Shapley [married names Salt, Gorton], Olive Mary (1910-1999), broadcaster
by Paddy Scannell

Shapley [married names Salt, Gorton], Olive Mary (1910-1999), broadcaster, was born on 10 April 1910 at 10 Tresco Road, Peckham, London, the only daughter and youngest of the three children of William Gilbert Shapley (1870/71–1939), local government officer, and his wife, Kate Sophie, née Reimann (1871/2–1958), who had worked as a servant before her marriage. Her father was a sanitary inspector for London county council and, later, chief inspector of the public health department. Her oldest brother, Frank, eleven years her senior, was killed in the battle of Jutland in 1916. Bill, who was five years older than her, became a journalist. Both parents were Unitarians and, although Olive later declared herself agnostic, she returned to Unitarianism towards the end of her life. At the age of ten she started at the Mary Datchelor Girls' School, Camberwell Green, where she remained until she was nineteen. In 1929 she won a place at St Hugh's College, Oxford, to study history. There she established a lifelong friendship with Barbara Betts (later Barbara Castle) and discovered the mysteries of sex and communism with which she, like so many of her generation, flirted while an undergraduate. She graduated in 1932 with a third-class degree and stayed on at Oxford to take a postgraduate certificate in education. After a spell as a Workers' Education Association lecturer in Surrey and training as a nursery school teacher she applied, in late 1934, for a post at the BBC, in Manchester, to organize Children's Hour. To her surprise she was offered the job and so began a lifetime's involvement with the BBC.

The BBC's regional programme had started in 1930 and Manchester was the production centre for the whole of the north region, from the Scottish borders to the Peak District. For a brief period before the war it was the most exciting place to work in the BBC. Shapley's activities soon went well beyond Children's Hour. She produced a memorable radio drama, Plague at Eyam, about the coming of the black death to a Derbyshire village. But her enduring contribution to broadcasting was with her recorded ‘actuality’ programmes about the lives and experiences of working-class men and women in the north of England at that time. She produced remarkable programmes, using the BBC's one and only 7-ton recording van, about shopping, the homeless, barge people, an all-night transport cafe, miners' wives, and the BBC itself. Her two most ambitious productions, of which recordings still exist, were They Speak for themselves, about Mass-Observation (1 June 1939), and The Classic Soil (6 July 1939), written by Joan Littlewood, which compared the living conditions of the working class in Manchester with those described by Frederick Engels 100 years earlier.

On 14 July 1939 Shapley married John Scarlett Alexander Salt (1905–1947) (great-grandson of Sir Titus Salt of Saltaire), then director of programmes in Manchester. Much to her indignation, she had to resign from the BBC to conform with its policy on staff inter-marriage. Her freelance services, however, were in immediate demand when war was declared, and her sympathetic skills as a documentary maker were now applied to the impact of evacuation and the blitz on people's lives. Late in 1941 Salt was posted to the BBC's North America office in New York. From there Olive produced a regular Letter from America (the title was subsequently taken over by Alistair Cooke, in whose apartment the Salts lived for some months) for transmission on Children's Hour in London. She suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1942, from which psychoanalysis helped her to recover. Her first son, Daniel Alexander, was born in New York on 15 August 1943. Back in Manchester she gave birth to her second child, Nicholas John, on 7 December 1945, and to a daughter, Christina Mary, on 11 May 1947. Within months her husband was stricken with inoperable stomach cancer, and died in the same year on the morning of Boxing day.

With three small children to support, Shapley returned to full-time work. In 1949 she moved to London to become the presenter of Woman's Hour, with which she was associated for the next twenty years. Unobtrusively she introduced talk about a whole range of matters of concern to women that had hitherto been unmentionable: not only medical and sexual topics, but also psychology and human relationships. Listeners were advised that they might wish to turn down their radios, especially if there were young children about. Throughout the 1950s Shapley was busy, writing a regular features column for Modern Woman, taking in lodgers, and working on early BBC television, for which she presented a series of interviews with prominent women called Women Today and, for children, Olive Shapley Tells a Story.

On 31 October 1952 Shapley married Christopher Bellhouse Gorton (1894–1959), fifteen years her senior, who worked for the Manchester textile firm Tootals. The following year they moved back to Manchester and bought a large Victorian villa in Didsbury, called Rose Hill, where Shapley lived very happily for nearly thirty years. She continued to work as a presenter for television in London, but in 1959 switched to production. Her most successful programme, in her own judgement, was Something to Read, for which she recruited Brian Redhead, then a young journalist with the Manchester Guardian, as presenter. In the same year, and again with devastating suddenness, her second husband died of a heart attack on 2 November, leaving her once more alone with three children.

The immediate impact of Christopher's death was the gradual return of depression and a breakdown. With the help of friends and BBC colleagues Shapley recovered and continued to support and care for her family and to work in radio and television. In her later professional years she presented the Manchester edition of Woman's Hour, three series of The Shapley File on social issues, as well as many individual contributions to radio magazine and feature programmes. She finally retired from broadcasting in 1973. After her children had left home she established the Rose Hill Trust and for fourteen years ran it as a refuge for unsupported mothers and babies. In 1979 she took in some of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’. In 1982 she sold Rose Hill and moved into a small terraced house in Didsbury, and in 1992 moved to Llanidloes, in Radnorshire, to be near her son Nicholas. Meanwhile she had taken to travelling and became a regular visitor to India and the Himalayas in her sixties. In her seventies she campaigned vigorously, but without success, to establish a community for older single people like herself. On this topic she wrote to Katharine Whitehorn:

I am 72 years old, but will not be tidied away neatly and there are many like me. I have just come back from a rough tour in India where I travelled with my 9 year old grandson and it was grand to feel part of the human race again. But living alone in a small neat house is simply not on as far as I am concerned. (Shapley files, BBC WAC 341/48/1, 1 July 1982)

In 1996 Shapley's autobiography, Broadcasting a Life, was published with the help of her daughter Christina. She wrote the story of her life in part so that her three children should know something of their father, whose untimely death was most movingly described in her book. It was also the record of a life in broadcasting, by one who was committed to letting people speak for themselves on radio and television. Much of what appeared in the book was first broadcast by Shapley herself over a thirty-year period. Her life story, with its difficulties and triumphs, exemplifies what it was to be a professional working woman, wife, and often single mother in the twentieth century. Shortly after the book was published Shapley suffered a stroke and lost much of her speech. She died in a home for the elderly, Crosfield House, Dark Lane, Rhayader, Radnorshire, on 13 March 1999, and was survived by her three children. She was buried at Thorpe Arch church, Boston Spa, next to her first husband, John Salt, on 3 July 1999.

PADDY SCANNELL