From This Side of the Pond - One: Inspiration

I've written about this project before. But from now, once a week, the essays which are written will be posted here and, as soon as I have a suitable space worked out, I'll be recording the essays.

Anyone who has any input on the essays, either corrections or additional information, add a note and I'll look to include it.

Please, enjoy.

On 24th March 1946, a little over six months after the end of World War Two, a short fifteen minute long broadcast began on BBC radio.

It was a reworking of a few similar programs the presenter had partaken in earlier. The name of this one, ‘American Letter’, was a flip of a show the presenter did when he was NBC’s London correspondent in the nineteen-thirties - that one was called London Letter.

The presenter was English, but emigrated to America in nineteen-thirty-seven. Shortly afterwards he suggested a version of the ‘London Letter’ to the BBC and Mainly ‘About Manhattan’ graced British airwaves as a periodic broadcast during the short months between October nineteen-thirty-eight and the start of World War Two in late nineteen-thirty-nine. The idea then awaited the end of the war before resurrection with a larger scope

These three shows, London Letter, Mainly About Manhattan, and American Letter had a common thread, which was the single presenter delivering a slice of life to an audience who lived far from the place under discussion.

I don’t personally know what the precursor shows were like, exactly, but American Letter - which was renamed Letter from America in nineteen-forty-nine — was a thoughtful, eloquent, well researched, and deeply human fifteen minutes.

History, observation, experience, research, anecdotes, and humor were all brought together in a manner which frequently left the listener needing a minute or two of contemplation, like the time taken after you push an empty plate away and the waiter glides over to offer the next course or coffee, but you need a few minutes to appreciate the chef’s genius.

From that first broadcast in March nineteen-forty-six, Letter from America ran through its thirteen commissioned episodes, and then onwards for an amazing total of two thousand eight hundred and ninety six broadcasts over nearly fifty-eight years. The final one was delivered February 20th two-thousand-and-four.
Incredibly, in all that time, the show had the same presenter, Alastair Cooke.

Alastair was born November, 1908 in Salford, Lancashire - an industrial town in the middle of Britain. Nowadays it has been subsumed into the Greater Manchester area, but then it was still identifiable as a town in its own right.

From a working class background he did well at school, passing the eleven plus exam at the end of primary education - equivalent to Grade Five in the US. This academic success allowed him to attend Blackpool Grammar School. From there he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge which culminated in graduation with an English degree.

In nineteen-thirty-two Alastair took his first trip to the US courtesy of the Commonwealth Fund Fellowship, now called the Harkness Fellowship. It’s a scheme similar to the Rhodes Scholarship which allowed folks such as Pete Buttigieg and Rachel Maddow to study in Britain.

Looking through Fellowship alumni is to see a long list of eminent professors, politicians, journalists and writers. Mr Cooke’s position on the list is well earned.

Apart from radio presenting there was work as a newspaper correspondent, television presenter, and writer. His career brought awards and honours, including an address to the joint houses of Congress, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth.

In its nearly fifty-eight years on air Letter from America covered every significant event of an entire generation. There were fifteen presidential elections; the Civil rights era; the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy - he was only feet away from Robert when Sirhan Sirhan murdered him in 1968. But he also talked about mundane things. Ice cream; Golf; the weather - a part of being British that taking up US citizenship in 1941 couldn’t erase.

Listening to Alastair Cooke was hearing the voice of an Englishman who loved being American. He revelled in conveying the complexities, inconsistencies, ironies, and tragedies of American life. He built word pictures about places, people, and events which resonate in the ears long after the topic in-hand has been forgotten, a memory of things heard, even as the words used to explain them have slipped away.

While he covered the huge events of America, things which reverberated around the world, which belong to all humans and not just ones born on a particular continent, things like the moon landing, or Olympic Games, or the arrival of the computer age, he also delved into the minutiae of life, of American living. How did Americans feel about their leaders, what was it like to live in a coastal town as summer ended and visiting hordes returned to their city jobs, why does America celebrate the holidays it does, how are presidents elected.

And all of this information was delivered to eager listeners in Britain and, via the BBC World Service, around the globe, in fifteen minute segments which may have been circuitous in their delivery, but never digressed from the topic at hand.

As I write this I have not, yet, listened to any of the one thousand four hundred and seventy two episodes available on the BBC website - overseas listeners who are interested can access many of these via the BBC podcast service - yet Alistair Cooke’s voice, and delivery flows distinctly through my head despite a gap of eighteen years since listening to him.

He died in two thousand and four, at the age of ninety-five, just a month after his last broadcast. In two thousand and four I was a father of two young children, the internet was not brand new, but had yet to become the all encompassing behemoth we live with now. Working from home, as I then did, was still a rarity. Podcasts were only just about beginning.

But between then and now memories of Letter From America have never left me. I could make a strong case for it being a basis for my own deep interest in the country, something I call and unrequited love in the introduction to volume one of my short stories set in America, These United States.

And, I suppose, it is this powerful memory, and this yearning for a place I have never been, which lies at the heart of the decision to start this new venture.

From This Side of the Pond will be a short, fifteen minute, slice of Americana but as viewed from across the Atlantic, as filtered through news reports, twitter spaces conversations, email exchanges, WhatsApp chats, Google Earth searches, and all the other ways information flows back and forth across, or under, the ocean.

Some weeks there will be big ticket news items to discuss, indeed twenty-twenty-two promises to be busy as an election year, and one where various investigations into a former President are likely to culminate in charging decisions, and open testimony before the January Sixth commission investigating the assault on the Capitol building will take place.

But it would be easy to get bogged down by the ins and outs of partisan US politics, and that is something I will be avoiding. Where the matter is touched on, I will seek to provide relevant information and not personal commentary.

Where I will get deeply personal is in talking about fantastic landscapes which move from dense New England forests, to parched New Mexico deserts, through high mountains, and flat plains; or in discussing cuisine I have attempted to replicate in my own kitchen, while wondering how close I came to replicating a Philly cheesesteak, or a Georgian BBQ pork butt.

America is a land of diversity, and one of the best ways to discuss that is a consideration of the states and territories which are part of it. For that reason, at least one episode a month will be devoted to considering the fifty states, Washington DC, and five overseas territories. There’ll be some history, some state quirks, and folklore. Hopefully I’ll have folks who live in each area tell me something I definitely need to know about the place. Feel free to let me know the things that make your home state unique and special, or the things that make the state you live in now strange and weird.

There is an obvious question to be asked about a show written from the far end of the longest of lenses: Who is it being written for?
Fundamentally, this is for me. Condensing the news and information I continue to pick up about America, its land, peoples, institutions, and the like will be scratching an itch unlikely to be cured without opportunity to visit for an extended period.

But hopefully others will want to tune in. There’ll definitely be folks who want to correct me on the many mistakes to be made, whether they are actual errors, or just differences in understanding. Hopefully, for some listeners, it will ignite a desire to visit and see the nation for themselves, or to return and investigate somewhere they hadn’t been.

And, possibly, it’ll evoke in some listeners a moment of introspection.

The Scottish Poet Robert Burns said in his poem ‘O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us, tae see oorselves as ithers see us’.

The ability to observe ourselves and perceive what others see is a skill a rare few of us posses. It’s always simpler to observe the straw in someone else’s eye than the rafter in our own.

Hearing what a random middle aged white man from Britain thinks about America and its way of doing things will possibly rile folks up. Some will take the view that From This Side of the Pond should be dismissed as the maundering of a know nothing limey. Hopefully there will be a scant few of these.

I’ve always believed that travel broadens the mind, and if you can’t travel then at least listen to people from other places. But this will be listening to someone observing things from far away. How is it useful to anyone?

In times gone past radio shows like Letter to America, books like those Alastair Cooke wrote, were ways to travel when you the physical capacity was unavailable to you.

Today there are so may other options, a myriad websites, and social media applications which can link you directly to the places you wish to go. However, not everyone has the time or imagination to make those journeys of the mind. I’m fortunate. I do.

So I am going to explore the United States of America. From glistening towers to adobe huts; through roadside bbq joints that only open twice a week to Michelin star palaces of cutting edge cuisine; via shiny new factories set outside soon to grow towns, to rusting and rundown industrial centres of yesteryear; deep in the heart of the continent, and along its coastal edges. There’ll be mention of state fairs and small town celebrations and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I’ll talk about Bigfoot, Thunderbirds, and other cryptids rumoured to roam the country.

I might even show an interest in actual people and the things they did, do, or hope to achieve. With a present population of three-hundred-and-thirty million there are enough personal stories to fill every hour of every day for over nine-thousand-four-hundred years, if everyone is given a personal fifteen minutes of fame. I’ll not get to everyone.

There’s a school of thought which posits all writing is autobiographical. It’s a fallacy. But all writing comes from inside. We take in information and knowledge, we formulate ideas, and place them out in the world. When I sit to write what I aim to be a weekly, or bi-weekly, broadcast there will be less of me in each episode than there has been here. But my hope is there will be a simple and personable presence of my desires to experience the things of which which I speak and to leave a resonance for the listeners in the same way Alastair Cooke’s well-crafted words have with me.

Welcome to, From This Side of the Pond.

words by stuartcturnbull. Picture licenced from Kirsten Alana and worked in Canva