Far from being drowned out by the mechanized clang of the city, as Michael Guida argues in his innovative and perceptive Listening to British Nature: Wartime, Radio, and Modern Life, 1914–1945, the sounds of nature were virtually omnipresent in early twentieth-century Britain, whether experienced directly or mediated by radio or gramophone. Guida's central concern is with birdsong, but other natural sounds such as rushing water and the wind blowing through leaves also feature, as do to a lesser extent non-aural, notably haptic, sensations.
This is a short book, but Guida engages productively with several prominent themes in the recent historiography, among them therapeutic responses to World War I shellshock, the reassessment of the relationship between modernity and supposedly antimodern cultural responses such as ruralism and nostalgia, a growing interest in histories of the senses, and a new materialism skeptical of the cultural turn's tendency to construe human-environmental relations in purely social constructionist terms.
The story Guida tells begins in the trenches of the Western Front. Citing a range of diaries, memoirs, and letters written not only by often-quoted officers such as Siegfried Sassoon but also by less familiar voices from the lower ranks, Guida argues that artillery and birdsong were the two defining sounds of the trenches. Attentive listening was an essential survival skill for those on the frontline (a habit persisting long after the war was over), so the nonmilitary sounds that could be heard when the guns were silent were registered acutely too. Many drew consolation from birdsong amid the devastation. For some, its persistence even in the most unpropitious environment indicated that nature would continue no matter how self-destructive humanity. Listening to and sometimes watching birds gave others something to hold on to quite separate from the hell of the trenches, a sort of escape by proxy. A third source of consolation was that birds provided a link to home: skylarks, thrushes, robins, and nightingales sang from the fields, woods, and hedgerows of Flanders just as their counterparts did back home in Britain. But there were others for whom the indifference with which birds sang amid the carnage was unbearable.
In the second chapter, Gida considers the therapeutic uses of “pastoral quietude” (41) during and after the war. It was widely held that quietness conduced to recovery, to the point that banners asking drivers and other passersby to be quiet were sometimes displayed outside hospitals. Quietness and the soundscapes of green spaces were often equated: many of London's garden squares were opened up to recovering soldiers. Rehabilitation centers for officers suffering from shellshock were established in country houses and other rural settings near London. This approach to therapy continued after the war, and Guida provides a useful outline of the work of Enham Village Centre, a therapeutic community set up in the north Hampshire countryside offering craft employment for war-damaged veterans.
Chapter 3, “Broadcasting Nature,” opens with an extraordinary episode: the live recording of a duet between a wild nightingale and the cellist Beatrice Harrison in her Surrey garden in May 1924. The broadcast was a sensation, with Harrison receiving 50,000 enthusiastic letters, and the BBC repeated it every year until 1942, when it was interrupted by bombers flying overhead. The BBC saw the nightingale recording as a means of bringing birdsong to many who might otherwise have few opportunities to hear it and also to strengthen national community through shared listening to iconic sounds of the English/British landscape. Beyond this, BBC executive John Reith (1922–1938) regarded radio waves themselves as natural phenomena and endowed them with a spiritual significance because they and the ether he (erroneously) believed they traveled through connected listeners across the nation with each other, and with God.
In the fourth chapter, Guida switches focus to rural rambling. This is, in the main, familiar territory, but Guida draws effectively on life writing sources to emphasize the sensuous, thoroughly embodied character of rambling experience. Following Melanie Tebbutt, he explores the nexus between arduous, ascetic rambling and masculinity in the Peak District but counterposes this with a vivid distillation of Nan Shepherd's equally intense, embodied, and ascetic engagement with the high Cairngorm plateau, underlining the complexity of the relationship between landscape experience and gender.
Guida returns to birdsong with an assessment of Ludwig Koch's pioneering recordings and the BBC's broadcasts of them. Koch had to surmount numerous challenges. Birds do not sing to order, and many species are at their best long before most people are awake, often singing from dense scrub or high up in trees. Nor was it easy to avoid incidentally recording other species singing in the background, a problem given Koch's educative aims. Nevertheless, the recordings were popular, and, Guida suggests, they contributed to the popularization of birdwatching after the war. Koch's enthusiasm for his adopted country was reflected in his conviction that English birds sing better. Whatever his listeners made of this, there was undoubtedly a resonance between his birdsong recordings and perceived markers of Englishness such as quietness, domesticity, and moderation.
There is a limit to what anyone can do in 150 pages, and I am sure Guida would be the first to acknowledge that Listening to British Nature is not a comprehensive study. There is much more on the wars than on the period between, much more on military than civilian listening during World War I, and the converse during World War II, and much more on birdsong than the other sounds of nature (including the many other noises birds make). Indeed, the book reads rather as a collection of sparkling essays than a closely rehearsed argument—the chapter on rambling sticks out in this respect. The question of how nature is and was understood and defined warrants much fuller discussion, as does the relationship between listening to nature and experiencing it through other senses. It is surprising that there is so little engagement with the work of David Matless and others on sonic geographies, especially in the section on playing the radio outdoors (chapter 3). More fundamentally, although the quotations and examples that underpin the book are well chosen and plausibly construed, a short, wide-ranging study of this kind cannot take the reader very far into the listening experience of the individuals concerned. Listening to British Nature is nevertheless a valuable addition to the literature—an informative, thought-provoking, and indeed in many respects pioneering study that is likely to stimulate much further research on rural and natural soundscapes in and beyond twentieth-century Britain.
