MACDIARMID, Hugh [i.e. Christopher GRIEVE], and Valda TREVLYN GRIEVE.
Three Christmas cards, signed from Christopher and Valda, or Valda alone,
undated.
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Three Christmas cards, signed from Christopher and Valda, or Valda alone,
Three Christmas cards to Douglas Geoffrey Bridson, BBC radio producer and long-time friend of MacDiarmid, and his wife Joyce. The two cards signed from both Christopher and Valda (but in her hand) carry generic messages, the third evidently sent after Christopher’s death, laments ‘I don’t seem to get anything done. Will need to snap out of it – I’ve got all Christopher’s papers sorted – most have gone to Edin Uni Library.’
The Manchester-born poet, journalist and radio producer Douglas Geoffrey Bridson was responsible for over 800 broadcasts during his career at the BBC, 1933–1969. In the mid-1960s he was known as ‘the cultural boss of the BBC’ in his role as Programme Editor for Arts, Sciences, and Documentaries. Although he was a poet of no small ability himself, it was his tireless and democratic promotion of modern British and American literature on the airwaves that led to correspondence and then friendship with nearly all the major literary figures of his day, many of whose works he brought to a wider audience through his radio productions.
Bridson had been an avid reader of MacDiarmid (pseudonym of the Scottish poet Christopher Grieve) since the Thirties, and organised a ‘comprehensive selection’ of his work for broadcast on 5 Feb 1951, which was followed by In Memoriam James Joyce (31 May 1956) and Impavidi progrediamur (19 December 1956). After the success of his TV profile of Ezra Pound for Monitor in 1959, Bridson projected one on MacDiarmid. A week was devoted to it, with Karl Miller brought in as interviewer: ‘Resplendent in his kilt MacDiarmid paced the fields, leaned on gates and drank with the locals at his hostelry. He read Marx by lamplight while Valda his wife cooked supper for him over a hot-oil stove. Lengthy sequences were shot up and down the country to illustrate everything from The Watergaw to A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle’. Bridson thought him ‘the greatest poet living in the British Isles’, but the programme editor thought his audience would never have heard of him. ‘It was lucky that MacDiarmid – or Christopher Grieve, as I knew him – happened to be another old friend of mine. Otherwise, he might have been a lot more angry than he was. Luckily I had again spent each evening recording conversation with him’, which was then broadcast on the Third Programme on 9 and 14 March 1960, along with a reading (see Bridson, Prospero and Ariel: The Rise and Fall of Radio, pp. 267–8). In 1962 Bridson produced a programme of readings in celebration of MacDiarmid’s 70th birthday.