The Nightingale Broadcasts

Beatrice Harrison, who lived in a remote house in woodland

south of Oxted, Surrey, was a distinguished cellist.

She was thirty-one when she tried to persuade Lord Reith to sanction

the BBC's recording, to be broadcast live, of a tryst

she was planning in her garden, with nightingales

in a copse, accompanied by herself on the cello

playing Elgar, whose favourite soloist she was – if it happened,

this would be the first ever live outdoor radio

broadcast. In May 1923, on a bench in a sea of bluebells,

she’d been playing ‘Chant Hindou’ by Rimsky-Korsakov

when a nightingale had swollen into song ‘in thirds,

and always in tune’ with her, from deep in a nearby grove.

It was the following spring, while making her broadcasting debut

as soloist in Elgar's Cello Concerto with Elgar

conducting, that she’d first hit upon the idea of nightingales singing

for the nation. Lord Reith supposed they’d be real prima

donnas – costly and unpredictable – and he was also chary

of packaging nature, of making birdsong ‘second-hand’.

But Miss Harrison pleaded the case of the poor – all those

without motorcars, in cities and the north of England.

A rehearsal went well. The broadcast, planned for 19th May,

would interrupt the Savoy Orpheans’ Saturday night dance

music programme just as the Oxted nightingales started

their evening crescendo. What a performance! –

the summerhouse filled with amplifiers, engineers swarming

in the undergrowth. Miss Harrison played in a ditch –

Elgar, Dvořák, ‘Danny Boy’. Silence. Then, fifteen minutes before

the station went off the air, a nightingale cadenza, which

gargled and trilled from the oak leaves, flowered through

a million radios and crystal sets, some of them outdoors,

themselves setting off nightingales, or building in the night air

a city of song in alien habitats – cornfields, moors,

mountains, housing. For twelve years the BBC broadcast

Miss Harrison's nightingale concerts (one of them, set up near

a pond, featuring a chorus of frogs). After she moved house,

the birds were recorded solo, not every year

but certainly in 1942, when engineers captured a nightingale

outsung but not silenced by a fleet of Lancasters

droning overhead, the first of the ‘thousand bomber’ raids,

targeting Cologne, archived though never broadcast.