Four Didsbury balconies ….and a pioneering woman radio producer ….. Olive Shapley

It started with a balcony and a picture.

In Didsbury they have balconies, Olive Shapley Aveune, 2026

And turned into one of those moments of synchronicity where what appear to be random discoveries with no obvious connection all fall together.

So, my picture of four balconies prompted me to search the address which turned out to be named after a pioneering radio presenter who lived in Didsbury on Millgate Lane and was born close to where I grew up in Peckham in southeast London.

To this can be added a shared belief in socialism and the power of the wireless to document, inform and inspire the imagination.

10 Tresco Road, 2022

She was Olive Shapley and the more I pondered on her life and work the more I was drawn to her.

As a boy of ten out on endless adventures, I would have passed her birthplace on Tresco Road just a short walk from Lausanne Road where I grew up.*

And much later on wanders across Didsbury in the early 1970s I would have walked down Millgate Lane and passed Rose Hill, an impressive 19th century property which in 1965 she converted into accommodation for “unsupported mothers” a term she preferred over the description unmarried mothers.  

Later still she turned the house into a home for “Vietnamese boat people”.

But it was her work in radio that really interests me, and in particular her determination to produce programmes which explored the lives of working people in the North where she settled in the early 1930s.  

Perhaps one of the most important of these was the 1939 "The Classic Soil" made with Joan Littewood comparing the social conditions of the 30s with those observed a century earlier by Friedrich Engels.

Rose Hill, Mill Gate, 2020

She also broke new ground in how such documentaries were made giving them a real authenticity and vibrance by recording the conversations unscripted.

It was a method she continued to use while living and working in New York and making programmes about life in Harlem and Native Americans.

In 1941 she started to produce a "newsletter" programme which was sent back to Britain and broadcast fortnightly on the BBC's Children's Hour, and among her interviewees were Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson. 

They were according to Guardian the precursor of Alister Cooke’s Letter from America which began four years later. **  

And as a lifelong fan of his weekly fifteen-minute insights into all things American I wish I could find voice recordings of those earlier programmes.

That mould breaking approach continued when in 1949 she became the presenter of the Women’s Hour where “she brought formerly taboo subjects like menopause and women without men onto the air” **

There is much more about Olive Shapley and most of it is available from Guardian articles as well as a useful summary on Wikipedia. ***

They included a selection of BBc radio peogrammes on Olive Shepley, and her long listing for the Wo Manchester Statue which was finally awrded to Emmeline Pankhurst.*****

But I can’t leave without quoting a series of observations which chime in with my own feelings as a Londoner for my adopted city of Manchester.  

The first comes from a moment in the 1930s when she arrived back “cold and homesick at 10pm on a Sunday night and I can remember looking outside the station at a large advertisement asking, ‘Why wear a Truss?’ [and] Once recording in a shop I saw a women trying on a hat, and the sales assistant said, ‘Love, you look terrible’. I thought I want to stay here.  I was so excited by the people I met and felt I’d got to get them on radio.  I wanted to show Northern people as they were”. ****

Olive Shapley Avenue, 2020

And the last words should also be hers  showing as it does an emotional honesty. 

Writing to her children ten years after the death of their father from cancer she wrote that it had taught her that “the bad, unwelcome thing must be taken into the centre of your being and accepted; that it must be looked at and looked at again.  There is no other way to look”.

Picture; In Didsbury they have balconies, Olive Shapley Avenue, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Tresco Road, Peckham, southeast London, 2022, courtesy of Google Maps, and Rose Hill former home of Olive Shapley, 2020, and Olive Shapley Avenue, 2020, Cnbrb, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license; the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

*Lausanne Road, Evelina Road Linden Grove Tresco Road

**Letting the People Speak, Annie Karpf, The Guardian, March 15th, 1999 

***Olive Shapley, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Shapley

**** Radical radio days, Annie Karpf, The Guardian, July 26th, 1989

*****Woman's Hour,BBC Radio, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p01ldcsc

BBC Archive shines light on Northern social documentary pioneer Olive Shapley, https://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/news/bbc-archive-shines-light-northern-social-documentary-pioneer-olive-shapley/

In Focus: Olive Shapley, https://www.bbc.co.uk/creativediversity/history/oliveshapley