Henry Swanzy

Henry Swanzy (14 June 1915 – 19 March 2004) was an Anglo-Irish radio producer in Britain's BBC General Overseas Service who is best known for his role in promoting West Indian literature particularly through the programme Caribbean Voices, where in 1946 he took over from Una Marson, the programme's first producer. Swanzy introduced unpublished writers and continued the magazine programme "with energy, critical insight and generosity".[1] It is widely acknowledged that "his influence on the development of Caribbean literature has been tremendous".[2]

Biography

Born Henry Valentine Leonard Swanzy at Glanmire rectory, near Cork in Ireland, he was the eldest son of the local clergyman and his wife. After his father's death in 1920, the five-year-old Swanzy moved to England with his mother.[3]

He was educated at preparatory schools in Cheltenham and Eastbourne before going on to Wellington College in 1928. He read History at New College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree, and he also won the Gibbs Prize.[4][5] For a year thereafter, planning a career as a civil servant, he studied French and German and travelled throughout Europe, then in 1937, aged 22, he was employed at the Colonial and Dominions Office, joining the BBC four years later.[3]

Broadcasting career and Caribbean Voices

Swanzy began working for the BBC during the war,[6] reporting for the General Overseas Service.[7] He took over Caribbean Voices after Una Marson, the programme's original architect and first producer,[8] returned to Jamaica in April 1946,[9] and he remained at the helm until 1954.

Swanzy, it has been noted, "had a great respect for Caribbean writers as representing a legitimate and distinctive element of British literature."[10] Writing in Caribbean Quarterly in 1949, he said: "It is not inconceivable that of all the English-speaking world, the West Indies may be revealed as the place most suited for maintenance of a literary tradition."[11] He went on to make his mark on the literature of the region, in collaboration with Frank Collymore of BIM magazine, by providing a platform through the programme for some of the most notable Caribbean literary talent of the twentieth century. As Montague Kobbe writes: "...it is hard to overemphasise the tremendous influence which Henry Swanzy, editor to Caribbean Voices from 1946 onwards, would exert in the development of a literary tradition that was in its earliest stages. The other initiative in question corresponds, of course, to the emergence of Frank Collymore’s audacious magazine, BIM. Launched in Barbados in 1942, BIM encouraged young local writers to put forward their work and quickly established a fruitful rapport with the literary findings uncovered by Swanzy’s Caribbean Voices, establishing a cultural infrastructure of sorts that had its local nucleus in Collymore’s magazine and its international outlet in the BBC."[12]

Swanzy is acknowledged to have "transformed Caribbean Voices into the primary site for new and unpublished poetry and prose from the Caribbean, granting an international forum to many who would go on to become the leading lights in Caribbean letters".[13] Writers who received their start on Caribbean Voices or were nurtured as contributors by the programme during Swanzy's tenure include George Lamming,[14] Edgar Mittelholzer, Shake Keane, Sam Selvon, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, Ian McDonald, Gloria Escoffery, John Figueroa,[15] Alfred Mendes[16] Derek Walcott[14] and V. S. Naipaul.[7][17] According to Naipaul, Swanzy brought to the programme "standards and enthusiasm. He took local writing seriously and lifted it above the local".[18][19] Lamming in his 1960 book The Pleasures of Exile paid tribute to Swanzy's role in sustaining the work of such writers:

"From Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica and other islands, poems and short stories were sent to England.... Our sole fortune now was that it was Henry Swanzy who produced 'Caribbean Voices.' At one time or another, in one way or another, all the West Indian novelists have benefited from his work and his generosity of feeling. For Swanzy was very down to earth. If you looked a little thin in the face, he would assume that there might have been a minor famine on, and without in any way offending your pride, he would make some arrangement for you to earn. Since he would not promise to 'use' anything you had written, he would arrange for you to earn by employing you to read. No comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be written without considering his whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel."[20]

In 1956, Swanzy himself wrote about what the programme had achieved:

"The listener has visited every kind of home in town and village, sat with the fishermen hefting sea-eggs, gone with the pork-knockers into Guiana jungles, followed the saga-boys and the whe-whe players, heard the riddles, the digging songs, the proverbs, the ghost stories, duppies, la Diablesse, Soukiyans, zombies, maljo, obeah, voodoo, shango. He has agonised over the waifs, the unemployed, the mental patients, scoundrels, fallen women, the rich and comfortable in their wall of privilege."[21]

From 1954 to 1958 Swanzy was seconded as head of programmes to the Gold Coast Broadcasting System (later the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation). While there, he wrote about the Swanzy family's historical connections with the Gold Coast.[22][23] He also edited the anthology Voices of Ghana: Literary contributions to the Ghana Broadcasting System, 1955–57 (Ghana Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1958).[3][24]

Swanzy subsequently returned to the BBC's external services, where he worked until his retirement in 1976.[4] He wrote several critiques of West Indian literature and for a decade edited the journal of the Royal African Society,[7] now called African Affairs.[19]

In November 1998, Swanzy was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled What Does Mr Swanzy Want? presented by Philip Nanton and produced by Matt Thompson.[25]

Family life

In 1946, Swanzy married Tirzah Garwood, widow of Eric Ravilious. After she died from cancer, in 1952 he married Henriette Van Eeghan, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.[3]

Swanzy died on 19 March 2004, aged 88, at his home in Bishop's Stortford.[4]

Legacy

In his honour, the Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters was announced by the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in 2013. It will be an "annual lifetime achievement award to recognise service to Caribbean literature by editors, publishers, critics, broadcasters, and others".[26][27]

A Postcolonial Studies seminar entitled "Henry Swanzy at the BBC: World Literature and Broadcast Culture at the End of Empire" was conducted at King's College, London University, by Dr Chris Campbell of the University of Warwick on 12 February 2013.[28]

Swanzy's papers are held at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House.[5] Copies of correspondence (1945–53) between Swanzy and various authors connected with Caribbean Voices is held by the Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.[29]

Selected publications

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Erika J. Waters, "Interview With John J. M. Figueroa", The Caribbean Writer, 2010, quoting Figueroa's introduction to his anthology Caribbean Voices (Evans Brothers, 1971).
  2. ↑ CaribArts, May 2004.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Philip Nanton and Anne Walmsley, "Henry Swanzy – Pioneering BBC producer whose literary programmes launched a generation of Caribbean writers", The Guardian, 20 March 2004.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Alan Ashton, "Henry Valentine Swanzy", Forum for former BBC Staff, 1 April 2004.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Papers of Henry Valentine L. Swanzy".
  6. ↑ Diana Athill in her memoir Stet: An Editor's Life (Granta Books, 2000, Chapter 3) has written of a two-floor flat in Devonshire Place that she and her friend Marjorie shared with George Weidenfeld and Henry Swanzy: "The few young men in the BBC at that time had to be exempt from military service. George was exempt because he was still an Austrian.... Perhaps Henry was disqualified from active service because of some weakness in his health, or perhaps he was a conscientious objector who was considered more useful in the BBC than down a coal-mine.... The men's floor had an enviable bathroom, all black glass and chrome, given extra distinction by containing a piano on which Henry often played moody music."
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Obituary, The Times, 6 April 2004.
  8. ↑ Delia Jarrett-Macauley, The Life of Una Marson, 1905-1965, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 159, 175, 179-90.
  9. ↑ Glyne Griffith, "'This is London calling the West Indies': The BBC's Caribbean Voices, in Bill Schwarz (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, Manchester University Press, 2003, p. 200.
  10. ↑ Anne Spry Rush, "'A Bridge Between': The BBC's Colonial Service" (pp. 173–207), in Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 197.
  11. ↑ H. L. V. Swanzy, "Caribbean Voices: Prolegomena to a West Indian Culture", in Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2 (July–August–September 1949), pp. 21–28.
  12. ↑ Montague Kobbe, "Caribbean Identity and Nation Language in Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetry", Latineos, 23 December 2010.
  13. ↑ Letizia Gramaglia and Malachi McIntosh, "Censorship, Selvon and Caribbean Voices", Wasafiri, Vol. 28, No. 2, June 2013, p. 49.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Waters (2010), "Interview With John J. M. Figueroa", The Caribbean Writer.
  15. ↑ Pamela Beshoff, "Obituary: John Figueroa", The Independent, 11 March 1999.
  16. ↑ John C. Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis, University of Toronto Press, 2004, p. 103.
  17. ↑ Philip Nanton, "What Does Mr. Swanzy Want – Shaping or Reflecting? An Assessment of Henry Swanzy's Contribution to the Development of Caribbean Literature", Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 1 (March 2000), pp. 61–72. Originally in Kunapipi Vol. XX, No. 1 (1998).
  18. ↑ Marina Salandy-Brown, "Swanzy meets La Rose", Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, 18 April 2013.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Philip Nanton, "London Calling", Caribbean Beat, Issue 63, September/October 2003.
  20. ↑ George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960); new edition London: Allison & Busby, 1984; pp. 66–67.
  21. ↑ "Henry Swanzy, "The Literary Situation in the Contemporary Caribbean" (1956). Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds), The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, London: Routledge, pp. 248–51.
  22. ↑ "A Trading Family in the Nineteenth Century Gold Coast", Transactions of the Gold Coast & Togoland Historical Society, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1956), pp. 87–120.
  23. ↑ Lewis Henry Gann, Peter J. Duignan (eds), Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960: The economics of colonialism, pp. 96: "A. and F. Swanzy, the leading commercial house in the area, shipped arms to the king of Ashanti. Hence, when war broke out between Britain and Ashanti, the London Pall Mall Gazette attacked Swanzy for supplying munitions of war to the enemy."
  24. ↑ J. A. Ramsaran, "The Afro-Carib Literary Scene: Sun, Sea and Sonnets", Negro Digest, March 1962, p. 56. Reprinted from West African Review.
  25. ↑ "What Does Mr Swanzy Want? BBC Radio 4 FM, 22 November 1998", Radio Times, Issue 3902, 19 November 1998, p. 137.
  26. ↑ "Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters", NGC Bocas Lit Fest 2013.
  27. ↑ Zahra Gordon, "Bocas Lit Fest adds new award", Guardian Media (Trinidad), 21 March 2013.
  28. ↑ "Henry Swanzy at the BBC: World Literature and Broadcast Culture at the End of Empire", King's College London.
  29. ↑ Caribbean Voices Correspondence. The Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago.

External links