Dreaming of BH
Last night I dreamed I went to Broadcasting House again. It seemed to me I crossed the road from the Church of All Souls and pushed open the heavy bronze doors, beneath Eric Gill’s statue of Arial with it’s (supposedly) truncated genitals. I must have done this a thousand times, into the marble foyer with its uniformed commissionaires. Most were, as the French say, mutilés de guerre, and rumour had it that when one limbless gentleman retired, the BBC had given him a push button digital watch. The foyer was also the scene of an infamous (but apocryphal) theft. Men in brown dust coats arrived to collect the grand piano from the Concert Hall. As they crossed the foyer, a commissionaire interjected “you can’t take that!…”…. and removed the distinctive Bakelite ashtray that sat on the lid. The piano was loaded into a van and never seen again.
The foyer was a bit like the entrance to an upmarket 30s cinema. The Church of Reith. Generally I took the stairs on the left to the first floor. But, if early, I got into the fabulous Art Deco lift and pressed 7. The seventh floor, at the prow of the BH ship, was an oasis of quiet where the floor mysteriously dipped down and then up several steps. Here there was a small Gents bog where one could sit in peace and smoke, an oasis of calm, a near silent backwater behind the clock tower.
Usually, though, I followed the curving first floor corridor. In Old BH the rooms were numbered 106, 107, etc. Thus, on the east side of the building there was a room 101, possibly where Orwell himself had worked in the 1940s, and still a rather strange corner of the building. Maybe it was where the Security Services went through news stories and issued the D notices. But my route took me down the steps to the Control Room doors. On special occasions (so called Grade 1 broadcasts) these were locked against marauders, but usually you just buzzed straight in. On week days there was a tea trolley by the lifts at around 11am, where Joyce served what was meant to be coffee, but was more generally coff-tea, since the canteen didn’t wash out the urns properly. Joyce was a mother to us all.
What can I say of the Control Room that has not already been said? The two rows of angled, plate glass windows that were said to be resistant to a light armour piercing shell? The front desk and the seemingly endless bays of amps and jack fields, and at the back the 6 Continuity Suites where BBC radio pumped out its 4 networks. Even then some of the equipment dated back to the 1940s. In fact the whole place, with every piece of equipment painted battleship grey, still seemed haunted by war, old BH had received a direct hit in 1940. The air conditioning, with its constant back pressure on the doors, made people ill. You could sleep behind the bays on a night shift if you wanted, the rows of valve amps at least kept you a bit warm. Sometimes we would answer the phones “Engine Room!” because this was the core of the ship as she sailed down Portland Place to who knows where. They didn’t like you saying that; as underlings we had to be deferential to the Studio Managers, even when they had “finger trouble” – that is, they didn’t know how to work their studio.
Lifts, always lifts in my dreams. Sometimes vertiginous, rickety and unstable. Even though the real lifts were efficient, smooth and, at night eerily quiet – most of the time you just took them to the 8th floor canteen, on a tea round for the Control Room or Cons, slopping the vile brown liquid onto the plastic tray as you returned. The canteen was staffed by a group of stout Afro Caribbean ladies, which one well know Radio DJ called “Martha and the Vandellas”. Their catch phrase was “We’re waitin’ on de chips”. They were always waitin’ on de chips. Mostly the food was OK, but the cheese and potato pie was to be avoided; a beige dollop, you could turn the plate upside down and it would not move. There were other places to eat, at least during the day; the little ground floor cafe that served Humous, Pitta and salad, obviously aimed at the creatives rather than the rude mechanicals. Oh, and the sandwich bar on the seventh floor, just next to the roof “garden” which had a few sad looking plants, but a good view over the rooftops of the West End.
Nights were the best and the worst. If on an early show you got to sleep in the haunted Langham Hotel across the road, where the ghost of a commissionaire walked an earlier floor, several feet below the present one. Terry swore he had seen it. If unlucky you got YATNATM – the Radio 2 graveyard shift between 2 and 5 am. 3 hours of interminable vibraphone jazz with only some stale sandwiches and more of the rotgut coffee to keep you awake. 4am in a sound proof, air conditioned studio is as close as you can get to being dead without being dead.
If you didn’t decide to catch a few Zs (some shifts, excruciatingly, stayed up all night playing “games”) it was a great time to explore the deserted building, like some vast stone Marie Celeste. There were studios in the basements and on the 3rd, 4th, 5th 6th and 7th floors. The fourth floor was news, sixth and seventh had drama studios with those weird sets of stairs that went nowhere, each tread with 3 different surfaces for different effects. Sometimes you found effects records; a 7 inch 45 with 20 different sounds of bees. Or one of tractors, starting, stopping. To be honest, most of the studios were pretty similar; a cubicle with a mixing desk and 3 tape machines, a studio with a table and some mics. My favourites were S1 and S2, below Lower Ground and Basement, you already felt you were in the bowels of the Earth, expecting to see the letters AS carved into the plaster. After the direct hit of October 1940, the Control Room had been moved from the 7th floor to this Sub-basement, where it remained until New BH was built in the 1960s. S1 and S2 were cavernous rooms, seeming to go on forever in the half light from the cubicle. Originally they had been sumptuous Art Deco rooms for big band concerts. Sometimes I played the Steinways down there. Here you could also hear the passing trains on the Bakerloo line, in fact they were often audible on programmes from B4 and B6.
The bowels of the building held other secrets, such as the “Stronghold” a 10 000 ton concrete bunker completed in 1942, it was never used and incorporated into the BH extension in the early 1960s. At the end of its single corridor, which was protected by a gas proof door, was the famous “staircase to nowhere”; a narrow staircase leading down to a lobby of blank concrete walls. This is widely believed to be the source of the rumour that BH had access to a platform on the Bakerloo line, although in fact the tube is about 100 feet below the lowest basement. In the 1960s, the Stronghold got its rural counterpart in PAWN; the still secret nuclear bunker at BBC Wood Norton near Evesham. I had been in its upper level, but the rest was rumour. Apparently one had to be vetted by the Security Services to be allowed into the studios under the hill. Like the mysterious activities that colleagues periodically went off to do, but would not discuss, it was all part of the Cold War paranoia that still haunted the times. The stronghold was demolished in 2007, Protected Area Wood Norton lives on, described by the Independent in 2010 as “The BBC bunker they don’t want you to know about.” Most obscure of all, and least know, were the caves under Broadcasting House, entered from the same stairwell that led to S1 and S2. I never ventured far into the cave mouth, but it led to one of the many underground rivers, like the Fleet, that flow across the city into the Thames.Looking back over what I have written, I’m reminded of H.G. Wells short story, “The Door in the Wall”. Briefly, the central character, as a child, finds a door into a paradisical garden, but for one reason or another never returns until the ambiguous and mysterious events surrounding his death. Supposedly Wells is contrasting rational scientific thought with imagination and memory. As I recall it, BH was full of mysterious doors in walls, though none, in my experience, led to paradise, friendly girl playmates or tame panthers. Maybe I just never found the right door…
See this site for images of BH history: http://www.orbem.co.uk/index.htm
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