Raleigh's English

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 471, 2 July 1948, Page 11

Raleigh's English

(Vale by accident I ‘iappened to be tuned at 10.12 p.m. to 3YA, and heard something which riveted my attention to the station for the next half-hour-a half-hour which I wouldn’t willingly have missed. It was a BBC feature entitled A Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, and the main attraction for me was the actor’ in the part of Raleigh, who gave his character a most fascinating Devon accent. Why on earth we should expect all our radio heroes to speak BBC English I don’t know, but in most radio plays, historical or otherwise, they are apt to do so, whether the accent is true to fact or not, so the hero with a regional accent is a novelty. I know that the Devonian Raleigh sounded to me more manly, more adventurous and admirable than he would have sounded if he had spoken in the English which I am accustomed to hear from the unseen lips of my radio heroes -but why this should be I don’t know. By the same arrangement of accents appropriate to the character, James the First in this play was allowed to speak broad Scots. Another point was the resemblance (I don’t think this is all my imagination) between the Devon accent and that of the people of the Southern States of U.S.A.-perhaps not so much a coincidence, either, considering that one of Raleigh’s ventures was the organising of the expedition to found the colony,of Virginia!