| Description |
An account of the astonishing exchange of letters between a very determined lady from Watford and some of the highest officials in the BBC that led on 2nd January 1928 to the first of 75 years of Daily Services.
The programme is presented by Judy Merry, who regularly leads the Daily Service, and will feature many of the original letters from the BBC’s archives at Caversham.
Miss Kate* Cordeux first wrote to Reith in 1926 asking for a daily Evensong mainly for invalids and hospital patients. There followed a prolonged and exceptional correspondence with the BBC, during which she raised a petition and had an appeal printed in the Radio Times. To the suggestion that existing listeners might begrudge the time, she said sweetly ‘few if any listeners will grudge say twenty minutes out of eight and a half hours a day, to bring peace and consolation to the sick, the lonely and the sad’. Who could argue?
When she heard the BBC was considering putting out ‘alternative programmes’ on the Daventry transmitter, Miss Cordeux shrewdly wrote asking for a trial run of her Evensong. The BBC wondered whether it could deflect her with a morning service and so in 1928 that first service was broadcast. Within two weeks a staggering 7,000 letters of appreciation reached the BBC. It became a permanent fixture and continued to inspire more listener correspondence than any other BBC programme.
A month later she wrote ‘now that the dear little Morning Service seems to have taken good root and be thriving shall I ask for another quarter of an hour daily as Evensong?’ Her voluminous correspondence at one point persuaded a worn-down Reith to ask his senior managers ‘are we irrevocably opposed to an evening five minutes of the sort she wishes?’ The answer was yes, so she never got her Evensong. But in recognition of her campaign for the daily service, she received the 100,000th copy of the book of prayers from the programme, published in 1936.. |
