OTD in early British television: 30 December 1936
John Wyver writes: The conventional forms of conventional politics on television are absent from the pre-war Alexandra Palace service. There was no television news, and Panorama, the first regular current affairs magazine show would not debut until 1953. But there were the newsreels, political figures gave bland interviews to appeared on Picture Page, and there were occasional state-of-the-nation talks, including The Pattern of 1936, given on Wednesday 30 December 1936 by Professor John Hilton.
John Hilton is (I think) little-read these days, but in the interwar period he was the first Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge University, taking up the post in 1931. He had apprenticed as a mill mechanic, studied before the First World War in Russia, and for a decade after 1919 he worked as Director of Statistics for the Ministry of Labour. In the 1930s he was recognised as a prominent public intellectual, broadcast regularly on radio and contributing numerous columns to the News Chronicle and The Listener.
Producer Cecil Lewis brought him to AP within the first fortnight of programmes, with Hilton giving a talk on 13 November 1936 titled The Declining Population. Part of the selling-point of the broadcast, as the billing indicated, was the use of ‘charts and diagrams’, exactly the kind of visual aids that were denied to radio but that the new medium could offer.
With Hilton being interrogated by Cecil Lewis, The Pattern of 1936 was ‘a review of trade, finance, exports, imports, employment, etc, with chart illustrations‘ [emphasis added]. Radio Times offered more detail:
Nearly five years ago John Hilton, Professor of Industrial Relations at Cambridge University, helped to form a club for the unemployed, Fellowship House. The members are the keenest critics of his weekly broadest talks. Few men can better understand the outlook of the unemployed and few men have done more than he to cheer them up. As a listener once wrote in a letter to him, he has ‘a happy knack of making life seem extra good’.
In this interview with Cecil Lewis, Professor Hilton will show, with charts and figures, the probable tread of unemployment during the coming year. He will answer such questions as, What will the reduction amount to?’, ‘In what industries and places is improvement experienced ?’; Will the Depressed Areas remain so as the boom develops?’; and ‘How much has the armaments boom contributed to improvement?’
Lewis soon departed AP, leaving for Hollywood to script a film based on his war memoir Sagittarius Rising, although not before hosting Hilton on 14 January in the first of a series titled Home Affairs. In the opening programme, the academic discussed ‘London’s green belt’ with Labour MP Herbert Morrison.
Mary Adams, who took on the task of organising talks, inherited Home Affairs and Hilton, who spoke with a fascinating range of guests including Sir Walter Citrine on ‘the future of trade unionism’; on housing with Sir Harold Bellman, Chairman of the British National Association of Building Societies; and Sir William Beveridge, later to be canonised as the architect of the post-war welfare state, but in 1936 Chairman of the Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee.
‘Food and health’ was the topic considered in two separate discussions on 11 March 1937, in the afternoon with MP R.S. Hudson, and in the evening with Minister of Health, Sir Kingsley Wood, while later in the month ‘The industrial belt round London’ was chewed over with industrialist Sir Thomas Barlow.
After which, Hilton either withdrew from television or fell from favour, as there are no further recorded appearances by him in the pre-war period. Yet he deserves to be remembered as the first notable television commentator on current affairs.
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