who also worked for the BBC during the Second World War, and who encouraged Henderson to tackle the story of Borden, sensationally acquitted in 1892 of murdering her parents with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts.
The Trial of Lizzie Borden was first broadcast in July 1945, and a Radio Times article publicising the play noted that Henderson had spent seven months working as a scriptwriter on Front Line Family, ‘the famous daily serial which BBC listeners overseas have been hearing throughout the war’. Paul Harding’s researches in the BBC archives reveal that on one occasion, Henderson was called upon to write a special episode at a few minutes’ notice. He completed the script within a couple of hours, earning praise from the BBC and an enhanced fee of twelve guineas. Front Line Family, later known as The Robinson Family, was the BBC’s first venture into soap opera—much to the consternation of those, like Val Gielgud, who feared that it would lead to creeping Americanisation of the Corporation’s output—and was a forerunner of Mrs Dale’s Diary and The Archers. Henderson’s predecessors as writers on the series included Alan Melville, who had published a handful of lively detective novels in the Thirties and later became a popular broadcaster, and Ted Willis, who went on to earn fame as the creator of Dixon of Dock Green, and ultimately received a life peerage. Like them, Henderson had a talent to entertain, but sadly enjoyed much worse fortune.
In 1945, Henderson discussed with Gielgud and Michael Sadleir the possibility of adapting Sadleir’s popular novel Fanny by Gaslight for radio, but the project fizzled out, as did a proposal to write a light-hearted radio thriller in six parts called The Haunted Wireless. He considered that ‘book writing is thoroughly odd’, but kept working on novels and also adapted Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper for the stage. Tragically, he died of lung cancer when he was only 41 years old, at a time when his work was finally beginning to achieve recognition after years of setbacks. A Voice Like Velvet was, he said sadly, ‘perhaps the best reviewed of all my books, [but it] was only allowed one edition of three thousand copies.’ Among those who heaped praise on it in Britain was the influential critic James Agate, whose laudatory notice in the Daily Express was headed: ‘Ah, just the sort of book I like.’
Thanks to the Detective Story Club, this highly readable tale of a scoundrelly BBC presenter can finally enjoy the new lease of life it has merited for many years.
MARTIN EDWARDS
February 2018
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
MR ERNEST BISHAM kept as still as possible behind the green velvet curtains and listened to a clock ticking. Suddenly he slipped from behind the curtains and made for the door. He went unchallenged along a corridor and opened the first door he came to. Nobody was in it, it was a bedroom. He went to a window and softly opened it. A few minutes later he was hurrying along a side street and panting slightly. He was not so young as he had been, and he was not so slim as hitherto.
He couldn’t find a taxi, so he got a bus and reached Waterloo Station a little before eleven. Comfortably, he caught the eleven-five for Woking and sat in a first-class carriage, lighting a cigar, and knowing: ‘That porter recognized me again—he knows I’m Ernest Bisham, the Announcer!’ He still got a kick out of it, in spite of much recent mental research. Then he sat back and relaxed, thinking: ‘I promised myself I would never do it again. But I’ve failed myself again. It’s worse than smoking.’ He made a new promise to himself not to do it again, he really would get caught one day, and think of his position now! But he recognized that it meant giving up the biggest thrill of his life, not excluding that first time he had sat at the microphone and read: ‘And this is Ernest Bisham reading it.’ Deep in his overcoat pocket his fingers touched something hard.
Mr Bisham had recently arrived at one of those stages any intellectual man can arrive at during middle life, if he is honest: which stage was to take a day off and have a serious look at himself. So he spent a rather windy March day looking at himself, and in the evening asked Mrs Bisham to have a look at him too. Unfortunately, the evening was interrupted by the arrival of Mr Bisham’s sister. Bess Bisham had the knack of interrupting things. She always brought a bit of an atmosphere with her and somehow or other induced a pause. Even before her brother had become the famous announcer, Bess had possessed a tremendous sort of family consciousness and now it seemed ideal for her to go about saying her brother was, ‘the BBC announcer, you know’. But she was a good sort, and she made a good friend if anyone took the trouble to be patient with her and not laugh at her war efforts.
Mrs Bisham went in for a good deal of sewing in wartime, and she strained her eyes and her pink lips at it, looking genial and concentrative at the same time, with three little lines over the bridge of her large nose. She had a beautiful petal-like skin, it was really the skin of a young girl. Yet she was on the hefty side, in an elegant kind of way. She was called Marjorie, with a j, not a g, and she spent her time saying she must not get snobbish, in spite of the rather snobbish district, and in spite of the determination of the public that announcers must become, and remain, the very hallmark of English respectability. This was all very fine, in its way, but the public might surely be entitled to like its announcers human, in addition? They were human beings, weren’t they? And she had quite a dread of Ernest becoming pompous and inhuman. He was already a borderline case. But both Marjorie and Bess knew that the Bisham family had ‘arrived’ when Ernest came home one night a year or two before and said, as he threw his hat on the hall table: ‘Thank God—they’re transferring me from the Overseas Service! I’m going to be at Broadcasting House! You’ll hear my name on the air!’ As a matter of fact, it was the day Rommel had used up all his best cards and the war, for us, seemed suddenly to have reached a happier turning point.
HIS new duties were more of a relief than an excitement to Ernest. It was a long time yet from the advent of the General Forces Programme and a long time before he was to say it was the So and So News and it was ‘read by Ernest Bisham’. He liked broadcasting, and he knew quite a lot about it; the public knew, or thought it knew, all about the wonderfully glamorous life of an actor: but if it had ever been an actor it would know something about such snags as being out of work, or of being in a three years’ run with matinees three times a week. But to Bess and Marjorie, who thought the radio full of glamour and romance—which it was, of course—it was as if Ernest had been made Lord Privy Seal. They joined hands and did an excited and rather ungainly sort of dance in the lounge, tilting over a small Chinese table with the silver cigarette-box on it, and only stopping because one of the servants happened to come in. You could not dance with BBC announcers in front of the servants, however closely connected. As the particular servant said (she was sacked for it later, when it came out): ‘Blimey, it’s like dancing with God!’ She was sacked because of the religious implications, quite apart from anything else that might be read into it. Bess advising Marjorie: ‘You owe it to Ernest to live very differently now, dear. And what about a bigger house?’
Ernest, however, had a particular affection for Tredgarth, The Ridgeway, Horsell, Woking. He often pleased Marjorie very much by saying he had never been happy anywhere else, and that Tredgarth, in spite of its frightful name, had brought him a happiness he had never known before.
‘And by that, of course, I mean you have brought it, Marjorie! For it was your house!’
Ernest paid compliments in rather a stately manner. He was a bit ponderous, rather as if he was reading it out to fifteen millions at six o’clock, or to twenty millions at nine o’clock. But although he said this and laughed, she usually blushed, for he was always sincere.
‘It’s nice of you to say so, Ernest.’
‘I mean it.’
‘I know you do.’
They had the habit of linking arms and wandering around the house