(5) AUNT FOR TWENTY THOUSAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 942, 30 August 1957, Page 12

(5) AUNT FOR TWENTY THOUSAND

RADIO came through the Great War with some well-earned battle honours, but around the house it remained a burping, caterwauling infant. Some teen-age boys in Dunedin had made New Zealand’s first known Morse transmission as early as 1908. Not till 1921, however, did the Government issue its first permit for wireless transmission of the human voice. Dr Robert Jack, of Otago University, was licensed to conduct experiments. : About the same time, Aunt Daisy was introduced to the new medium by her husband and her second. son Geoffrey. By then the’family lived at Waipukurau, Fred Basham working as engineer for the neighbouring. Patangata County. The house had a spare room which father and son claimed for their experiments with -wireless reception. They tried circuit after circuit. When one seemed to work they would hold a musical evening. Friends and nurses from the near-by hospital were invited along to listen. "We would all sit mute," says Aunt Daisy, "and then somebody would say, ‘Hark, hark! We've got it!" Then we'd hear an American voice saying something about the Hotel San Francisco. Oh, it was wonderful. We’d hear faint music-dance music. Then the set would give a howl and break down."

The sounds which rent the quiet night air of Waipukurau were mostly olcer than Signor Marconi’s wonderful device. Aunt Daisy -recalls being wakened by the "terrible noise" as mobs of sheep pattered over the echoing wooden bridge spanning the near-by Tuki Tuki. She herself went rural, keeping chickens and guinea fowls, and three Muscovy ducks to keep the ditches clean. A house cow provided the milk and cream, the chore of milking falling usually to the eldest boy Freddy. Daisy’s own experience with milking had not been fortunate, and the maid Elsie at first refused to help either. She was persuaded at last by a neighbour, Mr York, who, like most countrymen, knew how to handle females on four legs or two. "You know, Elsie," he éonfided to the girl, "you'll never get a husband in Hawke’s Bay if you can’t milk a cow." Elsie learned. The animals, by and large, were spoiled. Fred Basham struggled to prevent his family making his hunting dog Lyra decadent and fat. "Dad used to say that I took the fowls morning tea," says Aunt Daisy. "I sometimes did take’ them up a few biscuits."

In a large orchard at the back of the house, disabled soldiers from the nearby sanatorium were invited to help themselves to the fruit, and the children cooked green plums in billy-cans. They came near to explosion once as they stood round the fire cleaning plum juice from their clothes and hair with kerosene, LOWLY, by trial and much error, Daisy improved her cooking. The day when she advised others was still distant. "We had any amount of eggs and I used to make a sponge cake or two every morning," she says. "I think that’s why the children liked to bring their school friends to the house. And, of course, with all those plums I used to make jam. I generally burnt it! And once you burn an enamel preserving pan it stays burnt forever." Sewing remained something of a mystery. Daisy cut her husband’s shirts from new material, using the old shirts for patterns. "Of course, the old shirts had lost their shape," she says, "and the collars I bought never fitted. So I just used to put in a few pleats. Poor Dad! When he wore my shirts he’d try to cover as much as he could with his

coat. I remember his saying, ‘"There’s one thing I must ask you, Mother. Please don’t try to make my trousers!’" Pleats became an Aunt Daisy specialty. For Barbara she made Magyar dresses. They were cut from one piece of cloth. "Of course they never fitted," she says, "so I used to put a false pleat inside with a tape to draw it up. That made them fit! "I can remember being very hurt once when I stayed with my sister Katie in Wellington. We were brought up to be very polite to each other, So when Katie looked at Barbara’s dress she said very gently, ‘Daisy, are those pockets meant to be crooked?’" Her chief interests remained music and church. She travelled a good deal to sing in concerts, and became choirmistress at the Waipukurau church. Her eldest boy Freddy took turns with the vicar’s boy to ring the bell. A. W. Stace, the vicar, was always on time for services, but the boys would continue ringing. They held up the service thus until Mrs Stace arrived. "The Rev. Stace now lives in Levin," says Aunt Daisy. "So many retired clergymen live in Levin that they call it the Holy City!" :

Daisy’s love for music was passed on to her children, Freddy, the eldest, was performing Beethoven piano works at the age of six. The next boy, Geoffrey, took lessons in Waipukurau from a Miss Locke. Aunt Daisy recalls that he presented himself one day for his lesson wearing an expression of shining and unusual virtue. "I couldn't go to school today, Miss Locke," he explained. "I’m really ill. I’ve come for my lesson out of sheer goodness!" HE first of Daisy’s many thousands of broadcasts was a result, .of her musical talent. During a visit to Wellington for a _ concert engagement, she was (continued on page 14) *

The Aunt Daisy Story

(continued from page 12) invited to help with an experiment. She was taken to an _ improvised studio in Courtenay Place. Gus Biluett was there, she remembers, and Clive Drummond, later to become 2YA’s chief announcer. Attempts at soundproofing had been made, with the result that the room was excessively hot and _ stuffy. Daisy crowded in, along with the experimenters, a piano, and a weird tangle of transmitting equipment. "For my first broadcast,’} she says, "I put my head almost inside a big horn, like the H.M.V. dog, and sang ‘Il Bacio.’ " What this sounded like to the "listeners-in" Daisy was never to hear. Certainly radio in those days could torture the best of voices. But she dismisses her performance, anyway, as altogether too easy. "‘Il Bacio’ is very impressive," she says, "but very simple -easier than, say, a sustained pianissimo. My teacher used to say that a man who called ‘Ices!’ in the street could sing it." Radio broadcasting had not yet the substance in which to carve a career. Daisy went back to the country and used her fine contralto for calling the chickens. Soon after, the family shifted once more, this time to Ngatea, on the Hauraki Plains. "It was a much bleaker place," Aunt Daisy recalls. "It was drained swamp and there were ditches everywhere. One of our guests took a plunge one night when leaving the house. "In winter the place was freezing cold and damp. At singing practice in the little hall, the children used to go all goosefleshy. We'd have to send over to plunge one night when leaving the house. Daisy combated the cold by giving the frozen local girls some exercise in singing. The glee club she trained took part in concerts to which people came from Turua and Kerepeehi and the other hamlets thereabout. The girls sang pieces from the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and one did "wonderful monologues" from the Belle of New York: Life’s just a bubble, don’t y’ know? A painted piece of trouble, don’t y’ know? We come on earth to cry; We get older and we sigh; A little older and we die-don’t y’ know? This mocking pessimism was to echo in Aunt Daisy’s ears during the ensuing years. New Zealand lay under the clammy hand of depression. The jobless had been recommended to eat grass. Fred Basham was put on half pay. Daisy stepped into the breach. She had been a pushful child, but had not grown into an assured ‘and dominating adult. She was clever and talkative, but remained inwardly modest. Her own accomplishments always took her somewhat by surprise. To this day she retains a small, irrational»*fear that one day she will make a mistake and the NZBS will give her the sack. So when Daisy set out to work she astonished herself. The driving force against which her aunts had warned in childhood, "Daisy, don’t get so excited!" came again to the fore. She says herself: "You had to be pushing, pushing, pushing-all the time. You’d never get anywhere if you didn’t." Daisy pushed. The doors of 1YA _ gave before the assault. p : DAISY no longer had to sing with her head inside a horn. Station 1YA had passably effective microphones. "I Tan programmes on composers’ birthdays," she says. "Brahms and Schubert

* and Mozart and all. There’d be a pianist and the baritone Barry Coney and some soprano, and we’d sing excerpts. And I'd give information about the life of each composer. Not just where they were born and where they lived, but funny bits about them-spicy little bits about their lives." The work was. intermittent-a_half-hour here and there, with payment at one or two guineas a time. It wasn’t enough to support a growing family. Two weeks’ work relieving one of the station’s staff did little to relieve the financial pinch, but it did change Mrs Frederick Basham, otherwise Maud Ruby Basham, otherwise Miss Daisy Basham, at last into Aunt Daisy. The job was to relieve Ruby Palmer, alias Cinderella, who conducted the children’s session. "Cinderella," she says, "was a dark-eyed, clever, tiny little thing whom I'd seen taking the children’s session without a note. She just sat before the mike, telling the children stories and keeping them going." Daisy admired Cinderella’s polished technique, but her own confidence remained high. And, when the time came, she found the gift for extempore speech had not left her. Cinderella’s slipper fitted, so to speak, like a glove. Aunt Daisy was a hit with the kiddywinks. But when Cinderella returned, Daisy’s Aunt-hood came to an end. She went back to celebrating composers’ birthdays, and to singing with Arthur Briggs as a duo (Gilbert and Sullivan), and with Gwenda Weir and Winifred Hill as a trio (Lilac Time and others),

Nowadays Aunt Daisy broadcasts without a script, speaking on the air exactly as she does off it. But it was not always so. Her composers’ lives were, as the Goons would say, "specially writted for the wireless." She remembers being reproved by Len Barnes, 1YA’s Director. "Could you please read that passage," he said, "a little more naturally?" — "We've often laughed about that, because if anything I’m natural on the air. But I was very careful and particular then. I relaxed a little after he said that." Meantime, in Ngatea, Fred Basham lost his job entirely. The county could no longer afford an engineer. He joined his family in Auckland, where Daisy had already taken the children to finish their schooling. To make ends meet,

they sold most of their surplus belongings, and for a time took boarcers at their house in Parnell. "J remember so well our airy-fairy style,’ says Aunt Daisy. "We lived and ate as we had always done, which was pretty well, but the boarders only paid about £1 a week, so we didn’t make any money. And Dad never got a job again." AISY kept up the pressure. She wanted a full-time radio job-with full-time salary attached. She deluged the Broadcasting Company of New Zealand with letters urging bright new programmes. She knew just the person to do them-Daisy Basham. Finally, while staying. in Wellington with her sister Katie, she received a letter from A. R. Harris, the Broadcasting Company’s general manager. He had been impressed, he said, by the hundred or so letters he had received from her. Would Mrs Basham please come to Christchurch to see him? He might have a proposition to make. With rising excitement, Daisy took the overnight ferry to Christchurch. Without pausing to admire the Avon, the Cathedral, or even the Old English tradition, she made straight for Mr Harris’s office. Harris received her politely and told her bluntly that his company was in the last year of its contract with the Government. Hoping for a renewal, the company was making a special effort with its gy doar On Wednesdays 2YA did not broadcast at all. The job might be just right for Aunt Daisy. Would she fill the "silent day"? Thus began Aunt Daisy’s professional career. She conducted classical music programmes on Sunday and Monay nights, and helped to fill the great silence of Wednesday with programmes for children. At first, Daisy’s musical programmes consisted mainly of singing. She hed able assistance with these from Mrs Wilfred Andrews and Mrs Amy Woodward, but the station’s broadcasts were notably short of orchestral -and instrumental material. The only musicians broadcasting "live" were Signor Truda and his Orchestrina. This provoked Mr Harris into an angry directive: "Can’t. you get away from this everlasting singing! Mrs So-and-So will now render such-and-such! It sounds like melting fat! Get some instrumentalists." So Daisy rounded up players. She induced Sister Placidus, \of St Mary’s Convent to allow her best pupils to broadcast. These youngsters. mostly violinists, played for the thrill of it. There was too little money for payment of fees. — Amateur performers were sometimes an embarrassment. "We had to be on our guard," says Aunt Daisv, "because people would ring the stu7io and say what a lovely singer they’d heard the previous week. A beautiful soprano. Couldn’t we please put her on the air again? Clive Drummond would usually manage to trace the caller, and she’d be the soprano’s mother, or. sister, or some other relation!" To the children’s session Aunt Daisy introduced the Cheerful Chirpers. "They weren't organised regularly," she says, "but the children would come in and I'd let them sing. I'd write the words on a_ blackboard. They’d sing ‘White wings, they never grow weary, they follow me cheerily over the sea.’ And all the old songs, ‘The Old Folks at Home and ‘Poor Ole Joe.’ Years afterwards I've had women come up to me and say, ‘Aunt Daisy, you don’t remember me, but I was a Cheerful Chirper.’ "

Borrowed from the famous march of the American Civil War, the theme song of the Cheerful Chirpers beganListen now to 2YA, we'll sing a cheerful song; : Sing it Su a spirit that will start the world along; For now.the children’s session’s more than twenty-thousand strong; Big friends and little friends’ of Rad-io. Broadcasting was growing, too. Many of its defects had been overcome. It was becoming the powerful medium that was to breed a new race of politicians said to have one ear to the ground, the other glued to the radio, and nothing whatever in between. As with television in our day, certain highbrows condemned radio as an opiate that dulled the finer senses. The compact majority saved to buy a set, sometimes paid a licence fee, and tuned in to whatever was going. From the country’s most powerful station, 2YA, they often heard an_ enthusiastic woman’s fluent conversation. Aunt Daisy was on her way up. (To be continued)