounds that were considered ‘British’. Nevertheless, these are relatively minor quibbles. All in all, this is an excellent contribution to historical scholarship spanning modern British history, media history, and the history of the senses. An invaluable text that will no doubt become a point of reference for historians of Britain’s environments in the twentieth century, it is also very elegantly written and richly illustrated with visual sources. © The Author(s) [2022]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) [2022]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio & Modern Life. By Michael Guida
JF - Twentieth Century British History
DO - 10.1093/tcbh/hwac037
DA - 2022-11-29
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/listening-to-british-nature-wartime-radio-modern-life-by-michael-guida-jR4olZm8Xj
SP - 160
EP - 162
VL - 34
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -