Elizabeth Gwladys Davies (24 February 1917 – 27 January 2018) was a British radio drama producer and director, and a prolific dramatist who contributed scripts to radio, primarily at the BBC, for more than fifty years. Her work appeared on the BBC Home Service and radio For the Forces during the Second World War and continued to appear on BBC Radio 4 well into the 1990s. As a director of drama, she produced the long-running radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary and worked closely with writers ranging from the Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon to the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, while directing hundreds of plays and serials for the radio. Davies died at the age of 100.
Life and works Betty Davies was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, on 24 February 1917, towards the end of the First World War, to Esther née Warrington, who was Welsh, and Percy Davies, an English civil servant. Davies was an only child, although her mother was one of six daughters and a single son which provided Davies with a large family network of cousins which sustained her until her death. Davies and her parents moved to London after the war.
Davies prepared to fulfil her ambition of a BBC career by learning shorthand and typing, and by reading for an honours degree in English with subsidiary Latin at University College London. She joined the BBC in June 1939, as a secretary, and moved through the Corporation ranks, serving as secretary to the Presentation Manager for Outside Broadcasts and Presentations before becoming Research Assistant in the Analysis Section of the Listener Research Department by November 1946.
She had already established herself as a contributing writer to BBC programmes from 1943, in diverse offerings that demonstrated a light touch and included collaborations with musicians. With the band leader Miff Ferrie, later better known as the long-time producer and agent for the British comedian Tommy Cooper, she wrote the musical entertainment Blow Your Own Trumpet! which was first broadcast on the Home Service in 1944 and later shown on BBC Television in 1947.Blow Your Own Trumpet, IMDb, BBC Television, 1947.
Her early contributions to radio sometimes seemed to develop a theme: For the magazine programme Divertissement transmitted on For the Forces in 1943, she wrote The Telephone, a 'story with a surprise by Betty Davies'.BBC Genome, Divertissement The Telephone, 1943. In 1959, when she was preoccupied as "main producer" of Mrs Dale's Diary, she wrote and produced The Telephone Call for the Home Service. Her 1945 play Best Seller, originally produced for the Home Service by the actor and director Hugh Stewart, was remade for the Home Service in 1961 by David Geary.
Davies also wrote for Children's Hour, with plays such as The Conjuror's Rabbit,BBC Genome, The Conjuror's Rabbit, Children's Hour, 1946. broadcast twice in 1946, and again in 1949 – a recording is preserved in the British Library Sound ArchiveThe Conjuror's Rabbit, BBC Home Service, 1949, British Library Sound Archive. – and The Silver Flame, with music by Alan Paul,Alan Paul, BBC profile for the forces, 1940. broadcast in 1951.
In the course of her career, Davies was involved in well over 1,300 BBC productions as identifiable in the BBC's searchable database, BBC Genome. While the site lists more than 2,000 productions, some include contributors with similar names, including the actor Betty Ann Davies, and many of Davies's productions did not list the producer in the Radio Times, the main source for BBC Genome.
Just the Job for Jones
Among the many young women who brought new energy and ideas to BBC radio during the war, starting careers in broadcasting that would endure for decades, Davies cut a highly unusual path in entertainment by taking, with the BBC's blessing, a two-hour musical comedy that satirized the BBC, set in the BBC's Broadcasting House, into London's West End.
Just the Job for Jones, with book and lyrics by Davies and music by her established radio collaborator Alan Paul, was a big enough event to attract senior BBC management and the theatrical press. Presented at the Fortune Theatre, with members of the corporation's theatrical society, Ariel, making up the company, it was nonetheless a full-scale spectacle, produced by two of the outstanding talents in BBC drama and comedy.
Audrey Cameron, a leading producer (and actor) in radio with hundreds of credits,Audrey Cameron reference page at BBC Genome. was joined by Douglas Moodie, a producer of musicals and comedies who would go on to produce the BBC's television police classic Dixon of Dock Green, took charge of the production, and were to give Davies a free rein.
What set the show apart was the innovative way in which Davies interwove musical gags and jabs at the BBC culture with material inspired by her day job, working in Listener Research to compile confidential reports on listeners' and viewers' reactions to programmes. One of her lyrics, teasingly sung by a "listener", went: "I'm not a prude/but I think the Third's rude," poking fun at the young cultural network, the Third Programme. Sir William Halley, Director-General of the BBC, who had devised the network, was in the audience, with Lord Simon, chairman of the BBC, and his fellow governors.
The Third was not spared further attention – when a man turns up for a Third Programme interview he is, indicatively, bearded and in sandals; a spiv selling mouth organs seeks out the distinguished chief conductor of The Proms Sir Malcolm Sargent. All of the corporation's bandwidths would receive attention.
Clifford Davis, writing in the Daily Mirror – "A girl takes the mike out of the BBC""A girl takes the mike out of the BBC", The Daily Mirror, Monday, 28 May 1951, p. 2. – described Davies as a "slim dark-haired B.B.C. girl". He added: Bachelor girl Betty wrote book and lyrics unaided in her Maida Vale flatlet. It took her two months work after her daily stint in the Listeners' Research Department.... Does Betty take the mike out of the B.B.C.? Of course. How will Lord Simon, chairman of the Corporation, his fellow governors, Director General Sir William Haley, and other radio barons react? "We shall have to wait and see," says Betty. "No one's vetted the script."
Making merry with the criticism of the BBC and setting the criticism to music, did not set Davies back in her career. A complaint about television's new intrusion into the home was sung: We feel bewitched and bewildered By acrobats thrown in your face. A stomach's all right, but X-rayed in the light It really looks quite out of place.
According to The Stage, Britain's theatre journal of record, it was "extremely enjoyable".The Fortune Theatre, Just the Job for Jones, The Stage, 31 May 1951. It also signalled the end of her research into the audience, and to her move to drama full-time.
Mrs Dale's Diary
By the time Davies became assistant producer on Mrs Dale's Diary, in June 1953, the BBC's first long-running serial drama had been airing for over five years, since January 1948. Each weekday a new episode was broadcast, introduced by the title character, Mrs Dale, with a new diary entry on the latest domestic crisis. Initially a feminine perspective on Britain's middle-class suburban family in a nation recovering from war and austerity, it was required listening for many. According to The Daily Telegraph, The Queen Mother said about the programme: "It is the only way of knowing what goes on in a middle-class family." The Daily Telegraph, "Mrs Dale's Diary: the radio show that captivated Britain", 25 April 2016.
Mrs Dale's Diary had been due for a makeover when Davies joined the programme in 1953, and Davies was part of that refreshment. In a later, feminist, deconstruction of the programme in 2013, Kristen Skoog argued that the BBC's male culture took over the series. In her essay, "They're 'Doped' by that Dale Diary: Women's Serial Drama, the BBC and British Post-War Change","They're 'Doped' by that Dale Diary: Women's Serial Drama, the BBC and British Post-War Change", Kerstin Skoog in, Renewing Feminisms: Radical Narratives, Fantasies and Futures in Media Studies, p. 134, Bloomsbury, 2013, . she wrote:
Being a domestic serial Mrs Dale's Diary was from its very inception categorized (and devalued) as popular feminized mass culture, mainly written by women for a female audience and therefore it was not admired among BBC producers. This had resulted in producers working on a rota or in the engagement of outside producers on an ad-hoc basis. This changed with ... Antony Kearey – an actor who had started to work on the serial as Assistant in the Drama Department Script Unit – and in June 1953 he was hired as the main producer for the serial. His appointment would guarantee greater editorial control and continuity. As main producer he was dedicated and keen to improve the serial. Already in April, he had [suggested] that a complete break with the current editorial policy was needed and that national events could be mentioned. Before Kearey's appointment it had also been confirmed that the serial was to be allocated not only a producer but also an assistant – Betty Davies, who took over as main producer when Kearey left in 1955 ...A few months into his new position, Kearey said that the main priority was to raise the level of scripts by better reflecting the life of a middle-class family in a London suburb: "greater research by scriptwriters into their material is necessary if the past 'vagueness' is to be overcome"....
Kearey's tenure was brief. By the time of Mrs Dales 2,000th edition in November 1955, Davies was the main producer. Her extensive experience in research for the BBC and credits as a writer stood her in good stead on the programme, where she continued until 1962. Mrs Dale was then due her next makeover, which was to see the series become The Dales, while Davies would be taking up her influential role in the mainstream of radio drama.
Allen Andrews, writing in the Daily Herald, considered the programme and its audience at the time of that 2,000th edition, also talking to Davies for his article, The dream world of Mrs Dale.The dream world of Mrs Dale by Allen Andrews, The Daily Herald, 12 November 1955. As the BBC Sound Archive retains only five of the more than five thousand editions, he also usefully captured the mood of the serial:
This week, in a church that does not exist, two people who do not exist either, were married. And on Monday, millions of us will hear all about it when the harp strings are plucked to turn the 2,000th page of Mrs. Dale's Diary. At a reception given by the B.B.C. to celebrate the double occasion, the "bride,2 standing by a cardboard cake, wickedly observes that this is radio's first shotgun wedding. For, in her private capacity as actress, Julia Braddock, she is expecting a baby in March. This is the sort of remark that infuriates the fans, for it destroys the dream-world of Mrs. Dale. The doctor's wife is, the BBC claims, "part of the mythology of our island."...
Andrews took a sympathetic view of the programme and its audience – asking what it offered the "Dale day-dreamers" and declaring in one word: "FRIENDSHIP". "Mrs Dale", he wrote, "is our dream Mum." She is a nice, confident and competent woman, inhabiting a world where nothing ever happens to her – it happens to other people.
"Ask her pretty puppet-mistress, radio-producer Betty Davies," he adds. "All movements of the Dale marionettes suggested by the covey of script-writers must accord with Miss Davies' fundamental conception of Dale characteristics and BBC policy."
"The Dales", says Betty Davies, "are an idealised version of the middle-class, suburban professional family". "They are improvements on reality. They are how we should like to see a family, more united than in actuality".