Hallam Tennyson (radio producer)

Beryl Hallam Augustine Tennyson (10 December 1920 in Chelsea, London – 21 December 2005 in Highgate) was a British radio producer.

He was the son of Sir Charles Tennyson and his wife Lady Ivy (née Pretious), and the great-grandson of the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He was educated at Eton College and Oxford University.^[1]

He married Margot Wallach in the autumn of 1945 in Kensington, London: they married in 1946.^[1] She was born 30 March 1921 in Moenchengladbach, Germany, and died 19 April 1999 in Highgate, London.

He was homosexual, a fact known to his wife at the time they married. He was convinced by a therapist that his homosexuality would be cured if he married a woman. He and his wife Margot nevertheless had satisfactory sexual relations, and they had a son, Jonathan Tennyson (born 1955), and a daughter. He was stabbed to death in his bed in 2005.^[2]

Hallam joined the BBC World Service in 1956, working as a radio producer and becoming assistant head of drama.^[1] His own radio play The Spring of the Beast, an account of the friendship between Henry James and author Constance Fenimore Woolson, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as the Monday Play on 26 May and repeated as Afternoon Theatre on 31 May 1986. James is depicted as unable to overcome his inhibitions against loving either a woman or another man.

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