As an Archers devotee for more than 40 years, I was fascinated to discover recently that the original idea for this dramatic story of a farming community has two significant Quaker connections.
In 1948, the BBC organised a conference of farmers to find out why more farmers weren’t listening to the radio (can you imagine this happening today?!). A leading figure was Godfrey Baseley, the BBC’s farming producer in the Midlands who was struggling to make programmes that were both informative and engaging. At the conference, one farmer eventually shouted out “It seems to me what is really wanted is a farming Dick Barton!”, referring to the highly popular radio thriller about the adventures of Dick Barton, Special Agent, which, since 1946, had been broadcast each weekday for 15 minutes, with an omnibus on Saturdays. The idea was initially treated as a good joke, but eventually took root and turned into the Archers, with Baseley as its creator and producer.
So where do Quakers come into this? Well, the interjection had come from a forward-looking and successful farmer Henry Burtt, whom Baseley happened to have interviewed for another programme in 1946. The Burtts were prominent Quakers in Lincolnshire. Already recorded as Friends in the late 1600s, a survey of Brant Broughton Meeting House reports that the Burtt family “provided most of its members in the eighteenth, nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries”. In 1862, a Burtt was one of the last Friends to be punished for non-payment of tithes to the Anglican church. Henry’s father, Theodore Burtt, established a Quaker industrial mission on Pemba Island (now part of Tanzania) to show how plantations could be run with freed labour, rehabilitating slaves who had only been freed there in 1897. Henry Burtt himself was an active and committed Quaker. He was a conscientious objector in the first world war – in 1915, at the age of 21, he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit, serving until 1919. In 1965, Henry and his wife Christine paid for the total refurbishment of Spalding Meeting House. He died in 1987.
Intrigued by this Quaker connection to the Archers, I wanted to find out more and started to read Godfrey Baseley’s memoir The Archers, a Slice of My Life. Imagine my surprise when I found that his parents were also Quakers and that he attended two Quaker schools: Sibford and Bootham (though by his own admission he was an unruly pupil and did not stay long at Bootham). It is easy to imagine that when he and Burtt first met back in 1946, they found common ground in their Quaker connections.
It’s interesting to speculate how much these Quaker connections influenced the Archers in the early days. In many ways, probably very little – Henry Burtt only sparked the idea, and Baseley doesn’t seem to have followed his parents into Quakerism, though he kept up his connection with Sibford School as an old boy. Some sources suggest that Henry and his son were models for Dan and Phil Archer – and there was certainly a simplicity and straightforwardness about them that could have had Quaker roots – but Godfrey doesn’t say this in his memoir. I don’t think there has ever been a Quaker character in the Archers. Please let me know if I’m wrong!
So, what would Henry have made of the Archers? I haven’t found any record of his views, but I hope he would have approved of the various characters who have taken a stand for their beliefs over the years, as he did himself as a conscientious objector – I think of Pat at Greenham Common in the 80s, Tony and Pat with their early adoption of organic farming, Freddie’s challenging his mother and the trustees about his family’s picture of a slave-trading ship, even Jill and her famous flapjack-throwing incident! Henry’s original idea was to portray farmers and rural communities as living adventurously, and the Archers has given us that both on and off the farms of Ambridge.
If you’d like to explore contemporary Archers themes with a Quaker ‘lens’, join Simonne and fellow Archers addict Jacquie Cole for Quakers and the Archers: Tales of Everyday Folk, three weekly Zoom sessions starting on 4th September.
Book your place on Quakers and the Archers: Tales of Everyday Folk
