A boy from Salford, a typewriter and a Letter from America

Happy Sunday!
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Last week I mentioned my childhood Saturday morning ritual of watching Casey Jones, whose repeats were still steamin' and a-rollin' across British television screens well into the 1970s.

As it happens, another American broadcast was a regular fixture in our house at around the same time — and for the thirty years that followed. This one, though, was strictly Sunday mornings.

Coming downstairs at around 9:15, I would find my father in his favourite chair, Sunday broadsheets spread around him like a small paper city, BBC Radio 4 purring from the radio in the corner.

Through the rustle of newsprint would drift the unhurried, mid-Atlantic tones of Alistair Cooke, delivering his weekly Letter from America.

Who’s Alfred?

Alfred (later Alistair) Cooke came into the world on 20 November 1908 in Salford, Lancashire — a gritty industrial city adjacent to Manchester and an area I know well from my three years at Manchester University.

His father, Samuel Cooke, was a metalsmith and Methodist lay preacher, his mother, Mary Elizabeth, an Irish Protestant.

Number 7 Isaac Street, Ordsall, Salford — where Cooke was born and grew up — was a two-storey red-brick terrace, one of a continuous run of houses lining either side of the street.

The house was a typical modest worker’s home — the kind that Salford produced by the thousand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It comprised a small front room and kitchen downstairs, with two bedrooms above. In the rear yard, a scullery was standard, as was the outside toilet that nobody wanted to visit in January. The windows were kept small, keeping the warmth in and the industrial pollution out.

Smoke from the mills, foundries and factories hung over Isaac Street as kids played in the road. In that part of Salford, greenery was a luxury, not a given.

Nothing about Isaac Street suggested that the boy at Number 7 would one day address the United States Congress, be appointed an honorary Knight of the British Empire, or become the BBC’s defining voice in America for the best part of sixty years.

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While still a child, Alfred moved with his family from the industrial haze of Salford to the windswept promenades of Blackpool — out of the frying pan and straight into a tray of soggy chips.

The buzz of England’s favourite working-class seaside resort would have been exciting for the young boy; in terms of weather, though, it was just a different arrangement of the same grey.

Alfred or Alistair

In 1927, Alfred won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge — no small feat for a boy from working-class Salford. To graduate three years later with honours in English was remarkable.

On or around his 22nd birthday, while at Cambridge, Cooke had an epiphany. He killed off Alfred.

A swift deed poll later and the rather workaday Alfred was quietly retired in favour of the more distinguished Alistair. It was part of a considered effort to craft a persona befitting the literary and theatrical career he had every intention of pursuing.

Alfreds Tennyson, Nobel and Hitchcock may have raised a collective eyebrow at this initiative, but young Alfred Cooke had made up his mind.

Out of Curiosity

When Cooke founded and ran the Cambridge Mummers — the university’s theatre group open to both sexes — a young student approached him for an audition.

Cooke recorded the student as “painfully shy” and, in his opinion, “entirely without acting promise”. During the audition, he saw “no point in delaying the agony” and asked what subject the student was reading. “Architecture,” came the reply.

“Stick to it”, said Cooke.

The rejected student was James Mason — who would become one of Britain’s most internationally celebrated film stars of the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

Cooke must have dined out on that story for decades.

Bound for America

In 1932, armed with a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship and a sense of adventure, upwardly mobile Alistair crossed the Atlantic to study drama at Yale, before moving on to Harvard the following year.

However, it became clear that Cooke was studying something else entirely — America itself. He travelled the country extensively, talking to strangers, walking unfamiliar cities and eating whatever was put in front of him.

Cooke was falling in love.

This was 1930s America, a nation of contradictions: Hollywood glamour contrasted with the misery of the Great Depression; Jazz clubs nestled alongside bread queues; skyscrapers soared while banks crashed to earth.

This was a nation reinventing itself; it was a young journalist’s dream.

Apart from a three-year spell as the BBC’s film critic between 1934 and 1937, America would be Cooke’s home for the rest of his life.

On 1 December 1941 — with what I can only describe as impeccable timing — he swore the Oath of Allegiance and became an American citizen. Six days later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbour.

Out of Curiosity

During the early war years, Cooke criss-crossed America by car and train, absorbing and recording the mood and texture of ordinary American life — filing his dispatches for The Times of London and, later, the Manchester Guardian.

His relaxed, elegant exterior belied a considerable inner guile. To kick-start his relationship with Hollywood, he wrote to the Manchester Guardian, implying he had secured interviews with a number of major stars.

Simultaneously, he wrote to those very stars suggesting that he had the Guardian’s commission firmly in his pocket.

The bluff worked. Among many others, in 1934 he found himself in Hollywood, face to face with Charlie Chaplin.

Having subsequently struck up an unlikely — and lop-sided — friendship with Chaplin, the young Alistair Cooke asked him to be best man at his Pasadena wedding in 1934.

Chaplin agreed — but he never showed up.

How about a Letter from America?

In the 1930s, while working for NBC, Cooke had been broadcasting a radio show for American listeners called London Letter — describing everyday life in Britain.

In 1937, now settled in America, he suggested to the BBC that he could do the same in reverse: talk about American life for British audiences.

Lord Reith, the BBC’s formidable Director-General, raised his eyebrow at the suggestion. A fierce guardian of British cultural standards, he was wary of promoting an “American-style free-for-all”.

Nonetheless, Reith cautiously agreed to a trial series called 'Mainly about Manhattan' which ran between 1938 and 1939. The transatlantic experiment came to an abrupt halt, like so much else, by the outbreak of war.

After the war, with the BBC conscious of America’s pre-eminent place in the new post-war order, a regular broadcast explaining American life to British listeners now seemed not just natural… but necessary.

After Cooke’s one-off American Letter broadcast in November 1945, Controller of the BBC Home Service, Lindsay Wellington, commissioned a short series. He warned Cooke that only if the initial thirteen-week run did “wildly” well, might it be extended to twenty-six.

American Letter — soon to become Letter from America — would run for fifty-eight years.

In preparation for the first series broadcast of American Letter — and in typically understated fashion — Alistair Cooke sat down in his Fifth Avenue, fifteenth-floor flat overlooking Central Park and just started typing what came to him in the moment.

Eighty years ago this Tuesday, 24 March 1946, Cooke broadcast the first edition of American Letter.

Once he had drafted a letter, he would usually record the broadcast from the BBC studio in New York. Sometimes Cooke would record from “wherever his other duties took him”. In later years, that would include from his own bed, as his health failed him.

The weekly fifteen-minute radio programme — designed to give British listeners a window into life in the United States — would become the longest-running speech radio programme hosted by a single individual in the history of broadcasting.

For each week of the 2,869 broadcasts, Cooke sat in that Central Park flat, put a blank sheet into his typewriter and typed… about Eisenhower and Nixon. About Kennedy and Vietnam. About the space race and the Civil Rights Movement. About Watergate and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But Cooke was as eager to discuss Senator Jacob Javits’ parking fine as he was to contemplate the murder of John Lennon. He would linger over a New England blizzard as intensely as over the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

With characteristic dry humour, Cooke recounted the story of Meyer L. Sugarman’s wedding night. Meyer had done everything right. He had found his girl, popped the question and booked a room at the Nevele Country Club Towers in Ellenville, New York, for their honeymoon.

What he had failed to account for was President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The White House, with the breezy indifference of the very powerful, cancelled Sugarman’s reservation to make way for the President and his entourage.

Meyer fired off an indignant telegram to Washington.

The White House blinked first. The room was returned and Mrs Sugarman’s nuptials, I assume, went ahead more or less as originally intended.

And who else could have explained to a Brit that strange game of baseball or the peculiar American relationship with the motorcar in such a way that we would listen?

Alistair Cooke could make anything sound fascinating because he was interested in everything.

Out of Curiosity

When CBS were looking for a host for their prestigious arts programme Omnibus in 1952, they auditioned Alistair Cooke and a certain Ronald Reagan. The producers reportedly thought Cooke was too British.

He got the job anyway.

As for the rejected Reagan, apparently he didn’t do too badly for himself in the end.
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Perhaps Alistair Cooke’s most memorable broadcast came on 9 June 1968. Four days earlier, America was rocked by the news that Robert Kennedy had been shot in a pantry off the main kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes after delivering a victory speech claiming success in the California Democratic presidential primary.

Cooke was only feet from Kennedy when the shots rang out. While chaos erupted all around, he did what came naturally and reached for his notebook.

Kennedy passed away at 1:44 a.m. the following morning.

The broadcast that followed, on 9 June, was delivered in Cooke's customary calm, measured tone.*

As always, his description was forensic. He famously described the shots as more like “somebody dropping a rack of trays”, and then contextualised by reflecting on the state of American violence and politics in the late 1960s.

*If you have a spare fifteen minutes, listen in to Cooke’s Letter from America reporting on Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, 1968. If you don’t have an iPhone, try Spotify or BBC Sounds. If none of these work, apologies — I can’t find any other sources.

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Final thoughts

Letter from America last aired on 20 February 2004. Eleven days later, Cooke announced his retirement. Twenty-eight days after that, 30 March, he passed away aged ninety-five.

In the United States, Cooke is remembered as the long-time host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre and as the guide to his landmark TV history series, ‘America’. In the UK, he will always be the voice of Letter from America.

American audiences saw Cooke as the epitome of a cultivated British gentleman. The British couldn’t work out if he was English or American. Either way, to both nations, he was the ideal citizen of the other.

As a young child, all I absorbed was the slow, deliberate voice of someone on the radio. As I grew older, I had a better understanding of the relevance of Letter from America.

The emerging superpower was treated with suspicion by its European allies. While Europe had been busy perfecting the art of tearing itself apart, the United States was quietly ascending to world dominance.

Cooke felt that the United States was being misunderstood and that the real story of America needed to be told. He was the one to tell it.

Today, Cooke’s sixty-year archives are recognised as an important record of American life throughout the second half of the 20th century.

As for my Australian father, what did he find so captivating about a Lancashire-born Englishman talking about America?

Perhaps it was empathy for an outsider who had moved to a foreign land, fallen in love with it and spent the rest of his life explaining why?

Or perhaps it was simply the soft, unhurried voice of a man who could have been your uncle, brimming with curiosity and sitting in a leather chair opposite you, batting the breeze in a way that suggested that everything was alright with the world.

Whatever the reason, for fifteen minutes each week, the Sunday papers could wait.

Dates with History

Today...

By February 1941, James Stewart was an A-list Hollywood star. His first hit film had been ’You Can’t Take it with You’ (1938), followed by ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ (1939). He had also received an Academy Award for Best Actor for ‘The Philadelphia Story’ (1940). ​

Just seven days after collecting that Academy Award, Stewart walked away from everything and committed himself to joining the military.

Although the United States was still a neutral country in 1940, Stewart could see what was coming.
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Stewart’s grandfathers both fought in the American Civil War, while his father served in the Spanish-American War and the First World War. For Jimmy, there was no decision to make.

The A-list actor's first attempt at enlistment towards the end of 1940 hit an unexpected snag — he was five pounds under the acceptable weight limit. His solution was refreshingly uncomplicated: he went home and ate his way to eligibility.

Eighty-five years ago today, 22 March 1941, James Stewart became the first Hollywood star to enlist in the military in the build-up to WWII. As a consequence, his monthly salary dropped from $6,000 to $21.

Many great names would follow, such as Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman.

Stewart fought throughout World War II, flying B-24 Liberators over Nazi Germany. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal and Croix de Guerre for his outstanding service during the war.

Out of Curiosity

On 18 July 1997, shortly after James Stewart’s death, Alistair Cooke broadcast a Letter from America dedicated to the great actor.

In the letter, Cooke reflects on Stewart’s decency and modesty, in contrast with his high-profile media persona.

Cooke tells the story of Stewart checking in at a post-war Madrid hotel. The staff quibble over whether this is the real James Stewart.

Instead of presenting himself as a Hollywood superstar, Stewart quietly produces his ID as General James Stewart, U.S. Air Force.

That's class.
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Wednesday...

If you ever find yourself at an England v Scotland rugby match in mixed company — meaning you’re English and surrounded by Scots — brace yourself.

At some point, someone — usually looking through the bottom of a beer glass – will mention 'Bannockburn' and leave the comment hanging, the way a cat drops a dead mouse at your feet and waits for a reaction.

The Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 saw Edward II’s forces routed by the numerically inferior army of Robert the Bruce, effectively securing Scottish independence, albeit six years later.

Born in 1274, Bruce was a Scottish nobleman caught between loyalty to England’s Edward I and the burning cause of Scottish independence. He had watched William Wallace carry that torch — and seen what Edward did to him.

Something had to give.

In February 1306, Bruce met his great rival, John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch, at the Greyfriars Church in Dumfries. Churches were neutral ground; sacred, untouchable. The meeting was supposed to be a negotiation.

It wasn’t.

Words were exchanged. Tempers rose. Bruce drew his dagger and stabbed Comyn in front of the high altar. His companion, probably Sir Roger de Kirkpatrick, reportedly finished the job.

Bruce had committed sacrilege, murder and political arson — simultaneously. There was no going back.

720 years ago this Wednesday, 25 March 1306, Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scots at Scone.

The stage for Bannockburn had been set.

Talk to me...

Some of you signed up for The Breezer through platforms where you couldn't leave your first name. So, when I send out the newsletter each week, it feels like writing a personal letter to someone without putting their name at the top of the page. It's not doing my OCD any good at all!
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If I haven't opened this newsletter with your name, feel free to drop me an email at steve@battingthebreeze.com; just enter your first name in the Subject and send.
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(If you want to tell me any more about yourself at the same time that would be amazing too.)
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Thanks, Steve

Question of the Week

During the English Tudor period, two of Henry VIII’s daughters became Queen of England; Mary I and Elizabeth I.

However, before either of these reigns, which sickly boy-king inherited the English throne from his larger‑than‑life father, Henry VIII, 175,000 days ago this Friday, 28 January 1547?

And Finally…

Andrew Rankin is not exactly a household name. No statues for him, no Distinguished Flying Crosses or Croix de Guerre. At best, he receives an occasional moment of silent gratitude from half the world’s population.

One hundred and sixty years ago this Friday, 27 March 1866, the American inventor patented the urinal.

Now, the rudimentary urinal had been around since Roman times, but Rankin invented a system with built-in deodorising functionality.

The deodorising compound neutralised what Rankin diplomatically described as “obnoxious and unpleasant odours”, a turn of phrase doing a fair bit of heavy lifting.

So, gentlemen, next time you get caught short in public and stroll past a line of women who have been there since Tuesday, don’t forget to spare a thought for Andrew Rankin.

Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!

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Steve

HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER

Question of the week… answer

Edward VI was the boy-king who inherited the English throne from his father Henry VIII.

Edward became King of England at the age of nine, when most boys are still struggling with long division.

The boy king was a sickly child and likely died from tuberculosis before he could make his mark on English history.

His early death at just fifteen left the throne open for his elder half-sister Mary I, who would go on to earn the infamous nickname ‘Bloody Mary’ for her brutal persecution of Protestants during her reign.