Life was much slower

Life was much slower

 

When I interview people who lived through the war and austerity period that followed, I’m always intrigued to hear how they coped with shortages of food and clothing. I’ve had some wonderful conversations about pet pigs, sweets, bootlegging and what to do with frayed collars (turn them inside out and stitch them back in, of course!). But one side of things that I never thought to ask about until someone brought it quite recently, was petrol rationing.

Fuel rationing was introduced in September 1939 soon after the start of the war. Petrol was, in fact, the very first thing to be rationed. That’s because of our total dependence on imports from overseas. In 1942 petrol for private use was withdrawn completely so that what limited supplies there were could be reserved for essential use, like ambulances and public transport.

I expect many adults must have felt as if their worlds had been cruelly shrunk. Not so, it seems, the children. With scarcely any vehicles on the road, their horizons opened up. Some people I have spoken to remember wandering off round their villages as young as two or three. Others have described daily adventures cycling for miles, the only requirement being that they return home in time for tea.

Petrol rationing for private use came back in when the war ended in 1945. Old cars that had been stored in garages for years were dusted down, oiled up and brought back out on the roads – but only for special occasions. One person I interviewed described how it would take the family two days to drive from Surrey to Norfolk for their summer holiday, with a camping stop en route. ‘Life was much slower’, he commented.

It’s remarks like these that make me long for a return to ‘slower’ times, with less choice about where to go and more delight in the journey. But, of course, that’s from a privileged position of being someone who is very well-travelled. For those brought up in the 1940s, the lifting of fuel rationing in 1950 on ‘VP day’ (victory for petrol) was a major event. It opened up the possibility of impromptu day-trips to the sea-side or visits to see friends. And perhaps having grown up with such limited horizons explains why people of that generation tend to be such keen jet-setters.


Images from September 1939, during the first week of petrol rationing.

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Universal Aunts

Universal Aunts

 

One of the things I love about producing Spoken Portraits is learning about how different things were in the past. Often, these discoveries come from the little details of a bigger story.

So it was with ‘Universal Aunts’. I was talking to someone about his childhood during and after the war. We got onto the subject of his education, and the fact that he went to boarding school on the south coast from the age of seven. During that period the family lived in various parts of East Anglia and Scotland for the father’s work in the Navy. How, I asked, did he and his brother find their way across the country at the start and end of term?

He answered that, if his mother were not able to travel with them, the boys would take the train to London by themselves (hard to imagine young boys travelling alone these days!). They would be met off the train either by one of their ‘real’ aunts who lived in the capital or by a ‘Universal Aunt’. Being an aunt myself with lots of children in my life, I was tickled by the idea of a Universal Aunt. He explained that ‘UAs, as they were always referred to, were comfortable aunt-like people who were there waiting on the station with a visible notice saying UA. They’d take us across London to meet the School Train [two carriages at Waterloo reserved for the returning pupils] stopping at a Moo-Cow Milk Bar or a Lyons Corner House for something to eat.’

I later did some digging on the internet. I found out that Universal Aunt was the official job title for employees of the Universal Aunts company who could be engaged to look after unaccompanied children. The business was established in 1921 by Gertrude Maclean, who herself had looked after her nieces and nephews during the first world war while her siblings were serving overseas. When the war ended and they returned to England she found herself redundant and, like so many women of her generation, unlikely ever to marry due to the huge number of men who had died in the war. Her brilliantly ingenious response to the situation was to make a business out of the business of being an aunt and help out other children whose parents were serving in the armed forces or away working in the colonies.

I was intrigued to learn that the Universal Aunts company still exists today. Their duties have expanded with the times to cover caring for older clients, pet sitting, house sitting and pretty much anything else their clients need help with. And, of course, they include women with families of their own as well as a good number of men.

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London A to G on BBC Radio

London A to G on BBC Radio


I was thrilled that London A to G was the featured soundscape in this week’s Soundscapes show on BBC Radio Ulster.

If you don’t know the show it’s well worth checking out. It’s an eclectic mix of great music that you probably never heard before, along with a weekly featured soundscape. This week that was London A to G, the audio piece I produced based on recordings ranging from tube trains to barking dogs, arranged in order of pitch from A up to G. It’s inspired by the listening walk I lead for Dotmaker Tours called The London Ear. The piece comes on after 26 minutes and segues beautifully into Black Mesa by Biosphere. The episode also features tracks by Hot Chip, William Onyeabor, Quantic and others. It’s available to listen to on BBC Sounds until 26 July.

Our New Presentation Boxes

Our New Presentation Boxes

We’re absolutely delighted with the new presentation boxes for our Spoken Portraits. Each one has been hand-crafted specially for us by the wonderful folk at Bespoke & Bound. If you don\’t know Bespoke & Bound, they\’re a collective of master craftspeople who make, print and emboss the most exquisite albums and boxes. 

It’s been a hugely enjoyable process collaborating with their founder Gareth and box maker Cat to come up with the design. We wanted something really special for a feature that will form a treasured part of a family or business archive. It had to be able to accommodate CDs, a USB stick and a paper insert and be made from the highest quality materials. 

We settled on a design that, when closed, has the look and feel of a rare book. Each box has been hand-bound in book cloth and lined with suedette (vegan suede), with our logo embossed on the cover. There\’s an extra tray in some of the boxes. This is so that they can hold additional CDs if the Spoken Portrait lasts over an hour.

You can view more images here.

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What is it about Desert Island Discs?

What is it about Desert Island Discs?

 

A recent Radio Times article declared Desert Island Discs the greatest radio show of all time. Such was the verdict of a panel of industry experts including the Today programme’s Justin Webb and 6 Music’s Cerys Matthews. Of their 30 top-ranked shows, it was also one of the longest running (going since 1942), second only to The Shipping Forecast (which began in 1911).

So what explains the show’s popularity and longevity? Its’ producer Cathy Drysdale put it down to the “absolutely genius format [that] makes sure that each programme gets to the heart of people – what moves them and motivates them, what inspires them and enthuses them, who and what they care about. Those are all such incredibly human things that are applicable to absolutely everybody listening.”

The format is of course structured around music: the eight records that each person chooses to take with them to a desert island, which form the soundtrack to their lives, and give a window into their values and joys.

But it’s not just the music. For me, the programme is as much about the space that the presenters give to their castaways to tell their stories, and the kindness they show when talking to them about their struggles and vulnerabilities.

We take inspiration from the show when producing our Spoken Portraits. We don’t generally structure things around music. But, as in Desert Island Discs, the aim of our interviews is to create a space where people can talk freely about their lives, knowing we will respond with interest, humour and sensitivity. And our goal when editing the material together is to give the listener an intimate connection with the subject and what makes them tick.

London A to G

What does London sound like? How much is thought through and how much is sonic waste? These are some of the ideas behind London A to G the piece I produced as a follow-up to my sound walk The London Ear. I was delighted that it was featured on BBC Radio Ulster’s Soundscapes programme in June. It has also been played at the 2019 HearSay International Audio Arts Festival and on Resonance FM.

‘London A to G’ is a 4 minute audio piece based on sounds I recorded around London in January and February 2019, arranged in order of their pitch, from A up to G. If you have a musical ear, you’ll notice the gradual shifts up a note. If not, it doesn’t matter. The piece is really about the resulting journey through London’s soundscape.

I decided to produce this because of my experience over the years leading The London Ear, a sound-themed walk for Dotmaker Tours. I’ve been particularly intrigued by the observation of the acoustician Dr William Braid White in 1931 that each city has a different ‘ground tone’: the sound you hear when you go up to the top of the highest building, that emerges like a drone note beneath the jumble of street sounds bubbling up. He commented that at that time London had a ‘heavy hum’ closest to the lowest C because it was ‘a city of low buildings, wood paving blocks, moist atmosphere’ and a law abiding population ‘not prone to excessive displays of excitement’. It set me wondering, does London have a ground tone today? And if so, has it changed from a low C?

What I’ve noticed is that, rather than there being a single constant frequency, a journey through London takes you through lots of local ground tones: the mechanically generated hums and rattles coming from air conditioning vents, construction works, pile drivers, bus engines and tube trains. I’ve included a few in London A to G, and they are all at different pitches. For example, the air vents here that cluster around C, C sharp and D and the Bakerloo line that (in this clip) veers between A and A flat.

Then there are the other intermittent musical sounds around you, again all going off at different frequencies. This is chance music, John Cage style. By editing some of them together, I found lovely coincidences like the dog barking at D that sounds much like the screech of skateboards in the Southbank Undercroft; and the Petticoat Lane market trader whose “serving you cheap” cry rhymes with the quarter bells of St Lawrence Jewry.

Some of the sounds presented have been carefully tuned, like transport beeps, sirens and church bells which begs the question, how were the different pitches and keys chosen? I’d love to speak to the person at TfL responsible for decisions about which sounds to incorporate in the system, if indeed such a person exists.

This, of course, raises a bigger issue of the design of London’s soundscape. How much of what we hear is thought through, and how much is just sonic waste? The father of soundscape studies, R Murray Schafer, warned in 1977 against creating a ‘sound sewer’, something that ‘is much more likely to result when a society trades its ears for its eyes, and … is certain to result when this is accompanied by an impassioned devotion to machines.’[1] By bringing into some sort of order the seemingly random collection of pitches that surround us in London, there’s an interesting conversation to be had about whether and how we might retune the city.

Post by Rosie Oliver, founder of Tickertape Production and leader of Dotmaker Tours alternative London walks.

[1] The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, By R Murray Schafer, 1977. Quote from Chapter 17, The Acoustic Designer.

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Seaweed, waves and sandwich terns

Seaweed, waves and sandwich terns

We spent a glorious morning in Poole Harbour last week, foraging for seaweed with fisherman Pete Miles. The trip was for one of the ‘Meet the Maker’ podcasts that we’re producing for LUSH cosmetics who use the weed in their face masks. Fascinating to find out all about ‘toothed wrack’ (pictured) against a rich sonic background of Brownsea Island sandwich terns, splashing water, engine noises and seagulls.

By way of an update to this post, you can listen to the finished podcast here.

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Podcast for LUSH: Portrait of a Master Paper Maker

This is the first in a series of ‘Meet the Maker’ podcasts that we are producing for LUSH cosmetics, in collaboration with Cathy Haynes. The aim is to give a sensory rich insight into the craft of making.

Here, we follow Master Paper Maker Gary Fuller at Frogmore Mill, Apsley as he produces a new kind of packaging paper using banana fibre. When the machines were rolling the Mill was incredibly noisy! The challenge for us was both to capture Gary’s voice as cleanly as possibly, and to record and mix in the mechanical sounds so as to give the listener the feeling of being inside the Mill as the paper was being made.

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Listening to paper being made

Listening to paper being made

A fascinating day last week listening to the hums, ticks and whistles of a 100 year old paper-making machine at Frogmore Mill, Apsley. We were there to interview master paper maker Gary Fuller as he produced a special ream of packaging paper from banana fibre. It’s for the first in a series of ‘Meet the Maker’ podcasts that we are producing for LUSH cosmetics, about their suppliers.

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To Skye to talk about a life well-travelled

To Skye to talk about a life well-travelled

On a clear day, this view from Skye to the mainland would be majestic. No matter the rain, we were there to talk and listen. We were interviewing for a spoken portrait about an extraordinary life lived across continents and through war and civil strife. A profoundly moving, meaningful and rewarding project to work on.

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