By Inge Kjemtrup | From the November/December 2024 issue of Strings
One evening in May 1924, in a woodland garden in Oxted, Surrey, the famous English cellist Beatrice Harrison put her bow on the strings and began to play. As she played, she listened for the nightingale who had sung along with her for the past several weeks. Harrison was about to make history with the first outdoor BBC broadcast. But would her costar—the nightingale—appear?
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Before the appointed hour, BBC radio engineers scrambled in the woods, placing cables, amplifiers, and the revolutionary new Round-Sykes microphone. “It was something to see all the paraphernalia of the BBC in our garden,” Harrison recalled in her biography. “It was a great risk, of course, as in those days no wild bird had been broadcast before in its natural state. It was a thing so new that they all, engineers included, seemed to think it impossible.
“At about nine o’clock, I crept up with my cello to a ditch and placed my chair half in and half out of it, quite crooked,” Harrison wrote. “Suddenly, at about quarter to eleven . . . the nightingale burst into song as I continued to play. His voice seemed to come from the Heavens . . . . I shall never forget his voice that night, or his trills, nor the way he followed the cello so blissfully. It was a miracle to have caught his song and to know that it was going, with the cello, to the ends of the earth. My excitement was intense. My greatest wish was accomplished!”
Radio listeners around the world were enchanted by the duet between cellist and bird. Letters flooded into the BBC in London, addressed to “The Lady of the Nightingales.” The BBC, which had only launched a few years before, was relieved. And Harrison would perform in her garden every spring for the next decade.
Dr. Kate Kennedy is a cellist, academic, radio presenter, and the general manager of the Museum of Music History. I ask her why the broadcast inspired such a strong response. There are many reasons, Kennedy explains: “The country was in deep mourning in 1924. There was almost not a household in Britain who hadn’t lost someone close to them. The idea of something very beautiful and pure coming from the skies—after planes going overhead, after bombardments—was very potent.”
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Another reason was that the broadcast represented a technological leap for radio. “When people listened to the radio before the Beatrice broadcast, everything sounded very flat, very claustrophobic—there’s no sense of space. So as a medium for the arts, as a medium of creativity, it wasn’t really going anywhere. It was like having a walkie-talkie. This opened the door to the possibility of recording with depth because of this super high-tech microphone that they were trying out for the very first time.”
The final reason for the broadcast’s impact is perhaps less obvious. “It was something incredibly beautiful that people all over the Commonwealth who were nowhere near nightingales, people in New Zealand, were writing and saying, I haven’t heard a nightingale since I immigrated when I was nine, or whatever. It was something that brought people together that was so pure and innocent and about hope and about beauty and about joy. And it’s technologically a completely new world. It’s that all coming together in one moment. That’s what makes it so extraordinary.”
Beatrice Harrison (1892–1965) was a highly regarded cellist. Her calling cards were the Elgar Concerto, which she recorded with the composer, and the Brahms Double Concerto, which she performed with her violinist sister, May Harrison. Beatrice was also known for championing the music of contemporary composers such as Frederick Delius, John Ireland, and Roger Quilter. Yet, as Kennedy remarks, the success of the broadcast meant that “she became the lady with the nightingales, rather than the lady with a fantastically formidable technique and an ability to bring colors out of a cello like no one else. The nightingale became the gimmicky thing, but that wasn’t really her fault. It’s just how fame works.”
The idea that a human performer could duet with nightingales seemed dubious to some, however. It was claimed that Harrison was playing not with a nightingale but with a singer trained to mimic birds. In 1992, the Mail on Sunday newspaper claimed that Maude Gould, a professional bird whistler or “siffleur,” performing under the name of Madame Saberon, had mimicked the nightingale for the broadcast, and the entire thing was a hoax. These claims resurfaced in 2022 on a BBC radio program featuring Professor Tim Birkhead, an expert on birds.
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A cover-up by the BBC? Not so fast, says Kennedy, who has studied materials from the extensive Harrison archive at the Museum of Music. Harrison, it seems, left a manuscript of that first night in which she describes several nightingales singing together. “She gives us kind of forensic detail as to what happened,” says Kennedy. “She would’ve been a complete psychopath to have faked it with that level of detail.” In addition, “there were newspaper reports from journalists who were there for the dress rehearsal and were there for the first night, standing right there, very close to her. There was no way they would’ve all not noticed a woman [the bird imitator] in a bush.” A recording in the BBC archives provided another witness, a young boy, a radio amateur enthusiast, who ridiculed the idea of a bird imitator in the bushes.
What of Madame Saberon, aka Maude Gould? Shady, it seems. She had been arrested for carrying naval secrets to the Germans just before the First World War, working in concert with her partner, a German spy named Frederick Schroeder, who posed as an Englishman named Adolphus Gould. Later in her life, Maude Gould apparently told family members that she might have been the bird imitator.
What makes Gould’s story so implausible—besides the fact that there were multiple nightingales, according to Harrison and the witnesses, which would have required a flock of bird imitators in the bushes—is that a recording of the first broadcast does not exist. “It was live, and they couldn’t record it. They didn’t have the technology,” explains Kennedy.
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Does it matter whether the nightingales were real or not, when the original broadcast had such a positive impact? Kennedy argues passionately that it does, not only because of the BBC’s pact of integrity with its listeners, but because of Beatrice Harrison’s character. “She was a woman of absolute integrity with a huge commitment to serving the people. She was an eccentric, very brilliant, talented woman who wanted to share something very beautiful with many other people. It really is that simple. And that’s to be celebrated, I think.”
Less worthy of celebration is the fact that there are 90 percent fewer nightingales in Britain today than there were in Harrison’s day. When I came to London from California 26 years ago, I first lived on the fourth floor of a building in the center of London. Very late at night I would hear a bird sing. The variety and beauty of its song captivated me. The bird was, I was told, a nightingale, and I was lucky to hear it. “The nightingale sang in Berkeley Square / I know ’cause I was there.”
The Nightingales Sing On—for Now
The idea of playing in concert with a nightingale has endured beyond Beatrice Harrison’s legacy. Each spring, folk singer and conservationist Sam Lee leads a group of musicians and no more than 35 guests into a nightingale habitat for an “improvised duet with their virtuosic night song.” The nighttime experience, Singing with Nightingales (SWN)—described as “a work of immersive theatre, staged by nature, told by humans, and outshone by a very special bird”—follows an evening of “fireside food, drink, songs, and stories.” These evenings are held for seven weeks each year, coinciding with the nightingales’ migratory pattern. “Ultimately,” the website says, “SWN is a celebratory way to appreciate deeply that of our need to protect both this red-list endangered species and the natural web their existence depends upon.” —Megan Westberg
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