The British have always been known for their sense of humour and the ability to laugh at themselves. One way in which this manifests itself is our enduring affection for the family-based sitcom, writes Neil Crossfield…
Over the years, people have sat together and laughed at classics such as Till Death Do Us Part, Only Fools and Horses, The Royale Family and many others. Little do people know that arguably one of the first ever sitcoms broadcast on radio was based in Walworth and that the writer of The Bugginses had strong links to Southwark.
Their creator was a gifted woman called Mabel Constanduros (née Tilling). She was born into a wealthy middle-class family in Peckham on March 29 1880, the granddaughter of Thomas Tilling, founder of the famous Tilling’s bus company. He had first set up business in Walworth in 1841, trading as a ‘jobmaster’. This was the Victorian equivalent of a car hire firm and Tilling would rent out horses and carriages from a small stable in Beckford Place.
Tilling’s business expanded quickly and within a couple of years he was running a regular bus service into central London. When Tilling died in 1897 he owned around 4000 horses. Mabel’s grandmother was born in Walworth and so it is not unusual that she would have a close affection for the area as she grew up.
Mabel remembered going to visit her grandfather and she had real fondness for the people who worked for the company. Every year, Tilling’s would take many of its employees on a day trip out into the country, visiting places like Orpington, Epping Forest or the Welsh Harp Reservoir in Brent, and it is highly likely that Mabel may have gone along. In one of the Buggin’s stories, the incorrigible Grandma says “them buses of William Willing’s is comfortable, well-built affairs.”
This is obviously a reference to her grandfather’s bus company, but in this case, the crafty Grandma is planning an insurance fraud on one of its buses by throwing herself downstairs to get compensation for her injuries.
Mabel’s upbringing was typical for a middle-class girl in late Victorian London. She attended St. Giles Church in Camberwell, was educated locally (including at Mary Datchelor’s school) and volunteered to help teach poor girls in Lambeth working for the NSPCC. She married Athanasius Constanduros in 1906, though the union is not believed to have been a happy one.
Throughout her childhood, she had been interested in acting and this continued into adulthood. She joined several south London amateur dramatic companies including the ‘Anomalies of Streatham’ and at the same time was attending the School of Drama, Speech Training and Physical Education, based at the Royal Albert Hall, and run by the formidable Miss Elsie Fogerty. Her dedication and potential must have been noticed: when the BBC held auditions in 1925 for their new radio repertory company, Mabel was signed up, starting her professional acting career at the age of 45.
The First World War had seen rapid development in radio technology, as wireless sets had been used on the battlefields, in the air and at sea. This scientific advance led to the formation of the BBC in 1922, as stronger transmitters meant that radio waves could reach into every household in the nation. It would have been an exciting place to work, as this was a totally new medium and the early staff of the BBC had to innovative in producing radio shows which would appeal to a mass audience. Radio ownership grew massively during the inter-war period: in 1926 only around 25 per cent of the country had a radio licence but this had grown to around 80 per cent in 1937.
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Mabel was an extremely talented actress, and her vocal talents were much in demand, though perhaps it was her scriptwriting skills which soon came to the fore, when she created the Buggins. The fictitious family were supposed to have lived at number 17 Halcyon Row in Walworth, though no such street exists. The heroine of the story is Emily Buggins, the mother of the family – the lynchpin who holds them together. She is hard working, caring and always looks on the bright side of life, even though it seems that her family constantly try to sabotage her happiness. She is married to Harry Buggins, who is lazy, feckless and a bit of a drinker. He would rather spend time with his pigeons than with his family. The Buggins have three children: Alfie, Emily and Baby.
But the star of the show is undoubtably Grandma Buggins, Harry’s mother, who also lives in Halcyon Row. She is around 80 years old, greedy, selfish and has the ability to suck the joy out of any occasion in an instant. Many other inhabitants of the street featured in the shows, including Emily’s niece Ag and her boyfriend Bert. There were also other bit players like Mr Toovey, Soppy Arthur and the flirtatious blonde bombshell, Florrie Elwood. Most of the characters were voiced by Mabel herself and in one episode of the Buggins, she played seven different characters.
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As a wealthy, middle-class woman, Mabel could be open to accusations that she was mocking the working classes. However, it would appear that she genuinely felt a strong affinity to the people she portrayed. She had family links to Walworth and wrote in the Radio Times that she and her co-writer Michael Hogan would sometimes spend the day around East Street market listening to the way people spoke. Though the radio shows were comedies, she also produced a series of books based on the Buggins, in which she alluded to the domestic violence, drunkenness and overcrowding which many of the working classes experienced in areas like Walworth.
Like the modern-day sitcom, the humorous element of the Buggins derived from them doing everyday things which would seem familiar to families sitting listening to their radios. Daytrips out to the zoo or to Brighton could prove disastrous, however much Emily Buggins tried to get the family to enjoy themselves. Other show titles included The Buggins family Picnic, Father’s Lumbago, Father Sweeps the Chimney, Boat Race Day and Father Buys a Whale. In this episode, the family are on holiday in Norfolk and Harry spends the week’s holiday money on purchasing a dead whale which has washed up on the beach in the hope he can transport it back to London and make a lot of money selling its oil. This, like most of the schemes Father gets involved in, fails miserably.
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Mabel’s fame and popularity continued to grow throughout the 1930s. In December 1936 she took the ocean liner Normandie to New York where she embarked on a tour of the United States. During this trip, she visited Hollywood, Malibu Beach and Los Angeles, where she was entertained by some of the biggest stars of the time, including Ronald Coleman, Errol Flynn, P.G. Wodehouse and Shirley Temple. Such was her fame at this time, she even featured on a set of cigarette cards produced by the Wills Tobacco Company, alongside Marlene Dietrich, Noel Coward and Gracie Fields.
Perhaps though, the Buggins and Mabel Constanduros’s finest hour was during the Second World War. On September 1 1939, two days before war was declared, she offered her services to the BBC in the hope that she could do her bit. The Kitchen Front was part of the Ministry of Information’s campaign to promote food economy. First broadcast in June 1940, the programme ran from Monday to Saturday and food experts would give housewives tips on how best to make use of their meagre rations, how to make ‘substitutes’ for common foods and how to use unrationed goods more sensibly. Though at first listening figures were high, interest waned and in an effort to gain a larger audience, the Buggins were enlisted to help on the home front.
So from around October 1941, the Buggins had a regular Tuesday morning slot which continued right up until VE day in 1945. Though they had been included to provide light entertainment in the show, Constanduros didn’t want this just to be a rehash of her comedy acts, but rather wanted to give housewives useful, practical information which would help them manage in the kitchen.
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It should be noted that while this was the ‘peoples’ war’, with millions of women mobilised to help the war effort, whether they be in uniform or engaged in war work, women were still very much expected to be the ones carrying out the bulk of domestic duties around the house. Several British propaganda films of the period, like for instance Millions Like Us or The Gentle Sex would proudly show groups of women from all classes working in munitions factories or operating anti-aircraft defences but would still reinforce the pre-war image of the dutiful wife or daughter carrying out their domestic duties.
The Buggins on the Kitchen Front would become extremely popular and by the end of the war, they would have featured in over 250 episodes. While Constanduros would provide the scripts and perform, she was very careful to push the official Ministry of Information doctrine. Grandma could be used as a medium to express the grumbles and dissatisfaction of the general public, but this could be countered by Emma Buggins arguing the government line.
One episode of the Kitchen Front is available on the BBC website and gives a good idea of the type of content. A relative of Grandma is coming to visit and though she is obviously unwelcome, Grandma perks up when she hears she will be bringing her meat ration with her. They decide to cook a ‘Connaught Pie’ together and Emily Buggins carefully goes through each step so that the listening housewives would have time to note down the recipe. Grandma gives her usual curmudgeonly input by noting that “water is the one thing they haven’t rationed.”
After the war, Mabel and her nephew and writing partner, Denis Constanduros, wrote the scripts for a successful British film series, based on another fictional working-class family, the Huggetts. Produced by the Gainsborough Film Studios, British film audiences flocked to the cinema to watch stars Jack Warner and Katherine Harrison play the role of Joe and Ethel Huggett. The first in the series, Holiday Camp, came out in 1947 and showed the family embarking on a trip to one of the new highly regimented holiday camps which had become popular after the war.
The Huggetts films also gave a break to a young Diana Dors, as well as Petula Clark. Besides these films, Mabel also wrote novels and several successful plays, one of which, 29 Acacia Avenue, was turned into a film. Her acting skills were still in demand as she played the character of Earthy Mangold in the BBCs first radio adaptation of Worzel Gummidge in 1952.
The Buggins faded into obscurity, especially as television started to emerge as the primary domestic entertainment media, but Mabel continued to put forward proposals for programmes right up to her death in February 1957. Though she is little remembered today, her reputation has recently been reassessed and she is now regarded as one of the pioneering women at the BBC. The corporation celebrates its centenary this year and Mabel first joined its ranks in early 1925. Though the BBC would soon become part of the establishment, in its early years, it was a radical new venture.
The majority of its staff were men, but Mabel’s talent and creativity shone through, and she was able to play a key role in the development of light entertainment in this country. Her biographer, Jennifer J Purcell, refers to her as the ‘Mother of the BBC’ and notes that apart from being one of the earliest radio comediennes, her influence had far reaching consequences on the genres of situation comedies and soap operas in Britain.