“The growing good of the world,” said George Eliot, depends on those who have “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. Hilda Matheson is certainly in this category. Possessed of what Michael Carney and Kate Murphy celebrate in their biography Hilda Matheson as her “quick, intelligent, sympathetic and idealistic nature”, Matheson was something of a heroine. She worked for the Secret Services, she transformed news and discussion programmes on the BBC, and she masterminded a nearly 2,000-page study of the entire African continent, published by Oxford University Press in 1938. Two years later, she was dead of a “toxic goitre”. She was 52.
Matheson was born in a Putney manse in 1888, her Scottish Presbyterian father having among his congregation Quakers, Socialists, Ramsay MacDonald (the future prime minister) and one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting. But Hilda was packed off to school in Southwold, where she took the male roles in plays, liked getting boilers to start, and was generally not regarded as ladylike. Upon graduation from Oxford, she was a clerk in the War Office, before being recruited by the Special Intelligence Directorate, indexing information on people suspected of being German spies. She was skilled at making connections from disparate bits of knowledge, with the results utilised for counter-espionage. (She performed similar duties for MI6 in Italy.) Of the enemy aliens under Hilda’s surveillance, 11 were tried by military tribunal during the war and shot in the Tower of London.
In the 1920s, she became political secretary for the “courageous, pugnacious” Lady Astor, dealing with correspondence, drafting speeches, and lobbying for her ideas – the protection of children from indecent assault, the conditions governing guardianship, the raising of the school leaving age from 14 to 18, and the elimination of venereal disease.
In 1926, having met Matheson at Cliveden, the Astor stately home, John Reith, director-general of the BBC, offered her the job of Director of Talks at an annual salary of £900 – this at a time when teachers made £100 and nurses £50. The network needed more than simply music and plays; nevertheless, it’s odd to discover the opposition Matheson faced. “The wireless would keep people from attending concerts or reading books,” complained some headmasters, while newspaper proprietors feared that people would stop buying papers.
Matheson wanted to raise intellectual standards, experiment and take risks. She commissioned criticism and reviews, political analysis, scientific and philosophical discussions. She oversaw everything from lectures on “the home life of the artichoke” to cookery advice, child-rearing suggestions and gardening hints, including “a farmer talking about manure”.
Though there was manifestly an appetite for “information, ideas and good literature”, Reith wasn’t supportive. He thought Matheson’s schemes too highbrow: she went against his lower-middle-class, philistinic prejudices. For her own part, Hilda thought her male superiors had the “wits of a mentally deficient hen”. The crisis came when she allowed Harold Nicolson to mention on air the names of banned authors DH Lawrence and James Joyce. Reith said Matheson was an “unreasonable” and “difficult” woman. A restructuring took place, and her job disappeared.
Effectively sacked, Matheson found employment on An African Survey, which set out to describe the geography of the landmass, its languages and social structures. When the nominal author, Lord Hailey, fell ill, Matheson took over as supervisor. Though the project “bears the name of Lord Hailey”, for Carney and Murphy “it is more a monument to Hilda”. (In the 1957 edition, her name was even cut from the acknowledgements.)
Throughout her life, she was “ferociously energetic in her work”, as the authors make clear: during the Second World War, she was part of the propaganda machine, doing “covert work concentrated on political and economic information”.What Carney and Murphy stress is how unique this was, a woman holding high positions at a time when male chauvinism prevailed. Never interested in the distractions of a husband or family – HG Wells made fruitless “forceful overtures” – one of Hilda’s lovers was Vita Sackville-West, to whom she wrote three times a day: “Your eyes and your eyebrows and your forehead make my pulses run away with me,” etc.
Was she happy? Probably not. Hilda suffered from Graves’ disease, an overactive thyroid giving her palpitations and manic depression. She died on the operating table on October 30 1940. Obituary coverage was scant, though Nancy Astor and Sackville-West saluted “a splendid friend”.
Hilda Matheson: A Life of Secrets and Broadcasts is published by Handheld at £13.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
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