This paper is inspired by my interest in the transitional experiences our minds undergo when we are working with verbal and visual sources of evidence in the history of education. As writers, we select evidence, in this instance a radio script and a photograph album, and take what we glean from this material on a journey of transition. We create something else for a reader when we privilege and discard aspects from the primary sources we confront. Can I synthesize what I read, see and know in a way that makes an audience think critically? Or do I make a montage of my different anecdotes, dissolving unexpected discoveries and different frames together so the process becomes a kind of animation but does not necessarily communicate the transition between historical and imaginative enquiry? I am not approaching this exploration of the material with a preconceived theoretical framework. I am hoping that the note-taking and sketching that I produce while working with the written and visual sources will expand the debate about some of the irrepressible and fluctuating qualities of archival evidence.

A decade after the 1944 Education Act, English schools in 1955 were still in transition. The Tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern school, or the comprehensive school with no selective intake, were all jostling in the media for a public approval. The educational reformer, Shena Simon, following in Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s footsteps, was visiting Russia and heralding the success of an education system which operated without 11 plus selection.

My paper also touches on the problems for us as historians who need to not carry with us affections or attachments that blind us to the complex story of privileged and ‘elite’ visitors travelling across Europe and championing a school system developed within a non-democratic state. When working with broadcast material that involves the contributions of Shena Simon, and more surreptitiously Brian Simon, I cannot escape the knowledge that Ernest Simon (husband of Shena, father of Brian) was the chairman of the BBC governors from 1947-1952. This legacy allowed a safe space for their contributions, which ‘outsiders’, who may have shared their views, would not have accessed.

Shena Simon (Lady Simon of Wythenshaw) took a trip to Moscow with her son, the educational historian, Brian Simon in 1955, as guests of the psychologist Alexander Luria. They visited schools and on her return Shena Simon broadcast her account of what she saw in August 1955, on the North of England BBC Home Service. The script survives at BBC Written Archives, as does correspondence relating to the making of this programme. A photograph album of this same Moscow visit also survives at the Newsam Archives (UCL, Institite of Education). I work with the radio script, correspondence and the photographs, (photographs where no verbal commentary is provided) exploring how these sources can be seen and heard again for a contemporary audience. I am interested in the methodological problems I confront when trying to work with these materials. I want to move beyond the contradictions between the different types of evidence and explore how I deal with contradictions in transit. What can I do with what I find other than be surprised by how evidence throws up incongruous spaces? Brian Simon, an active member of the Communist Party in 1955, had no voice and no mention in this BBC script. In the photograph album, we find pictures of the science labs that Shena Simon described so vividly in her radio account; crowded with potted plants. Brian Simon is also visible in certain photos, smiling alongside the pupils at a school desk. The photos include children in a nursery home corner making a tea party for dolls. There are house plants here too, hair ribbons, embroidered table cloths and dresses not dissimilar from those worn by the affluent children in Tsarist Russian. The photograph album surprised me with its images of laughter and variety. I realized my own preconceived ideas had led me to imagine greater uniformity and seriousness when I read the surviving radio script. The photos offered Shena Simon’s private record of a place where she and her son were clearly welcomed. The radio script gives the impression of being personal in terms of the detail in her description and her heartfelt sense that the English have something to learn from an educational environment beyond England’s own boundaries. However, in her spoken script she presents herself as a more distant figure, emphasizing her inability to speak or understand the Russian language, and her dependence on translators.

The predicted findings from this paper will, I anticipate, take shape on two levels. Firstly I explore the radio programme and photograph album as a kind of microcosm of sources within a wider European historical context. In the 1955 broadcast, Shena Simon asks the English listener to reflect on the potential impact of widespread comprehensive education. This script reminded me of the ‘Space Race’ and appeared to tap into an anxiety that behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ things might be more advanced than they were in England. The message of the broadcast is not that we should adopt Communism but that educational processes under Communism might be educating the young in a broader and more resourceful way than the divisions of the Tripartite System can allow. Shena Simon’s broadcast offered a selection of memorable scenes intended to spark some debate as to whether scaremongering about comprehensive education in England was reactionary and side-stepped the central issue of educating for a world undergoing rapid industrial change. Alban Webb’s study of Cold War broadcasting and the BBC suggests that the English tended not to tune into programmes that asked them to pay attention to parallel social experiences in the European context (1). Secondly, I also hope to extend the notion of transmission into an investigation of what occurs in the space we occupy when analysing and synthesising different types of sources. I am offering to present an academic paper. It is not my ‘duty’ fill a sketchbook, write a radio broadcast or create a documentary film which revisits and re-enacts Shena and Brian Simon’s journey. To build an academic paper of interest to this conference, I want to reach the transitions that enable me to carry forward some kind of sharing of the textural and visual rhetoric that I encounter.