Writing for The Guardian, the documentarian Kate Kennedy revisits the famous 1924 BBC broadcast in which cellist Beatrice Harrison played the “Londonderry Air” (“Oh, Danny Boy”) in her garden while a nightingale sang along.
Or did it? Maude Gould, a professional whistler, or siffleur, who performed as “Madame Saberon” in music halls, claimed that she had been hired by the BBC to impersonate a nightingale in case the real bird didn’t sing during the broadcast.
Kennedy, after examining the cellist’s papers and BBC archives, disputes the whistler’s story, noting that Gould, the partner of a German spy who helped him transmit military intelligence in the years before World War I, “was no stranger to adapting the truth,” and that there is no evidence of Gould being paid by the broadcaster. Harrison, meanwhile, left behind an account of the performance that “gave so much minute-by-minute detail of the broadcast that it would be impossible to conceive of it all being faked.”
Kennedy’s documentary “The Cello and the Nightingale,” can be heard here: