Betty Davies (radio)

So indelible was Davies's studio presence that in 2019 her hats were part of a story on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs: Dame Esther Rantzen, well known as a television presenter and notorious for an eight-year clandestine relationship with her married BBC boss Desmond Wilcox, rehearsed a story she had often used to explain her departure from radio drama: 'But I got into making sound effect, so then a lady producer who always wore a hat, even in the studio, did a drama – I was in drama – where there was a distant skating accident, and I had to make the sound of a skating accident. I thought it would be skates falling on ice, she thought it would be flesh. So I had to fall over on a plank five times before I got the sound she accepted. And then I limped up to office and resigned in triplicate. But it was fun, actually; it was fun.' It was also not the full story. It was not just the rigour and physicality of a Davies production that led to Rantzen's departure; Rantzen had already come to a parting of the way with the charismatic and highly regarded radio drama producer John Gibson. But Betty the Hat was still the story in the 21st century.

She had been a traveller of the world throughout her career, but when she finally wound down from her work she continued to extend her travels. At the time of her death in 2018, David Roberts, the son of her first cousin, David Ceredig Roberts, wrote to Nigel Deacon's radio drama pages of his Diversity website to recount some of her travels: 'while she was renowned for her globetrotting, from Antarctica to the Karakoram', he wrote, 'nothing beats the time I bumped into her by accident in the countryside near Cienfuegos in Cuba. This was in 1983 - deep in the Cold War, when western tourists were rare. She really did get about!'

Davies died just short of her 101st birthday on 27 January 2018, in Staunton, near Coleford, Gloucestershire, England.

He added: 'Until mid-2017, having outlived all her BBC contemporaries, she continued to live alone in the flat in Shepherd's Bush. Her longtime relationship with the Australian actor and writer Bruce Beeby had continued until his death in 2013.'

Throughout the Davies years at Mrs Dale's Diary, Mrs Dale was played by Ellis Powell. In 2012, the actor Penelope Keith, a Mrs Dale fan herself and a serial star of television comedies, presented a programme for BBC Radio 4 called I'm Rather Worried about Jim, taking its title from what had become Mrs Dale's catch-phrase that regularly repeated in her opening diary entry. Jim Dale was her doctor husband. The programme analysed the appeal of Mrs Dale, and also looked at the real-life drama that ensued when the original Mrs Dale, Ellis Powell, was brutally replaced by the more glamorous Jessie Matthews; a drama that took place when Davies left the programme. Ellis Powell was to die three months after her departure from the Dales.

In 2005, Cattouse was interviewed for Stephen Bourne's book Black in the British Frame: The Black Experience in Film and Television and talked about radio. 'There was John Gibson, a producer from Northern Ireland ... who did a lot of Caribbean plays ...then there was Betty Davies, who came in the wake of John Gibson. We understood some people in the BBC renamed her 'Black Betty' because she was always producing plays with black actors in the cast. If it wasn't for people like them we wouldn't have worked.'

Allen Andrews , writing in the Daily Herald, considered the programme and its audience at the time of that 2,000th edition, also talking to Davies for his article, The dream world of Mrs Dale. As the BBC Sound Archive retains only five of the more than five thousand editions, he also usefully captured the mood of the serial:

She also produced Jarvis in an unabridged reading of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield as an audiobook, a story she would later dramatise for the BBC The Personal History of David Copperfield as a Classic Serial which ran from September 1991, until November 1991 on Radio 4. Her dramatisation of An Imaginary Experience by Mary Wesley for Radio 4 in 1995 was among the last of her writing tasks.

Between 1965's Lost Property and Zeppi's Machine on 26 February 1977 – two days after her official retirement from the BBC staff on 24 February – Davies produced no fewer than 15 plays by the Trinidadian novelist and playwright Samuel Selvon. Selvon, who also published as Sam Selvon, had confirmed his reputation with the 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners. He was among the first writers to present the emigrant experience of the "Windrush generation" of West Indians who found themselves looking for employment in the cold streets of London.

Davies was not the only producer to work with Selvon at BBC radio, and Selvon was not the only Caribbean writer whose plays she produced. She worked with the Trinidadian author Mustapha Matura and Michael Abbensetts, a Guyana-born playwright. Davies would return to BBC radio to produce Abbensetts' The Sunny Side of the Street for 29 July 1977, after her retirement. (She continued to produce and direct plays for the BBC into the 1980s.)

Retirement at the age of 60, as the rules stood at the BBC in 1977, was somewhat notional for Davies. She continued to work as a writer and producer, providing scripts and productions for the BBC. She also produced for Capital Radio (Capital London) in the days when commercial radio was obliged to provide public service broadcasting. Awarded the "London General Entertainment" station, Capital maintained drama and dramatic readings. Martin Jarvis was among the voices she produced for Capital, while she also served as a judge on Capital's playwriting competition.

Women were to figure strongly in many of Davies's productions, as writers and leading actors. Her 1974 production of Lady Antonia Fraser's The Heroine, for instance, had the actress Maxine Audley in the lead, with a roster of leading women actors, including Patricia Quinn, Rosalind Shanks, Jane Wenham and Carole Boyd.

In her transition from Mrs Dale to the radio drama mainstream, Davies continued to produce Mrs Dale while establishing herself as a producer of the popular Midweek Theatre plays for BBC Radio 2. Already known as a particularly stylish character while working on Mrs Dale – the hats that became her trademark set her apart from other producers and reflected her theatrical flair – she built up a reputation for her work with actors in an impressively wide range of work. Betty the Hat, as she was affectionately known throughout broadcasting for her invariably stylish headwear, was the director of choice for many writers. In The Independent obituary of the prolific and pioneering television dramatist Sheila Hodgson, Jack Adrian wrote of her radio work with Davies: '... in the main Hodgson aimed to quicken the pulse in as diverting a manner as possible, as in The Long Drive Home (1967; directed by the legendary Betty Davies), which featured a clever murder plot set in the world of golf-bores with a cast (Timothy West, William Fox, Peter Howell, the inimitable Rolf Lefebvre) you could only have afforded on the radio. '

By the 1960s, new voices were being heard in England, including newly arrived voices from the Caribbean, and Davies was consistent in her support of the diverse new talents emerging. So active was Davies in promoting Caribbean writers and actors that to some she became known as 'Black Betty'.

Kearey's tenure was brief. By the time of Mrs Dale's 2,000th edition in November 1955, Davies was the main producer. Her extensive experience in research for the BBC and credits as a writer stood her in good stead on the programme, where she continued until 1962. Mrs Dale was then due her next makeover, which was to see the series become The Dales, while Davies would be taking up her influential role in the mainstream of radio drama.

By the time Davies became assistant producer on Mrs Dale's Diary, in June 1953, the BBC's first long-running serial drama had been airing for over five years, since January 1948. Each weekday a new episode was broadcast, introduced by the title character, Mrs Dale, with a new diary entry on the latest domestic crisis. Initially a feminine perspective on Britain's middle-class suburban family in a nation recovering from war and austerity, it was required listening for many. According to The Daily Telegraph, The Queen Mother said about the programme: 'It is the only way of knowing what goes on in a middle-class family'.

Mrs Dale's Diary had been due for a makeover when Davies joined the programme in 1953, and Davies was part of that refreshment. In a later, feminist, deconstruction of the programme in 2013, Kristen Skoog argued that the BBC's male culture took over the series. In her essay, "They're 'Doped' by that Dale Diary: Women's Serial Drama, the BBC and British Post-War Change", she wrote:

His first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), became Highway in the Sun in Davies' 1967 production for BBC Radio 4, and was to be the title of a collection of his radio plays by Peepal Tree Press, in 1991. Characters from his stories and novels came to life in his many radio drama and comedies.

Davies also wrote for Children's Hour, with plays such as The Conjuror's Rabbit, broadcast twice in 1946, and again in 1949 – a recording is preserved in the British Library Sound Archive – and The Silver Flame, with music by Alan Paul, broadcast in 1951.

She had already established herself as a contributing writer to BBC programmes from 1943, in diverse offerings that demonstrated a light touch and included collaborations with musicians. With the band leader Miff Ferrie, later better known as the long-time producer and agent for the British comedian Tommy Cooper, she wrote the musical entertainment Blow Your Own Trumpet! which was first broadcast on the Home Service in 1944 and later shown on BBC Television in 1947.

Her early contributions to radio sometimes seemed to develop a theme: For the magazine programme Divertissement transmitted on For the Forces in 1943, she wrote The Telephone, a 'story with a surprise by Betty Davies'. In 1959, when she was preoccupied as 'main producer' of Mrs Dale's Diary, she wrote and produced The Telephone Call for the Home Service. Her 1945 play Best Seller, originally produced for the Home Service by the actor and director Hugh Stewart, was remade for the Home Service in 1961 by David Geary.

Davies prepared to fulfill her ambition of a BBC career by learning shorthand and typing, and by reading for an honours degree in English with subsidiary Latin at University College London. She joined the BBC in June 1939, as a secretary, and moved through the Corporation ranks, serving as secretary to the Presentation Manager for Outside Broadcasts and Presentations before becoming Research Assistant in the Analysis Section of the Listener Research Department by November 1946.

Elizabeth Gwladys Davies (24 February 1917 – 27 January 2018) was a British radio drama producer and director, and a prolific dramatist who contributed scripts to radio, primarily at the BBC, for over fifty years. Her work appeared on the BBC Home Service and radio For the Forces during the Second World War and continued to appear on BBC Radio 4 well into the 1990s. As a director of drama she produced the long-running radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary and worked closely with writers ranging from the Trinidadian author Samuel Selvon to the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, while directing hundreds of plays and serials for the radio. She died at the age of 100.

Betty Davies was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, on 24 February 1917, towards the end of the First World War, to Esther née Warrington, who was Welsh, and Percy Davies, an English civil servant. Davies was an only child, although her mother was one of six daughters and a single son which provided Davies with a large family network of cousins which sustained her until her death. Davies and her parents moved to London after the war.

Her collaborations with Elizabeth Morgan often reflected shared social concerns, as with her production of Morgan's According to the Regulations, about the 1911 rail strike when Llanelly, Wales, saw the arrival of the Worcestershire Regiment who shot dead two men, an event which the play commemorated. Another of Morgan's plays, It's Warm, and There's Company, was motivated by the situation in the 1970s which maintained that women who needed an operation that would render them sterile needed the consent of their husband or male partners, regardless of possible life-threatening complications. Morgan's play about women who found themselves in hospital featured a young actress, just down from Cambridge, Miriam Margolyes, who would become one of the most successful voice artists in the English-speaking world, playing a much older lady against established actresses such as Gudrun Ure, Morgan and Katherine Parr. Women listeners, in similar situations, deluged the BBC with letters and phone calls. Davies arranged several interviews on the corporations Woman's Hour programme. The law would change a few years later.