"THE HEAVENLY TWINS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 117, 19 September 1941, Page 42

"THE HEAVENLY TWINS"

Introducing Georgie Henschel and Marjorie Anderson

EORGIE HENSCHEL and : Marjorie Anderson are inevitably known in the BBC as the Heavenly Twins. They | are the two’ women who, together, | broke precedent in the Empire | Service by joining as announcers in June, 1940, and as such their voices are well known to New Zealand listeners. They both admit that they were terrified at first, having the feeling that they would be regarded as gate-crashers by the men announcers. Their relief was considerable when they found, on the contrary, that they were quite calmly accepted as friends and colleagues. Now each has her own fan-mail. Marjorie’s followers are mainly backwoodsmen, Georgie’s are Naval men. Georgie was immensely delighted at receiving a cable from the Sergeants’ Mess aboard H.M.S. Illustrious, a short time ago, full of solicitous inquiries about her absenceeaused, in fact, by a knee damaged in a cycle accident. Famous Conductor’s Daughter Georgie Henschel is proud of her connection with America. She is the daughter of Sir George Henschel, who founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1880, and was, for four years, its first conductor. She accompanied him when he returned there for the fiftieth anniversary of the Orchestra, and had the time of her life. Sir George was twice married, first to Lilian Baillie and then to Amy Louis, the New York singer, and the mother of Georgie herself. Georgie, therefore, is herself half American, though she was brought up

in the highlands of Inverness, as well as in France and in Germany. One of her childish memories was that of being taken to Doorn and allowed to peep through the fence at the ex-Kaiser chopping trees, remarking: " He doesn’t look a bit like a bogy man." After a short time as a teacher at her old school, Georgie, who had been trained by her father, went on the concert stage as a

singer, giving her first concert at the age of twenty-one at the London Grotrian Hall. She has sung at the first headquarters of the BBC at Savoy Hill, run charity balls, appeared at the Open-air Theatre in Regent’s Park, and been a land girl. At the beginning of the war she had charge of seventeen cows and the milk-round at her old home in the Highland village of Aviemore. She is tall, very much alive and-in-terested in life, and chiefly looking for-

ward to the end of the war when she hopes to take advantage of all the invitations to visit them that she has received from listeners in the Empire and the United States. Indeed she has been bold enough to hope that some sort of exchange of announcers will be possible between broadcasting stations of Englishspeaking communities. Trained As Secretary Marjorie Anderson is also tall. She is dark and has large watchful eyes-in-spects her company very carefully before she starts to talk. Her background is one of a quiet London upbringing, followed by a secretarial training, and then suddenly blossoming out into a stage career. Marjorie was born in 1913, the daughter of a Royal Naval Volunteer Reservist, who died when she was six. She is the grand-daughter of the man who helped to perfect the Braille system. School days were followed by a period at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art of the University of London, where she secured a diploma, and then went straight on to the. stage. She played in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, not only on tour in the’ Englisn provinces and in London, but in America. ‘That was in 1938 when she played in Boston and New York, and so enjoyed herself that her chief desire after the war is to return there. Witch And Second Boy Miss Anderson has also given lessons in voice production in Italia Conti’s famous school, been a pupil of Ernst Téller, and a witch in an Exeter (Devon) pantomime -an experience which she enjoyed so much that the following year, the first war Christmas, she played Second Boy in Aladdin in the same city. Her present job, that of BBC announcer, she finds the most exciting and interesting of all.