Rewriting the Beginning of BBC Audio Drama History- Three Women Playwrights and Their Contribution to British Radio Drama Culture

For most of the first hundred years of the history of the BBC Richard Hughes (1924 & 1928) has been celebrated as the first author of an original radio play and other male dramatists or directors such as Cecil Lewis (1924), Tyrone Guthrie (1931), Reginald Berkeley (1925), L. du Garde Peach (1931), Lance Sieveking (1931) and Val Gielgud (1932, 1946, 1948, & 1957) have been canonised as the leading creators, voices and pioneers of sound drama. This paper reveals this to be a problematical trope and elevates the names of three women writers- Phyllis Twigg, Gertrude Jennings and Kathleen Baker who can be argued in some respects to be of equal and perhaps even greater cultural significance