Witts BBC Proms Conference 24.04.07 1100 BL Conf Centre ‘The Hall In Your Home’ – the Proms on radio and television 1942 – 1970 . This paper comes about because of my Auntie Elsie. You’ve probably come across Auntie Elsie. You might have seen her in the foyer. Here’s Auntie Elsie, singing something written for her by Vaughan Williams: CD Tr.1 Serenade to Music 0:25 OHP 1: Wood and singers Elsie Suddaby, the white-voiced soprano from Leeds, a kind of prelapsarian Emma Kirkby. She’s the skinny one on the front row. I ought to point out, in case you’re wondering, that she was actually my grandma’s cousin, but she sent me cards and presents signed Auntie Elsie. I was asked to check when it was that Auntie Elsie made her final broadcast from the Proms. It was 1956. But as I looked through the back copies of the Radio Times here in the British Library in order to establish this, I was surprised to learn that – far from broadcasting every concert of the series it was promoting – the BBC transmitted bits of some, and none of others. Whole nights were left to rattle round the drum of the Albert Hall. So, starting from 1942 when the BBC renewed its management of the Proms, I sampled the broadcast output every five years to identify at which date the BBC transmitted the Proms in their entirety. I came across a claim in the 1962 prospectus from William Glock how in that year every concert could be heard on the radio. Like many of Glock’s assertions, it was disingenuous, because only halves of concerts were covered on occasion. OHP 2: Segments 1947 to 1965. I therefore split the concerts into halves that I call segments (because now and again the BBC broadcast only bits of halves) and the result is in summary as you see here. In 1942 there were 98 segments in total but only 32 were broadcast, so a third of the concerts reached the radio. 1 1