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Doctor Who at fifty

By Matthew Kilburn

The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special

Doctor Who was first broadcast by BBC Television at 5.16pm on Saturday 23 November 1963. This weekend the BBC marks the fiftieth anniversary with several commemorative programmes on television, radio, and online—as well as a ‘global simulcast’ of the anniversary adventure, which places the two actors who’ve most recently played ‘the Doctor’ (David Tennant, the tenth, and Matt Smith, the eleventh) alongside a previously unknown incarnation of the character, played by John Hurt. As befits so famous a time-traveller, the anniversary is also an opportunity to look back at the origins of the series, and to some of those responsible, for what has since become a worldwide phenomenon.

Doctor Who had no single series creator, and its format arose from the convergence of several responses to competing demands at the BBC. Principal among these was the need for BBC Television to compete more effectively with its new rival, ITV, whose programmes had quickly come to dominate British viewing habits. In the early 1960s the BBC’s Saturday schedule was reasonably strong; its afternoon sports programme Grandstand was popular, as was its early evening pop music show Juke Box Jury. But between them was a gap typically filled by programmes from the BBC children’s department, including adaptations of literary classics or imported cartoons which failed to retain enough of the Grandstand audience. During 1963 the children’s department was wound down, with different genres of programmes transferred to their respective ‘adult’ departments. It was the BBC’s drama group which would now be responsible for a new ‘Saturday afternoon serial’.

The drama group itself was a creation of 1963. Sydney Newman had joined BBC Television that year from one of the ITV contractors, ABC, as head of drama; his brief was to expand the amount of drama produced—a second network, BBC2, was to launch in April 1964—as well as refashion the BBC’s output to contain more of the ‘agitational contemporaneity’ which had characterized Newman’s work at ABC. Newman’s earlier productions had also included science-fiction adventure serials for Sunday afternoons, and it was not surprising that he turned to this genre when confronting the BBC’s Saturday afternoon problem. There were precedents inside the Corporation: mid-evening science fiction serials had enjoyed wildly varying success, and in 1962 a report by the BBC script unit had considered the future of science fiction on BBC Television, assessing most of the literary field as too philosophical or technology-focused for the mass television audience. Newman appointed Donald Wilson as his first head of serials, and gave him the brief of drafting a new programme. Wilson and his staff writer C.E. Webber devised an overarching format for contemporary science-fiction stories which would feature a ‘handsome young man hero’ and ‘handsome well-dressed heroine aged about 30’ to attract children and women, and a ‘maturer man … with some character twist’. While Newman’s annotations on the format document expressed scepticism (particularly regarding the absence of a child protagonist), much in this document—including its understanding of science fiction as an area where ‘the wonder or fairy tale element shall be given a scientific or technical explanation’—made it into Doctor Who.

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Doctor Who, Still from “The Hand of Fear: Part 2″

Sydney Newman now worked directly with Wilson and Webber to revise the format in line with the experiences of the BBC’s target audience. The series was explicitly thought of as a series of serials, to run for 52 weeks of the year. As well as adding Newman’s child protagonist and making the hero and heroine into two of her schoolteachers, this redrafting turned the ‘maturer man’ into ‘a frail old man lost in space and time’, of unknown origin and identity but possessed of a ‘machine’ which enabled the characters to ‘travel together through time, through space, and through matter’. This character was dubbed ‘DR. WHO’, the title given to the proposed series. At Newman’s instigation further changes were made to the Doctor to make the character less reactionary and more obviously a source of scientific solutions to problems. The series was to be consciously educational with adventures divided between the headings of ‘past’ (stories set in human history where the regulars would be caught up in a historical event or culture), ‘future’ (intended to emphasise scientific progress), and ‘sideways’ (including changes of size or parallel worlds).

As heads of the drama group and serials department, Newman and Wilson could not take the series further in detail. After offers to some existing BBC staff members including Don Taylor, Newman brought Verity Lambert over from ABC as the new series’ producer. This was a significant promotion for Lambert. Though nominally only a production assistant at ABC, she had there stepped in for directors and understood how to motivate and manage actors and crew within the limitations of studio television. Although women had produced in other areas of BBC television, she was the first to hold this role in drama.

The Doctor Who TARDIS

By the time Lambert arrived, the scripts for the first serial had been commissioned from Anthony Coburn, an Australian writer who decided that Newman’s child protagonist should be the Doctor’s granddaughter. Coburn also suggested that the Doctor’s potentially budget-absorbing extra-dimensional spacecraft should have the external shape of a police telephone box and named it the ‘Tardis’—an acronym for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Lambert cast the actor William Hartnell as the aged time-and-space traveller, ‘Dr. Who’ himself. An initially harsh and coldly manipulative interpretation of the character changed in production to a warmer and more mischievous one. The transformation took many months and there was a marked change between the  initial recording of the first episode (rejected by Newman and not broadcast until 1991) and the revised one transmitted on 23 November 1963.

One of Lambert’s other astute decisions concerned the determinedly avant garde title sequence and music. The title sequence came first, devised by Bernard Lodge and formed of cloud-like patterns derived from a film recording of visual feedback caused by a television camera recording the image from its own monitor. Lambert then approached the BBC’s experimental sound engineering unit, the Radiophonic Workshop, and the prolific freelance composer Ron Grainer, who had collaborated with the Workshop on a documentary soundtrack earlier in the year. In this case Grainer’s score would be entirely realized by the Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire, using tape loops of electronically-generated sound played back at different speeds. The impact of the Derbyshire-engineered theme led to the popular association of Doctor Who with electronic music, though for much of the 1960s and 1970s the incidental music scores were composed for and performed with conventional instruments. Among the composers who contributed to the early years of Doctor Who were such prominent figures as Richard Rodney Bennett and Humphrey Searle.

The Doctor’s first broadcast adventure was set in the Stone Age and concerned the secret of fire. It was followed by the first ‘future’ story. This seven-episode serial established Doctor Who’s popular appeal, drawing on fears of the Second World War (not two decades past) and apprehensions of a nuclear future, embodied in the villains, the Daleks, who made their first appearance (bar one extended sucker-ended ‘arm’ the week before) on 28 December 1963. Shrivelled mutants dwelling in armoured shells with mechanical voices (again the work of the Radiophonic Workshop), the Daleks were disturbing to children and adults alike. The Daleks and their world were realized by designer Raymond Cusick and mounted against an unsettling electronic score by Tristram Cary. The story was written by Terry Nation, who had not been involved in the planning of Doctor Who but now became the writer most closely associated with the series. His sinister creations were the focus of cinema adaptations of their first two serials, starring Peter Cushing as an explicitly Earthly Doctor.

Lifted by the appeal of the Daleks and other futuristic terrors, Doctor Who was established as a favourite of the family audience and BBC management alike. Huw Wheldon, controller of programmes of BBC Television from 1965 to 1968, reportedly declared that the four greatest achievements of television were Gilbert Harding, Maigret, Quatermass, and the Daleks. Of the four, only the latter endure in the wider British public consciousness today.

Davros and Daleks from Doctor Who

Doctor Who’s format was an evolving one. Adventures set in the past featuring no interventions from inhuman other-worlders (an important part of Sydney Newman’s original requirements) became less frequent and disappeared in 1967. The three categories of story overlapped, with ‘sideways’ being subsumed into ‘future’ and a present-day element also emerging. Increasingly magpie-like, Doctor Who picked from a yet wider variety of genres, from military action to horror to detective fiction and political satire, though usually cloaked in science fiction and fantasy tropes.

In 1966 the programme’s third producer, Innes Lloyd, decided to replace William Hartnell with Patrick Troughton as a ‘renewed’ Doctor, physically younger and with a less irascible, more clownish personality. The ability to substitute a departing lead with a different actor, playing the same character but with a distinctive physical appearance and manner, became part of Doctor Who’s endurance mechanism. Later Doctors were played by Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy until the series, out of favour with management and unable to move on to new production methods, was rested in 1989. Paul McGann took over the role for a TV Movie in 1996, a co-production between BBC Worldwide with Universal Television in the USA, before it once more became a successful BBC1 series (now largely made of standalone episodes rather than serials) in 2005, starring Christopher Eccleston. He was succeeded in turn by David Tennant and Matt Smith. Smith is to be replaced by Peter Capaldi at the end of the Christmas 2013 episode.

Writing careers have also been shaped by Doctor Who. One of the script editors from the late 1970s was Douglas Adams, on whose imagination and published writing the series was a recognizable influence. Among the generation of established writers who’ve contributed to the twenty-first century series—first led by Russell T. Davies and subsequently by Steven Moffat—was Neil Gaiman. On both sides of the Atlantic, Gaiman’s work, spanning comics, novels, computer games, cinema, and television, is a very recent example of the opportunities for cross-platform storytelling—an approach long since adopted by earlier creators and producers associated with Doctor Who.

At its inception in November 1963 Doctor Who was addressed to a specific audience of eight-to-fourteen-year-olds watching as part of a family group on Saturday afternoons. Today it has a worldwide general audience of all ages, claiming over 77 million viewers in the UK, Australia, and United States, as well as a large devoted core sustaining the sales of DVDs, books, audio plays, magazines, and memorabilia. Equally striking is the breadth of the programme’s appeal: search Who’s Who and you’ll find an Anglican archdeacon and a circuit judge who list ‘watching the Doctor’ as one of their recreations—as well as many others with professional links to the programme. When Donald Wilson assured the editor of Radio Times in 1963 that the programme would ‘run and run’, it’s doubtful he was looking fifty years ahead. But those responsible for the series in 2013 are already speculating cheerily about the programme’s centenary in 2063. Few would be confident in dismissing their optimism.

Dr Matthew Kilburn is an associate research editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has written on the treatment of history in Doctor Who for Andrew O’Day ed., Doctor Who: the Eleventh Hour, (2013) and David Butler ed., Time and Relative Dissertations in Space (2007), as well as magazine articles and production notes to two Doctor Who DVD releases.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. In addition to 58,700 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 190 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news. The Oxford DNB is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day.

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Image credits: (1) “The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special” ©BBC via bbc.co.uk. Used for the purposes of illustration. (2) “Doctor Who, Still from ‘The Hand of Fear: Part 2′” ©BBC via bbc.co.uk. Used for the purposes of illustration. (3) “The Doctor Who TARDIS” (Doctor Who Experience) By Steve Collis from Melbourne, Australia. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons (4) “Davros and Daleks from Doctor Who” By Wer-Al Zwowe. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication via Wikimedia Commons.

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The evolution of music therapy research

With the American Music Therapy Association’s Annual Conference this weekend, we asked the Andrea Farbman, Executive Director of the American Music Therapy Association; Dr. Sheri Robb, editor of Journal of Music Therapy; and Dr. Anthony Meadows, editor of Music Therapy Perspectives, to tell us about the profession of music therapy in a three-part series.

By Dr. Anthony Meadows

I have been a music therapist for nearly 30 years. During this time, I have been struck over and over again by the many diverse ways there are to practice music therapy. Music therapists, myself included, have been present with our clients as they grapple with the various ways cancer affects their lives—the enduring sickness, financial burdens, strained relationships, and uncertain futures. As members of interdisciplinary teams, music therapists are there helping those with traumatic brain injuries regain their speech, cognitive, and motor capacities in the hopes that they can live life again on their own terms. Music therapists work with children with autism, helping them build relationships and develop communication skills in a sensory environment that can be so confusing. Music therapists also work with those in hospice care, fostering memories, bringing closure, and being present during the end stages of life.

Music therapy is a profession of diversity in practice and it’s this diversity that I have the privilege of showcasing to the research community as Editor of one of the premier music therapy journals, Music Therapy Perspectives.

The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) defines music therapy as “the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program.” (AMTA, 2013). Music therapy is a professional healthcare discipline that strives to help those with therapeutic needs—whether they be emotional, cognitive, developmental, sensorimotor, or communicative—develop skills, adapt behaviors, and overcome obstacles. There is a unique relationship that develops between the client, the music, and the music therapist and it’s this relationship that mediates the music therapy process.

Not only is there diversity in music therapy practice, but there is a diversity in the needs of the music therapy community. At Music Therapy Perspectives (MTP), we strive to meet these diverse needs. We seek to advance the knowledge of practicing music therapists by focusing on a broad range of topics pertinent to clinical and professional work. These include clinical interventions, education and training, professional issues, information sharing, book reviews, and technology. Our published research encompasses qualitative research, quantitative research, pilot projects, case studies, research summaries, and literature analyses. MTP is designed to appeal to a wide readership inside and outside the music therapy profession and seeks to promote the development of music therapy practice through the dissemination of scholarly work.

It has been my honor to serve as Editor of Music Therapy Perspectives since 2011 and it is now my distinct privilege to help shepherd this journal to a new era. The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), which has been self-publishing MTP since its founding in 1998, has recently partnered with Oxford University Press (OUP). The collaboration between AMTA and OUP will serve the ever-growing worldwide music therapy community. It will allow for numerous enhancements designed to improve the functionality and accessibility of music therapy research, such as mobile apps, e-articles, and archived materials, while still maintaining the high quality, peer-reviewed research standard that AMTA has maintained for three decades.

I am eager and excited to be a part of moving the MTP journal forward into this phase of its evolution. Although I have only been at the helm for two years, as a music therapist I am proud of the long and successful history of this journal. I look forward to sharing the quality and diversity of music therapy practice with the OUP readership.

Anthony Meadows, Ph.D., MT-BC, FAMI is Associate Professor of Music, Director of Music Therapy, and Chair of the Graduate Music Therapy Program at Immaculata University. A fellow at the Association for Music and Imagery, he is also the editor of Music Therapy Perspectives.

For readers inside and outside the profession of music therapy, Music Therapy Perspectives seeks to promote the development of music therapy clinical practice through the dissemination of scholarly work. Focusing on clinical benefits of music therapy, the journal strives to serve as a resource and forum for music therapists, music therapy students and educators, and those in related professions. Music Therapy Perspectives is an official publication of the American Music Therapy Association.

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Brave new world?

By Richard J. Miller

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of the author Aldous Huxley. Huxley was celebrated for many things and his involvement with the culture of psychotropic drugs was certainly one his most famous, or perhaps infamous, associations. Indeed, the story is told of how, on his death bed, Huxley instructed his wife Laura to inject him with LSD as he slipped into the hereafter. Huxley understood that psychotropic drugs were not just toys for recreational purposes but had the power to fuel political and religious change. In the 1930s, his breakthrough novel Brave New World described the use of a fictitious psychotropic drug for mass control of a subservient population. Later in his life he discovered real hallucinogens – first mescaline and then LSD. He experimented with them and concluded that they could be used as agents for self-discovery and enlightenment as described in his final utopian novel Island.

One story has it that Huxley was first introduced to mescaline in the 1930s by the famous occultist Aleister Crowley (“the great beast,” “the wickedest man in the world”). He would subsequently write about his mescaline experience in his book The Doors of Perception, read by every hippie in the 1960s. Huxley felt that the hallucinogenic experience was something that could be truly revelatory and his views fit in well with entheogenic theories concerning the origins of religion. These ideas posit that the discovery and use of naturally occurring hallucinogens by ancient peoples was a major influence on their emerging ideas about the spiritual world and the development of their civilizations. As Huxley once said, “Pharmacology came before agriculture.”

Now that it has been 50 years since Huxley’s death, one wonders what he would think about the status of psychotropic drugs these days. Apart from a few psychotropic drugs like caffeine, virtually all the others, including drugs like alcohol, hallucinogens, cannabis, psychostimulants, and opiates, are subject to legal controls of one kind or another. This raises certain questions. First of all, should we have laws regulating the use of these drugs and, if so, do the laws that we have make any sense?

We should remember that many societies have lived quite happily alongside the widespread use of psychotropic agents. Cannabis was widely used from ancient times on the Indian subcontinent; cocaine was widely used in pre-Columbian South America; and hallucinogens, such as psilocybin and ayahuasca, were used in Central and South America. On the other hand modern American and European cultures have never been comfortable with the use of such drugs. Drug taking seems to suggest something pre-Christian or pagan, which does not sit well with societies that think rewards should be the result of our labors. Why should we be privy to a profound psychological experience just by popping a pill — we didn’t work for it did we? It is also true that nowadays the available preparations of many drugs are of high purity, making their effects more immediate and powerful. So, perhaps we do indeed require laws to “protect” our society from these substances. Most people would agree that some limits are necessary.

But do our laws make sense? Since the early 1970s laws have been on the books in the United States and Europe that list drugs according to a schedule of perceived dangers. Schedule 1 drugs (using the US system as an example) are drugs which cannot be prescribed even by a physician, and are almost impossible to obtain even for research purposes. These drugs have been designated as having “no medical utility or other uses” and are supposed to have a high degree of likelihood for abuse. Schedule 1 drugs include cannabis, heroin, LSD, psilocybin, and ecstasy.

This makes very little sense. One may wonder who exactly determined that these drugs have “no potential for medical or other general use”? Most people would agree that there is no particular reason why anybody would need heroin (originally introduced as a cough medicine in 1898), but what about the others? Hallucinogenic drugs like LSD and psilocybin are not addictive in the normal sense of the word, and Huxley would have argued that they might be used in a beneficial and enlightening manner for self-improvement. Cannabis is also not very addictive and has a wide potential for medical utility in treating the symptoms of many diseases including cancer, chronic pain, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes. It has even been suggested in some circles that ecstasy might find a place in psychiatry. Should we not be actively considering the potentially positive uses of such interesting and mind-expanding chemicals?

The laws that presently exist in the United States and Britain do not reflect these possibilities at all. Most of these laws are the residue of political opinions that came into play in the early part of the 20th century, when little was known about how psychotropic drugs work or what dangers were really associated with their use. For example US laws governing cannabis use are contradictory. Many states are moving towards a more liberal attitude to cannabis use, whereas the federal government remains basically intransigent in its attitude and maintains cannabis’ status on Schedule 1. A significant problem has been the fact that the people responsible for drug laws are lawyers and politicians. Scientists may be “consulted” but basically this has always just proved to be window dressing as their opinions are ignored if they don’t fit it in with somebody’s political stance. Many people think that we are really missing an opportunity by ignoring the potential of these interesting substances, stuck as we are with our conservative, unenlightened, and clearly confused attitudes. So what would Huxley have thought of our world 50 years after his death? New – yes. Brave – no!

Richard J. Miller is the Alfred Newton Richards Professor of Pharmacology at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is the author of Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs.

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Image credit: Aldous Huxley. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Oral history goes transnational

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

Barring something unforeseen circumstances — looking at you, USPS — all subscribers should have received their copy of the Oral History Review Volume 40, Issue 2. We’re quite proud of this round of articles, which in the words of our editor-in-chief Kathy Nasstrom, “extends our editorial mission in two key areas — the internationalization of the journal and our multimedia initiative.” Through discussions of survival and silence, the contributors to OHR 40.2 address oral histories from the Soviet Union to Portugal. You can view the table of contents online — and if you have access, read articles!

We want to draw readers’ attention to two articles in particular. First, Claire Payton’s “Vodou and Protestantism, Faith and Survival: The Contest over Spiritual Meaning of the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti.” In this piece, Payton draws on interviews conducted following the January 2010 earthquake to explore the spiritual dimension of Haitians’ survival. We invite everyone to read her article now in preparation for the genius that will occur when we interview her in December.

This issue also marks the return of our pedagogy section! We are providing open access to Ken Woodard’s “The Digital Revolution and Pre-Collegiate Oral History: Meditations on the Challenge of Teaching Oral History in the Digital Age.” Here, Woodard assesses a digital-oriented oral history project he assigned in his high school US history class. We hope you all enjoy the article and return for his interview in 2014.

Finally, with this issue we officially bid adieu to our long-time book review editor John Wolford and once again welcome David Caruso into the fold. (Editor’s Note: OHA members can read more about Wolford and Caruso in the most recent OHA Newsletter Volume 47, Number 2.)

Caitlin Tyler-Richards is the editorial/media assistant at the Oral History Review. When not sharing profound witticisms at @OralHistReview, Caitlin pursues a PhD in African History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research revolves around the intersection of West African history, literature and identity construction, as well as a fledgling interest in digital humanities. Before coming to Madison, Caitlin worked for the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest OUPblog posts via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.

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Image Credit: Image courtesy of Caitlin Tyler-Richards

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Is this a selfie which I see before me

By Alice Northover

A further celebration of Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year ‘selfie’ with a variation of MacBeth’s famous ‘dagger’ monologue. I’ve bolded the new words to make it easier to scan for the changes.

Is this a selfie which I see before me,


The angle toward my hand? Come, let me tweet thee.


I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.


Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible


To tweeting as to sight? or art thou but


A selfie of the mind, a false creation,


Proceeding from the Instagrammed brain?


I see thee yet, in form as palpable


As this which now I tumble.


Thou Facebook’d me the way that I was going;


And such an instrument I was to use.


Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,


Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,


And on thy filter and tilt shift a duckface,


Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:


It is the social media which informs


Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one halfworld


Battery seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse


The mode’d sleep; smartphone celebrates


Pale Snapchat’s offerings, and wither’d Cam’ra,


Alarum’d by his sentinel, shutter,


Whose click’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,


With Tarquin’s ravishing arms, towards his design


Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set phone,


Feel not fingers, which way they walk, for fear


Thy very touch prate of my whereabout,


And take the present horror from the time,


Which now suits with it. Whiles I adjust, he lives:


Images to the heat of deeds too cold screen gives.

Alice Northover is editor of the OUPblog and Social Media Manager for Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager.

The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013 is ‘selfie’. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word, or expression, that has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date and judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance. Learn more about Word of the Year in our FAQ, on the OUPblog, and on the OxfordWords blog.

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Image credit: Altered Ferdinand Fleck as MacBeth by Johann Christoph Kimpfel via Wikimedia Commons.

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Benjamin Britten’s centenary

By Philip Carter

The 22nd of November is the feast day of St Cecilia, patron saint of musicians and church music, and the 22nd of November 1913 was the birthdate, in Lowestoft, Suffolk, of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976). The young Britten displayed an extraordinary musical talent and his mother had high hopes for her son: young Benjamin, it was said, was to be the fourth ‘B’ after Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

Benjamin Britten, London Records 1968 publicity photo, by Hans Wild for High Fidelity magazine via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Mitchell, author of Britten’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, examined the start of his lifetime’s association with music:

“The child’s first musical experiences would have been hearing his mother sing, and it cannot be altogether accidental that song, in its broadest sense, and more specifically the relationship of words to music—their colour, their rhythm—was to form so large a part of the œuvre he created in his maturity. This was a reason, too, no doubt, for his eventual choice of an aspiring and gifted young tenor, Peter Pears, as his lifelong companion, about whose voice a close friend from the Lowestoft years remarked that it recalled in character the voice of his mother.

“While recognizing the importance of the maternal influence it would be a mistake to exaggerate it. Some of Britten’s most remarkable compositions are to be found among his chamber music and his orchestral works, and while it is certainly true that songs are prominent among his earliest compositions, so too are numerous string quartets, many sonatas for piano, and a by no means inconsiderable array of attempts at large-scale orchestral works. One must be ever wary in Britten’s case of drawing too strict parallels between life and art. His prodigious musical gifts, which declared themselves at an astonishingly early age—a legitimate and meaningful parallel here with Mozart and Mendelssohn—undoubtedly in themselves would have constituted a prime influence, in particular his exploration of the absolutely basic materials of music—scales, triads, and so forth—at the keyboard.”

Britten became one of England’s greatest composers, as well as a highly accomplished pianist, conductor, and a champion of his seventeenth-century predecessor, Henry Purcell—not least in his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1946). Britten was also among the finest modern composers for the human voice—with song cycles such as the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943), operatic works including Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), and The Turn of the Screw (1954), and church music which comprised hymns and odes to his patron saint, Cecilia.

In addition to its life of Benjamin Britten, the Oxford DNB includes entries on his partner, the singer Sir Peters Pears, and on many who worked with Britten—among them W.H. Auden, his fellow collaborator at the GPO Film Unit in the mid-1930s; Eric Crozier, one of the co-founders, with Britten, of the Aldeburgh Festival; Britten’s musical assistant Imogen Holst; and Montagu Slater, librettist for Peter Grimes (1945), based on a text by the poet and clergyman George Crabbe (1754-1832).

The story of Sir Peter Pears—and his personal and musical relationship with Benjamin Britten—is also available as an episode in the ODNB’s biography podcast.

Or download the podcast directly.

Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Read more about Benjamin Britten on the Oxford DNB website. The Oxford DNB online is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day. In addition to 58,800 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 190 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news.

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Thoughts on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination

By Howard Jones

As we recall the “crime of the century” in Dallas a half century ago, it seems appropriate to ponder some thoughts perhaps relevant to that terrible event. I make no claims to having inside information on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but I am aware of several theories that range from the lone gunman to any number of conspiracies involving any number of conspirators.

The starting place is the Bay of Pigs debacle of 17-19 April 1961. From this event sprang the suspicion that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of either the CIA, the Mafia, or Fidel Castro — or any combination of the three.

This story seems star-crossed in that it originated in the closing days of the oldest person to hold the presidency to that point — Dwight D. Eisenhower; and it ended in the closing days of the youngest person ever elected to that office — John F. Kennedy.

Dwight D. Eisenhower official photo portrait, July 1956. Photo by the Executive Office of the President of the United States. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

President Eisenhower approved a CIA-engineered attempt to overthrow Castro that started as an infiltration (within the CIA’s expertise) but soon evolved into an amphibious landing (outside the CIA’s expertise). Spearheading the operation were 1500 Cuban exiles in the 2506 Brigade, accompanied by two Americans contracted by the CIA who were not officially there.

Richard Bissell, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations, was the architect of the plan. Widely regarded as the “most brilliant man in Washington,” he held a Yale PhD in economics, had wide experience with the Marshall Plan in Europe, and had deeply impressed CIA Director Allen Dulles by making the U-2 reconnaissance plane a reality. According to those in the know, Dulles’s heir apparent was Bissell — which made the Cuba project an important addition to his resumé.

To plan the operation, Bissell relied on two military veterans — Jacob Esterline as project chief and guerrilla expert, and Jack Hawkins, a specialist in paramilitary training.

They selected the town of Trinidad for the invasion. Located on the southern side of Cuba, it had a population of 18,000, many of them anti-Castro and perhaps the seedbed for a popular insurrection. Trinidad also had excellent docks and beaches to facilitate the landing, and nearby were the Escambray Mountains that headquartered a thousand anti-Castro guerrillas who could provide refuge for the exiles and a home for a provisional government seeking American military assistance.

Esterline and Hawkins considered air cover crucial to the amphibious operation.

But Bissell had more in mind: the assassination of Castro — with the help of the Mafia. He had decided in August 1960 (with White House concurrence) that the Cuban chieftain’s death on the eve of the invasion would incite an island-wide uprising.

Why the Mafia? Its luminaries had long controlled Cuba’s thriving nightlife — the casinos, brothels, and drug business — but had lost everything when Castro seized power in July 1959 and booted the crime lords off the island. Their interest in regaining these holdings provided the CIA with plausible deniability — and they were familiar with the island’s network and could find an assassin.

To contact the Mafia, Bissell turned to legendary “cutout” for the CIA, Robert Maheu.

Former FBI agent and now private investigator, Maheu had compiled an impressive portfolio of contract jobs for the CIA, but his real attraction was his social connection with “Uncle Johnny” Roselli, a sort of roving ambassador for the Mafia. Roselli was a close protégé of Sam Giancana, the psychopathic godfather of Chicago. Both Mafia figures had honed their craft under the tutelage of Al Capone.

To complete this nefarious triad, the two Mafiosos added the godfather of the South in Tampa, Santos Trafficante.

Not long afterward, Giancana and Roselli met with Maheu in the swank Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami Beach, where the two underworld figures dismissed the CIA’s idea of killing Castro gangland style and recommended a slow acting poison. They soon found a potential assassin, Castro’s disgruntled private secretary.

After Kennedy’s election victory in November 1960, he learned of the plan to overthrow Castro (and perhaps the assassination effort as well) at the pre-presidential briefing in West Palm Beach. Also at this gathering was the president-elect’s wife Jacqueline, who distributed copies of Ian Fleming’s recent novel, From Russia with Love, to her husband, his brother Robert, and Allen Dulles. Its central character was James Bond — the British spy licensed to kill.

Two days after JFK’s inauguration, Bissell received two phone calls from the White House, instructing him to establish within the CIA an executive action capability — a euphemism for the assassination of foreign state leaders. The calls had come from Bissell’s longtime acquaintance, McGeorge Bundy, head of national security affairs and liaison with the CIA, who could have acted only at the president’s direction.

Fidel Castro, president of Cuba, at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, 22 September 1960. Photo by Warren K. Leffler for the U.S. News and World Report. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

At the top of the CIA’s hit list was Fidel Castro.

President Kennedy’s primary concern about the Cuba plan was to preserve plausible deniability. Toward that end, he ordered two changes: an alternative location for the invasion that was less populated and would not take on the appearance of Normandy; and the cancellation of air cover.

In four days, Bissell recommended the Bay of Pigs, located alongside the Zapata Peninsula. The Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed no opposition to these changes. The result was a fiasco that shook the Kennedy White House to its foundations.

And, of course, everybody blamed everybody else.

JFK blamed the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was fair, and the CIA and Joint Chiefs blamed the president, which was not fair.

In advocating the Zapata plan, Bissell failed to inform the president of its shortcomings. The “Great Swamp of the Caribbean,” as the area was known, housed nearly every deadly creature conceivable — including both alligators and crocodiles, as well as the ferocious pigs encountered by Christopher Columbus some years earlier. Furthermore, the Zapata Peninsula lay more than eighty miles of treacherous terrain from the Escambrays, which eliminated those mountains as a refuge and governmental base.

The Joint Chiefs also failed the president by not warning him of the plan’s flaws. They remained miffed over the CIA’s heavy-handed insistence on controlling an operation beyond its competence, and sulked in silence.

JFK paid the price.

His decision to approve the Bay of Pigs operation had severe repercussions. Both the Mafia and the Cuban exiles deeply resented his refusal to take military action. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev exploited Kennedy’s humiliating position by making brusque demands that heightened the Cold War. The president had to take a stand against communism somewhere, and chose Vietnam. He and his brother Robert remained determined to eliminate Castro, either by invasion or assassination. The administration imposed an economic embargo on Cuba that still stands today. And Khrushchev authorized the construction of missile sites in Cuba for the purpose, he said, of protecting his new ally. Only at the eleventh hour did the two superpowers avert a potential nuclear war.

Castro meanwhile seethed over the Kennedy administration’s efforts to assassinate him. At a party in the Brazilian Embassy in Havana in September 1963, he angrily told an AP journalist: “Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they too can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their death.”

The presidential motorcade shortly before the JFK assassination. Warren Commission exhibit #697. Scanned from 1964 Government office printing of the Warren Commission. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In a devil’s coincidence, a CIA agent was meeting with a potential Cuban assassin in Paris on November 22, 1963, when the streets rang out with the news from Dallas.

The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, offered his take on the “crime of the century”: “Kennedy tried to kill Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.”

Ironically, the sole survivor of these turbulent events is Fidel Castro.

Howard Jones is University Research Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Alabama, and author of The Bay of Pigs and Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War, both published by Oxford University Press. He can be found online through Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Rowan Williams on C.S. Lewis and the point of Narnia

C.S. Lewis, the beloved author of The Chronicles of Narnia among other books, died 50 years ago today. Overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of Aldous Huxley, his death went largely unnoticed in the media, but his work continues to be debated. In the following adapted excerpt from The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams explores the purpose of Narnia.

A middle-aged bachelor teaching English Literature at Oxford proposes to publish a children’s fantasy: in most publishers’ offices, it is a proposal destined for the wastepaper basket. Yet no one could deny the extraordinary and continuing appeal of the Narnia stories — to adults as well as children. The enormous recent success of the series of films based on the books testifies to this. And even the ferocity of some critics of the books (about which there will be more to be said later) bears witness to their influence. Philip Pullman’s powerful trilogy, His Dark Materials, is confessedly part of a counter-campaign – as if recognizing that, for once, God has the best tunes and the devil (or rather the world of strictly secular morality and aspiration) needs to catch up in imaginative terms.

Statue of C.S. Lewis looking into a wardrobe. Entitled “The Searcher” by Ross Wilson, Belfast. Photo by klndonnelly, Creative Commons via genvessel Flickr.

Why the books go on working so effectively is no easy question to answer. It isn’t every reader, even every Christian reader, who finds them instantly compelling. Yet they bear many re-readings, and constantly disclose more things to think about. In this brief guide to some of their themes, I don’t intend to try and answer the question of why they are popular — though there are some obvious things to be said. I am more interested in what precisely C.S. Lewis thought he was doing in writing the books in the first place.
Escape from adulthood?

The question of what Lewis thought he was doing is not quite the same question as ‘What prompted him to write?’ On this, there are various theories. Some biographers, including A.N. Wilson in his brilliant and contentious study of 1990, have made much of the fact that Lewis began work on The Lion at a time in his life when multiple stresses, personal and intellectual, were driving him back towards a long-lost world of childhood imagination where matters did not have to be settled by constant conflict. He had been much taken aback by a rather traumatic debate in Oxford with the formidable philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, who had severely trounced him in argument, exposing major flaws in his book on miracles. Is it wholly an accident that the Narnia books have such a quota of terrifying female figures assaulting the simplicities of faith, hope, and love? And is Lewis retreating from argument back into the world of myth and fairy-tale which meant so much to him as a child? More damagingly, John Goldthwaite (to whose critique we shall be returning) claims that the Anscombe debate ‘stung him back into the brooding of adolescence rather than the innocence of childhood’, generating a fantasy picture of noble martyrdom at the hands of evil that finds its expression in Aslan’s slaughter by the Witch.

Lewis gives a little colour to such an explanation when he says both that he was writing the sort of books he himself would have liked to read and that he felt an urgent need to write them. But the theory of an origin in some sort of panicked retreat from debate is pretty doubtful. Apart from the oddity of imagining Elizabeth Anscombe as the White Witch or the Queen of Underland (she was a passionately devout Roman Catholic who wanted simply to avoid the slightest suggestion that the faith was being defended by faulty reasoning), it is an odd reading of the books that sees them as being in flight back to the simplicities of the nursery. They are successful children’s books — but, like most truly successful children’s books, they are very far from just being comforting. Lewis wrote of The Lion, when early sales were slow, that some mothers and schoolteachers ‘have decided that it is likely to frighten children’, and then added wryly, ‘I think it frightens adults, but v. few children’. If these were indeed the kind of stories that Lewis felt he would like to read, it does credit to his appetite for challenge in his reading material. And in response to the notion that he is indulging in adolescent self-glorifying, we need to read all that is said again and again in the books about the dangers precisely of such melodrama.

But it is also important to recognize how much the themes of the Narnia books are interwoven with what he was thinking and writing in other contexts around the same time, and with material he had already published in the 1940s — as well as the fact that the first seeds of the actual Narnia narrative seem to have been sown as early as 1939. For example: his 1946 book, The Great Divorce, foreshadows many of the ideas in the Narnia stories — most particularly a theme that Lewis insists on more and more as his work develops, the impossibility of forcing any person to accept love and the monumental and excruciating difficulty of receiving love when you are wedded to a certain picture of yourself. It is this theme that emerges most clearly in his last (and greatest) imaginative work, the 1956 novel, Till We Have Faces. The issues we shall be looking at in the following pages are very much the issues that Lewis is trying to work out in a variety of imaginative idioms from the early 1940s onwards — the problems of self-deception above all, the lure of self-dramatizing, the pain and challenge of encounter with divine truthfulness. What Narnia seeks to do, very ambitiously, is to translate these into terms that children can understand. And as to why Lewis decided to address such an audience, there is probably no very decisive answer except that he had a high view of children’s literature, a passion for myth and fantasy and a plain desire to communicate as widely as possible.

In a letter of 1945 to Dorothy L. Sayers, he declares that he is ‘all for little books on other subjects with their Christianity latent. I propounded this in the S.C.R. [Senior Common Room] at Campion Hall [the Jesuit House of Studies in Oxford] and was told that it was “Jesuitical”.’ Against such a background, writing children’s books ‘with their Christianity latent’ makes good sense enough. It is, we need to be clear, something rather different from simply writing standard defences of Christianity in code: he and Sayers would have agreed passionately that the writing has to have its own integrity, its own wholeness. It has to follow its own logic rather than being dictated by an argument. But this does not mean that it cannot be powerful in showing how an argument can be properly put into context. And if we turn back to his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, we shall find that this Jesuitical lack of scruple is simply a reflection of God’s unprincipled methods in nudging us towards faith. ‘A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,’ says Lewis; apparently harmless literary works are littered with traps for the unwary, seductive style, compelling narrative and literary integrity blinding us to the doctrine that a writer takes for granted and so insinuating the doctrine when we’re not paying full attention.

Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. A poet and theologian, he is the former Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England. His most recent book is The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia. 

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Promoting a sensible debate on migration

By Khalid Koser

Migration has had a rough ride in recent years. During times of recession, anti-immigrant sentiments often increase. Minor political parties around the world have taken full advantage and gained political capital from xenophobic policies. In many countries the media has followed suit, systematically reporting on migrants in negative terms. And political leaders are finding it hard to swim against this rising tide.

For sure migration can pose significant challenges, although often these are not the challenges that politicians, the media and the public worry about. There is very little evidence, for example, that migrants compete directly with locals for work, or that they represent a burden on the welfare state, or that they any more inclined than nationals to be criminals or even potential terrorists.

The real challenges arise around the very small proportion of migration that is unmanaged; or where migrants do not do enough to integrate; or where hyper-diversity challenges the delivery of public services (try being a teacher in a class where the students have six different mother tongues). Neither should we forget the challenges faced by migrants themselves: hundreds of drowned in the Mediterranean in the last month; while according to Amnesty International migrant workers building the infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar are being ‘treated like animals’.

Not only have we tended to focus on the wrong challenges arising from migration; we have also failed to do proper justice to its opportunities and benefits, which in most circumstances far outweigh the negatives. Migration can drive economic recovery, lift millions out of poverty, and make the world a more interesting place.

The evidence is quite conclusive that migrants contribute positively to economic growth in the countries where they settle. Skilled migrants drive innovation and competitiveness, which is why so many countries are desperate to attract them. Overseas students are the main revenue source for many universities, and in effect subsidize local students. In the United States, immigrants are 30% more likely to form new business than US-born citizens. Lower-skilled migrants can reduce labour costs to employers and in turn keep down prices for consumers. Taxes paid by immigrants and their children exceed the costs of the services they use in almost every study.

Migrants also contribute to development, and at a far greater scale than official development assistance. According to the World Bank each year migrants send home over US$ 400 billion, comprising a significant proportion of GDP in many developing countries. There is strong evidence from a wide variety of developing countries that remittances can reduce poverty at the family level, increase access to education and health, promote rural economic development, and empower women. Migration relieves unemployment in origin countries, and provides the best route out of poverty for many people.

Migration also has benefits beyond the purely economic. It is not a silver bullet but it is one way to help reduce the challenges of ageing and declining populations in a wider range of countries across the developed world. It is the engine for global cities, which are built on social and cultural diversity. Even if you or your recent ancestors are not migrants, I challenge you to follow your favourite sports team, watch a movie, read a book, listen to music, or just go out for a meal, and tell me that migration is not part of your story.

The negative stereotypes around migration need to be corrected. But positive stereotypes are just as irresponsible. What is really needed is a sensible debate about the pros and cons of migration, and in many countries we are losing the space to have that debate. Being concerned about migration doesn’t mean that you’re a racist, but neither does supporting migration mean that you are a betraying your country.

One thing is for sure and that is migration is here to stay. There are around 240 million migrants in the world, comprising one in every 33 people. The number is bound to grow, and the proportion to remain significant. If we can’t celebrate migration, at least we should try to understand it.

Khalid Koser is Deputy Director and Academic Dean at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and the author of International Migration: A Very Short Introduction

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook. Subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credits: Immigration march in Los Angeles from iStock; Citizen documents from iStock

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Edwin Battistella’s Word of the Year Fantasy League

By Edwin Battistella

Oxford Dictionaries have been collecting lexicographic material and updating dictionaries for over a century now, though its Word of the Year award is still relatively recent. Only since 2004 Oxford Dictionaries have been selecting a word that captures the mood of the previous year. Thinking about the possible contenders for 2013 (twerk? fail? drone? shutdown? bitcoin?) got me to wondering about the past. What would have been in contention for the Word of the Year in 1913, 1933, 1953, 1973, or 1993? The online OED lets us search words by the year of their earliest citation, so I’ve compiled my fantasy list of possible Words of the Year for the twentieth century.

Words with a first citation in 1913 include anti-freeze, behaviorism, big picture, body surfing, celeb, cryology, deboning, Fordist, girl power, groceteria, keypunching, and mneme. It was the age of cars and cinema and industrial innovation. And girl power referred not to feminism, but to the number of women-hours required for a particular task. That meaning has evolved, as has the form of mneme, which we now know as meme.

By 1933 we find biocentrism, careerism, clip joint, discography, Ellingtonian, escapism, em’cee, freeloader, and Hooverville. America was out of work but into music and entertainment. It was also the debut of the UK term body swerve, a football term meaning abrupt dodging to avoid interception. In the United States we find nice nellyism, a euphemism for prudishness. And Nazidom makes its way into the OED.

The postwar era finds 1953 words like binit, bleep, blue chipper, count down, game show, governmentese, and Medicare. That year was also the first citation of both hippie and frenemy, though they had not yet captured the spirit of the age. Binit was replaced by bit and bleep, which first meant a thin, high pitched noise. It later became adapted as a verb meaning to censor, cited first as blip in 1968 and as bleep by 1973.

In 1973 debut citations were found for affluenza, carbo, aspartame, and mouthfeel, all of which suggest an enjoyment of life. New things are entering our consciousness though in the forms of benchmarking, bioethicist, diskette, Derridean, grantsmanship, ecotour, newsfeed, televangelist, and date rape. The word octothorp made its debut as well, though we know it as the hashtag. And the Nixon Administration contributes the combining form –gate.

Fast forward another twenty years to 1993 and we get aight, cosplay, cyber-slacker, e-commerce, mwah-mwah (to give air kisses), schwag, snowblading, and Scooby (meaning “a clue”). With aight, mwah-mwah, schwag, and Scooby, we are breezier in our words, it seems. The internet is now a factor as well with first citations of weblog, web site, and webmaster.

Those are my contenders for the fantasy Words of the Year for the nineteen-teens, -thirties, -fiftes, -seventies and -nineties. Have you made your picks for each year? Here are mine.

For 1913, I’ll go with big picture, because movies were about to change the world. My 1933 word of the year is Hooverville, referring the homeless encampments built during the Great Depression. For 1953, I’ll go with count down, which ushers in both the nuclear age and will later come to represent the space age (though I must admit that game show is a close runner up). The 1973 word is –gate, which ushers in an age of cynicism, and for 1993, it must be web site.

Here we are in 2013, celebrating the selfie, ubiquitous internet self-portraits made possible by state-of-the-art digital cameras and social media. We’ve come a long way from the big picture of 1913, which brought the outside world into theatres. Today, the world is smaller and our fascination is with the small picture, self-taken and self-distributed. Or perhaps with the selfie, we each create our own version of the big picture, sitting for portraits in our own media galleries. Selfies have been analyzed in the New Yorker and the New York Times (can academe be far behind?) and even been the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This marriage of technology and culture is an excellent choice for the 2013 Word of the Year.

Edwin Battistella teaches at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon. His book Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology will be published by Oxford University Press in May of 2014. His previous books include Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others?, Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School, and The Logic of Markedness.

The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013 is ‘selfie’. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word, or expression, that has attracted a great deal of interest during the year to date and judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year and to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance. Learn more about Word of the Year in our FAQ, on the OUPblog, and on the OxfordWords blog.

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