The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency
When radios first appeared in British homes in the early 20th century, one thing soon became clear: domestic life would never be the same again. Beaty Rubens tracks Britons’ reaction to this extraordinary new technology via seven cartoons.
Radio silence
This double cartoon from 1923 laments the impact of the wireless on the art of conversation
Listening to the radio today is so familiar an occupation that we easily forget it was once a new technology. Like most new technologies, early radio stirred massive public excitement but also fear about its disruptive potential. What exactly was radio – or ‘wireless’, as it was then called? Who was it for? Where would it happen?
As the first ever form of home-based mass entertainment, anxieties ran particularly high about radio’s impact on the cherished traditions of domestic life. How, for example, might it affect conversation? Cartoons offer us a fascinating insight into how interwar Britons ad- dressed questions like these.
In the first panel of this before-and-after cartoon from 1923, guests at a Victorian dinner-party are engaged in animated conversation. In the second, each of them is isolated in their own world, all interaction stifled as they listen to the radio.
In the early days, problems with amplification meant that almost all listening was through head- phones, making them the must-have accessory of the 1920s, just as they are again today. Even the butler is wearing a set, on the verge of catastrophe as he stretches the wires to their full extent whilst carrying out his duties.
These images represent a wealthy fictional gathering, but real-life versions were soon playing out in homes across the country. Radio uptake was sensationally swift: when broadcasting began in 1922, just 150,000 people were able to listen; by 1939 the number had risen to 34 million.
Of course, such debates are not only a thing of the past, a forgotten feature of the lives of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Switch the gadget to mobile devices and this cartoon could as easily be a commentary on the ‘lost art’ of conversation at the 21st-century family dinner-table.
Is it a telephone, dear?
Many older Britons were utterly befuddled by the strange new talking gadget in their homes
Guglielmo Marconi patented wireless technology in 1896 but it would be more than a decade before the radio started making inroads into Britons’ homes. For many people, welcoming broadcasting into the domestic sphere could feel daunting, and attempts to understand how radio actually worked were often touchingly naive. Edith Davidson, wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, enquired in 1923 whether it was necessary to leave a window open while listening to the wireless.
In these first years, bad reception didn’t help. One disappointed early adopter in Sheffield compared the babble emanating from his radio to “an insurrection in hell”. And even when reception improved, older people often found the new technology daunting. Many cartoons depict them talking back to the radio, attempting to correct it or scolding it for interrupting.
The benign old auntie shown in this cartoon (which appeared in Radio Times in 1923) confusedly believes that her set is an updated telephone (the new technology of her youth). Hovering at the door, her nephew represents the first ever ‘wireless native’ generation. With such tech-savvy communication skills gaining currency, it makes sense to view the boy as a forerunner of the teenagers who listened to music on transistors in the 1950s and 1960s.
Early radio was soon enjoyed by all – including dear old aunties – but it was also beginning to play a role in a deeper generational shift.
The babysitting service
Was radio leading young mothers astray? The creator of a 1923 cartoon seemed to think it might be
Broadcasting was soon almost like a household utility. It provided a news service and regular weather forecasts, the Greenwich Time Signal, individualised SOS calls, live running sports commentaries, religious coverage, music and talks on a vast range of subjects. It also provided company.
As one housewife stated: “I know a woman who’s lost her husband and she was all alone, and she says with the wireless on she never feels lonely. It’s like having someone else in the room.”
The Radio Times cartoon shown above is, though, rather more ambiguous in its message. A fashionably turned-out woman is just leaving the nursery on the arm of her equally debonair husband. At the last moment she turns to give a final instruction to the nursemaid who stands humbly next to her toddler charge: “Let the little darling listen to Children’s Hour, and then, when he’s had his supper, the Radio Dance Band can play him to sleep.” The woman’s nonchalant suggestion is clear: listening to the radio can now replace more traditional forms of childcare.
Below the image, the caption asks: ‘WHAT IS HOME WITHOUT A RADIO?’ This is a provocative play on the title of a familiar Victorian parlour song, What Is Home Without a Mother? But is it claiming that the new technology has become a welcome domestic resource, or slyly suggesting that it provides an excuse for mothers to neglect their traditional household duties and go off dancing till dawn?
The curse of casual sexism
Housewives benefited hugely from the radio revolution. Yet the battle over misogyny hadn’t been won
At a time when almost all married women stayed at home, daytime broadcasting proved a boon. One housewife from Manchester captured this in a 1929 letter to Radio Times. She described herself as “bursting with mental energy” but obliged to “stay close to work-a-day household duties”, before declaring that “the task of cleaning a kitchen went down a little better while listening to the intelligent observations of an intelligent woman”. A Bristol housewife explained that she would take her bowl of potatoes into the parlour in order to peel them to the accompaniment of the Daily Service: “That half hour doose me good.”
The 1929 general election was the first in which all women enjoyed the same voting rights as men. In preparation for this, a formidable female BBC editor and dedicated team of producers commissioned many talks on civic and political life.
But even after equality had officially been won, casual sexism and deeply ingrained misogyny persisted, as numerous ostensibly hilarious cartoons reveal. The image builds on age-old tropes about who is really in charge in the home. It appeared in October 1928, three months after the passing of the Equal Franchise Act and is entitled How Laws Are Made.
With breathtaking irony apparently lost on the editor and arts editor of Radio Times (both men), the text immediately above reminds listeners that an “interesting series of Tuesday Talks, entitled ‘Questions for Women Voters’, is to be continued at 7pm on 6 November by Professor Harold J Laski of the London School of Economics, whose subject will be ‘How Laws Are Made’.”
Music for the masses?
The wireless transported working-class Britons to a gilded world they had little hope of inhabiting
With the manufacturers in over-drive, there was soon a wireless to suit every pocket. Only the super-rich could afford a ready-made set in a polished cabinet with its own amplifying horn, but a basic ‘crystal set’ was within the reach of most working people. After buying an annual licence (10 shillings, which could be paid by instalments into a savings club), there were no running costs, so day-to-day listening was free.
However, democracy of access to broadcasting could not disguise the wide social and economic divisions in British society. This cartoon appeared in Radio Times only weeks after the General Strike – the great symbol of 1920s inequality. The scene is a large office, furnished in masculine opulence.
In the foreground, a painfully thin charwoman has just pushed back the heavy carpet to clean the marble floor beneath. It is the look on her face that tells the story: a startled yet weary resignation at the absurdity of the words she is hearing broadcast from a conspicuously pricey radio-set: “We are now taking you over to the Savoy Hotel.”
Popular music played by the resident bands of grand, metropolitan venues brought immense pleasure into millions of lives but it might also awaken other emotions. For example, a headline in the Birmingham Dispatch announced: “Crystal Set Irony – Savoy Band in Miner’s Hovel.”
Radio broadcasting was increasingly playing a role in uniting the nation, but this cartoon is a poignant reminder that it might actually reinforce a sense of division between rich and poor.
Royals in your living room
How should Brits behave in the presence of monarchy? Thanks to the radio, this question took on greater urgency.
It was the ‘Year of the Three Kings’. In 1936, George V died, Edward VIII abdicated and George VI assumed the throne – all in 12 turbulent months for the royal family. The BBC covered all three events extensively, but bringing monarchy right into listeners’ homes inevitably provoked new questions of etiquette.
Was it necessary to stand for royal broadcasts and the national anthem (as happened in cinemas and theatres)? Was it permissible to eat and drink during the more solemn moments of the coronation?
It would be a mistake to imagine that all listeners took such broadcasts as seriously as the stern paterfamilias in the cartoon, whose wife meekly questions the need for the family to behave as if actually in the presence of royalty. Real listeners to the coronation allowed themselves to wonder about more humdrum issues: what did the king and queen do for food all day and how did the troops lining the route of the procession relieve themselves? As one Londoner reported: “We couldn’t quite hear the words of the ceremony and some of the phrases sounded like ‘Gawd blimey’ and ‘swelp me bob’. We all joined in mock interpretations and there was much laughter.”
At the same time, a more subversive brand of radio comedy was gaining mass appeal. Programmes such as Band Waggon mocked the more solemn pretensions of broadcasting itself and played on another intimate but virtual relationship – that of listeners in their homes and comedians in Broadcasting House. This so-called ‘radiogenic’ comedy (comedy particularly suited in style or content to the medium) was as important as royal broadcasting in the coming of age of radio as an art-form in its own right.
The wireless goes to war
In 1939, radio truly came of age: relaying world-shaking events to a nation battling for its survival.
Less than a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, this eloquent cartoon appeared in a special ‘Home’ number of Radio Times. It blends Broadcasting House with an image that has something of the modest suburban home, something of the cosy country cottage. Hens cluck in the yard, long johns flap on the washing line.
A comfortably plump man strides home to his wife who is waiting under a pergola. Above and behind her, like benign sentinels, stand the statues of Prospero and Ariel. Wisteria climbs between curtained windows towards the iconic clock and rooftop transmitter.
The text that appeared below the cartoon stated that “when all is said and done, broadcasting, with all its elaborate mechanism, is aimed at the home”. It also imparted the message that, if wireless was consumed in the same way as theatre and cinema – ie outside the home – it might be grander, more imposing and more sophisticated. However, it would also be less intimate and friendly.
Unashamedly romantic in flavour, this image represents the British way of life under threat. Skies are darkening overhead. War is coming. And that war would mark the end of the first phase of British radio and the beginning of the second, when the nation gathered around the wireless-set, eager for information, education and entertainment. News was to prove the key offering.
Just before the war, a Welsh grocer memorably commented: “The news is, for me, the very special feature... My wife releases me from the shop counter for the 6 o’clock news... I wouldn’t miss the news. I’ve even neglected the bacon machine for the news.” Not even 20 years old, and very far from perfect, the radio set had earned its place in the home.
Beaty Rubens’ new book, Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home, is published by Bodleian Library. A free exhibition with the same name is running in the Weston Library, Oxford until 31 August.
This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine