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Penelope Fitzgerald, brilliant Oxford student and already a clever if unpublished writer, was employed as a BBC features producer at the end of 1940 – the year in which Human Voices is set. She may not have been at the bottom of the pile but neither was she part of an elite graduate corps that the BBC brilliantly recruited and exploited in the last decades of the century.

In 1940 Fitzgerald could hardly have expected anything senior or with real prospects. The BBC had not yet discovered the merits of young female talent. As with almost all areas of public life, it was controlled entirely by men who largely required women to make the tea, do the typing and scurry through its corridors to store, retrieve and organise the material that would ensure the BBC could provide truthful information and a bit of light relief to a nation enduring the impact of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the military collapse of its closest ally, France.

If Fitzgerald’s contribution to the BBC’s war effort was marginal she at least had a ringside seat while its mandarins, then as now laden with acronyms, established its reputation as an independent, if imperfect, force for the good by telling the truth – or at least large chunks of it. The BBC had not done nearly as well during the General Strike of 1926, when its first director general, Lord Reith, much preferred the idea of buttressing the government, over any idea of the BBC as a trusted source of information. When Human Voices was published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher era, the BBC still drew much strength and credibility, both at home and abroad, from its performance in World War Two.

Fitzgerald’s view of the wartime BBC is unsparing, but her respect for its achievement is palpable throughout. Her summary of its public service credo may have been a response to the specific events of 1940 but has never been bettered in any subsequent crisis by any historian at any point in the BBC’s history:

Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective.

Her two central male characters, Sam Brooks and Jeff Haggard, are flawed broadcasting heroes. Brooks is head of Recorded Programmes, Haggard the director of Programme Planning. Their professional interests at the BBC are not aligned. Brooks is forever frustrated by having to cede airtime and resources to the needs of live broadcasting, Haggard’s domain. But they share a profound sense of duty: detached and understated in Haggard’s case, obsessive and narcissistic in Brooks’. They also share a pronounced disregard for the pettifogging, very senior managers who get in their way and for any government or military interest bent on turning the BBC into a more conventional state broadcaster. They never talk about the BBC’s independence – the first word the BBC normally uses to defend itself against outside pressure – they simply practise it.

The relationship between these two men, each with largely unexplored marital difficulties, gives the novel much of its shape. They do not go in for verbal intimacy, nor do they have time to socialise and, unlike others in the building, they don’t drink much.

Brooks is attractive, apparently oblivious to the interests of the women who work for him (his ‘seraglio’) and constantly complains, angrily and wittily about those who do not recognise the importance of his work. Haggard is laconic, understated and frequently called in to support his needy and vulnerable friend. He does so with almost terminal reluctance.

Haggard is the more impressive and more senior. In the book’s biggest dramatic broadcast scene he is in charge of a live address given by a fictional French Pétainist, General Pinard, who arrives at Broadcasting House to address Britain. Fitzgerald places this scene only a few days before De Gaulle’s famous and indomitable BBC broadcast to his defeated countrymen. It is a wonderful set-piece brimming with incident and comedy which illustrates Haggard’s wholly admirable and almost reckless independence of thought and action. Fitzgerald uses this moment to expose a deeply embedded BBC senior managerial trait when faced with improvisation – a nervous rigidity and lack of imagination. But more importantly she celebrates the BBC’s dogged refusal to allow anybody from outside to intimidate it.

Pinard, something of an Anglophile, is ‘always cheerful, and most important of all, nearly always a loser’. His speech takes a swipe at Churchill, ‘the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister’ and adds tartly that ‘the French are a nation who have always cared about their army, while you have never cared about yours’. As he reaches his climax to an audience of fifteen million, he has a terrible coughing fit.

And at this point, at what would have been the most dramatic moment in the history of broadcasting, Fitzgerald memorably captures a central and largely forgotten aspect of the first fifty years of the BBC – the obsession with the technicalities of broadcasting: ‘“He’s overloading,” said the programme engineer, in agony.’

Human Voices is in part a reflection on the BBC’s engineering roots, the nature of sound and of broadcasting authenticity. Brooks in particular is forever trying to perfect the art and science of radio while all the time his department is under threat from the primacy of live news – delivered live. A BBC meeting of hierarchs, from which he is typically excluded, decides that ‘the direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it – if not, the public must be clearly told what they’ve been listening to – the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, Not Quite Fresh’.

But Brooks, as ever resentful and frustrated, does not relent: ‘“All my energies are concentrated, and always have been, and always will be, on one thing, the recording of sound and of the human voice. That doesn’t make for an easy life, you understand.”’

This gives Fitzgerald a great deal of scope to describe the anatomy of a professional passion and the largely unintended punishment it can inflict on others. Brooks goes round the country with a half-deaf German refugee, Dr Vogel, to capture the sounds of genuine British wheezing and coughing, or the hinges of church doors creaking (‘The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so’). He can’t abide the absence within the BBC of recordings of German Stuka bombers and seeks with manic intensity to invent a new windshield to improve the performance of microphones in the open air.

This search for aural perfection is a central preoccupation of the entire novel. It provides more than the framework for the almost ideological struggle for resources and prestige between live and recorded programmes. It also leads to an early but defining moment in the relationship between Brooks’ unchallengeable expertise and the latest member of his seraglio – young Annie Asra from Selly Oak, a place described with reference to its sound as having ‘scrupulously fair intonation … neither rising nor falling, giving each syllable its equal weight, as though considering its feelings before leaving it behind’.

Annie is the daughter of a piano tuner but not musically sophisticated. Brooks wants to teach her about sound quality and balance. She is more than happy to learn but memorably seeks to correct him on the matter of pitch. She meets an amazed and indignant response and it seems that she will never be forgiven.

Annie is the most interesting of all the women in the novel. Most of the other members of Brooks’ seraglio have assorted boyfriend issues – aggravated by the separation of war. Lise is rather hopeless, Vi is full of solid decency, Della is flirty – and so on. Brooks, clearly thoroughly attractive to women, needs them all to listen to and be supportive of his grievances against all-comers. Annie is willing, calm, frank, clear-sighted, strong-willed and patient. She is delighted to have left her job at a Midlands hosiery store to be at the BBC (‘to help the war effort’). She is far from plain but has no concern for glamour and can neither flatter nor deceive, not least herself. There is something downbeat and pessimistic about her. When she falls in love and it is unrequited her fate is summed up thus: ‘She was free to stay here and be unhappy, just so long as she didn’t become ridiculous; for that she didn’t think she could forgive herself.’

Few authors depict the stoic virtues as well as Fitzgerald. She has a forensic eye and ear for domestic and romantic suffering borne in a minor key. If she doesn’t exactly celebrate an acceptance of fate and incomplete happiness, she evidently has profound respect for the ability to cope – and she applies it not only to her characters and to the BBC but to wartime Britain too. This is never done in a way that simply conforms to clichés of a unique British national fortitude. Indeed, she places some distance between herself and her characters’ observations of the temperaments of various nations – but she nevertheless is in tune with those who respond phlegmatically to the physical damage and disruption of war.

When the American journalist, McVitie (Mac), who has some of the attributes of the real Ed Murrow, arrives to report on Britain’s battle to survive he is impressed, but provides a highly attractive counterpoint to British reticence. He comes freighted with oranges (a luxury), energy, fraternal goodwill and enterprise. We learn little about his inner life but he neatly encapsulates a very different and more swashbuckling journalistic realm than that depicted within the BBC. His night-time trip with Haggard to a tube station, to decide a bet as to whether he knows any ‘ordinary men’, is a brilliant cameo of the physical damage wrought by the Luftwaffe, and of a journalist’s resourcefulness and guile.

There is one other big character in the book and that is Broadcasting House (BH) itself, ‘a ship with the wrong sort of windows’ – just north of Oxford Circus – then and now the BBC’s home. Much of the novel is set in and immediately around the building. Even in normal times the BBC is prone to claustrophobia. Here the introversion is pervasive. The bombs fall on it and near it, and the pre-war BH rhythms and routines are dislocated. The concert hall becomes the scene of a well-meaning but ridiculous first aid course with Haggard subverting proceedings as best he can. And its function as an overnight dormitory sees a child born amid sleeping and snoring. It becomes hard for Brooks and Haggard to leave it even if they had wanted to:

Their life in BH had become so secluded and so strange that it was difficult to remember at times where wives or friends could come from.

Fitzgerald left the BBC at the end of the war. Both before Human Voices was published and since, many have written accounts of its wartime role. None has so penetrated its physical and moral skin. She may only have been in her mid-twenties when she was there but she palpably understood the BBC’s profound, fussy, sometimes vain but largely heroic and invaluable commitment to the truth – and expressed it in the form of a concise, witty and beautiful novel. Would that the BBC had more friends like her.

Mark Damazer

2013