Catherine Law’s latest historical page-turner The Map Maker’s Promise is out now!
When I joined the BBC in 1985, at the tender age of 19, it felt like stepping into a lovely deep, lukewarm bath. I was on the BBC secretarial training course, based at The Langham, a former hotel opposite iconic Broadcasting House, which appeared like an ocean liner moored at the top of Regent’s Street, complete with aerial and Art Deco curves.
The course was achingly old-fashioned – even then! – and certainly character building. We were taught shorthand and typing on manual typewriters, tucked away in the old servants’ quarters on the fifth floor, supposedly haunted and reached by a rickety lift with a concertina door. We learnt how to use carbon copies, how to answer a telephone and write down a message. But, along with the basics of office life, we had tours of the BBC departments in their scattered headquarters, from the World Service to the Open University, to the Television studios at Shepherd’s Bush – where I had a go at vision mixing – and the hallowed corridors of Radio over in Broadcasting House. We recorded a news bulletin – not for broadcast I may add – in the infamous basement studios where you can hear and feel the tube trains rumbling underneath.
The technology may have improved, but the procedures and bureaucracy – the backbone of the BBC – remained then as it had done through WW2, forty-odd years before. And this, as well as the Beeb’s commitment to telling the truth, to be authentic and to reach all corners of the globe, with a little light relief from time to time, was what I believe got our country through our darkest hours.
Broadcasting House was hit twice during the Blitz, in October – when seven members of staff were killed – and December 1940. But the BBC patched itself up and continued to broadcast over Europe and to far-flung Empire countries where people would turn the dial to listen for reassuring voices through the static.
My formative time at the BBC – in the mid to late 1980s – stayed with me and re-emerged as the setting for the opening of my new WW2 novel The Map Maker’s Promise. My character Clare, born in the London suburbs, is working at the BBC in 1940 until her life changes one night during a terrifying air raid. While creating this backdrop to my story, I was inspired by Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel Human Voices. And hope I have conveyed the BBC’s heroic, dogged wartime role, summed up by its original motto: ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’.