‘But there’s no history here!’: children, heritage education, and the BBC Broadcasts for Schools, 1924–45

Abstract

Abstract The BBC offered broadcasts for schools almost from its inception; a significant strand of this programming focussed on teaching children about the material remains of the past in their own localities. Employing an impressive roster of historians, writers, and educationalists, the BBC experimented with innovative formats to engage children with what we would now call ‘heritage’. In Scotland first, then England and Wales, programmes aimed to construct national identities on the basis of children’s aural encounters with specific historical sites and artefacts. Young listeners were encouraged to become ‘heritage makers’ themselves, investigating their historical environments, collecting local stories, archiving objects, writing guidebooks. While at first, these programmes seem largely concerned with the preservation of historic sites from the encroachment of modernity, gradually the localized remains of the past were used more explicitly as a means of moulding citizenship in the nation’s youth. The Second World War gave this nation-building programming a new urgency, while post-War broadcasts challenged children to use their historical environments as a basis for building better places for the future. Analysing broadcasts from the 1920s to the 1940s, this article shows how this local history, ‘Rural Environment’ and ‘Regional Survey’ school’s programming constitutes an overlooked chapter in the history of the BBC’s attempts to reach and influence new audiences. It argues that these broadcasts pioneered new ways of deploying place-based history to fashion future citizens, anticipating the educative function that has now become an expected part of the heritage provision.