Original BBC radio actuality recordings bring to life the London of the 1930s and 1940s. These sounds were captured on location at street markets, fairgrounds, skittle alleys, auction houses, hopfields and elsewhere.
THE FAIR AT Hampstead Heath was a major holiday fixture for Londoners during the first half of the 20th century, with 200,000 visitors in 1910 and a visit from Queen Alexandra in 1920.
This recording (BBC catalogue number 871005) was made in 1939 as part of the Foreign Broadcaster’s Tour of Britain, although the catalogue entry doesn’t state what program it was used in.
There’s a wide range of sounds including the regular ding of a ‘test your strength’ bell, voices and whistling from passersby, and showmen touting shies and lotteries. One curiosity is the whine of a miniature siren belonging to one of the fariground rides.
Of particular interest is the voice of showman running a weight-guessing pitch. Weight-guessing was recorded as a street occupation by Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor in the mid-nineteenth century, typically occurring outside major railway stations.
Weight-guessing was also an early example of the human voice becoming automated. ‘I Speak Your Weight’ machines began to be produced in the early 1930s by the British Automatic Co. Ltd. and other manufacturers. A shellac disc inside the machine bore voice recordings, and the customer’s weight made a needle move to the start of the appropriate track and begin playing.
In the 1979 comedy film The Jerk, Steve Martin pursues the noble calling of weight-guessing in an American fairground.
Many thanks to BBC Worldwide for granting the London Sound Survey permission to reproduce this recording. It is not covered by the site’s Creative Commons licence so please don’t try to download or redistribute it.