People to People

Americans who consider the British reticent got a surprise last week. BBC went to London's Lambeth Walk and invited the Cockneys to tell the U.S. about themselves and their renowned thoroughfare. They were hard to stop. They were evidence that radio can whip up a rousing show almost any time by letting citizens step up to the microphone and speak out.

The short-wave broadcast, rebroadcast on U.S. medium wave, was fifth of 13 in the BBC-CBS series Transatlantic Call (Sun., 12 noon, E.W.T.). "Plenty of doughboys come down to look at Lambeth Walk," said one Lambethman, "and there's nothing to see now." From the radio account it appeared that the Walk had been a bent little lane of shops with a pub called The Angel, an Eel Pie Saloon, and, in peacetime, a street market where anything could be had from "a pin to an elephant."

"The incident" changed all that. One night in August 1940, the Luftwaffe all but blotted out the Walk. A Cockney told how it blasted him off the street into a church. Everyone lost a relative or a friend.

The Lambeth people had plenty to say about what they wanted after the war. A costermonger named Amy said it best. She wanted Lambeth Walk restored, and she had no desire to give up her fruit & "veg" business. She also wanted it understood that from now on her children and grandchildren were to have something more "on the Christmas tree [than] old clothes and boots and that sort of thing."

One old Lambethman recalled "the greatest Lambeth boy of them all" when he was a "Mumming Bird" (an entertainer) around the place--Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin himself, from Hollywood, closed the broadcast. He painfully remembered having to walk down three flights of rickety, narrow stairs from his "three and sixpence" lodgings "to empty those troublesome slops."

Over the air the Lambeth Walkers sounded as real as real life. So had their fellow Englishmen of the series' previous broadcasts: Lancashire millworkers, etc. On alternate weeks, CBS's Norman Corwin, who produces the U.S. end of the program, has tried to tell the British about the U.S. But he has told too much of the story himself. The result has been that the U.S. broadcasts have sounded like chapters out of Baedeker, while the English have sounded like themselves.

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