Borders Talking Newspapers

Written by Matilda Mitchell, Founder and Convenor of BTN from 1992 until 2009.

It was 1992 – my husband Douglas Hall, who had retired some years before,  and I were living more of each week in our small Borders cottage at Spottiswoode. I needed some local work.  In 1991 I had set up Paintings in Hospitals Scotland based in Edinburgh (still flourishing as Art in Healthcare) and now a borders activity seemed an excellent idea.  My blind friend Jack Riviere who lived in Hampshire, with whom I exchanged cassette tapes, continually told me how wonderful it was to go on getting the local news.  By this time most of the UK was covered by Talking Newspapers but I suspected the Borders wasn’t.  I was right.  An earlier attempt working with the local libraries had faltered.  I checked in with Lothian Sound  in Edinburgh to see how they did it – seemed very simple to me.

I enlisted the help of the postman, Jim Nairn , my neighbour over the hill, Eileen Ovens, and the travelling librarian, Dougie Smith.  But we needed a sound engineer. By chance at the Reid School of Music in Edinburgh I saw somebody recording a new piece of music commissioned  for two young local Greenlaw musicians from the well known composer Edward Maguire.   He said yes he was willing to give it a go as he had recorded quite often in Cheshire, before moving to Greenlaw.  So we were all set.  But I also needed a good local voice. Visiting Halliwell’s House in Selkirk, the voice over the tape telling us about the town sounded just perfect – but who was he?  Eventually I discovered he was ‘the butcher’s son’ and I tracked down Jim Newlands who subsequently became Provost of Selkirk.  I put in a small advertisement looking for other readers and Rufus (who was Colin Townsend Rose) seemed enthusiastic.   He preferred to remain anonymous – over the years he made wonderful magazine tapes for the talking newspaper and was a great inspiration to us all.  He also became a recording technician as well as a reader.  His last words “Goodbye, goodbye” came over the tape that we used in our video.  They were Colin’s last words to the listeners before he died.

Back to 1992, three weeks later, with fifteen listeners on our books, found through the Scottish Talking Newspaper Association, we were all climbing slowly into John Coy’s loft and recording our first tape.    I could see Jim Newlands truly didn’t believe the Borders Talking Newspaper would last which made me even more determined to see it did.  John Coy’s professionalism helped us greatly as the quality of the tape was good from the start.  We went out fortnightly – and our numbers increased each time. We sent our tape  to Edinburgh to be recorded and circulated by the kind fanatic ,Brian West, who ran the association.  After some months, he drew my attention to a Bradford TN which had recording equipment to sell.  We set off early for Bradford, Douglas and I,  and were met by an enormous man with minimal vision who had been their local inspiration; we bought our stuff and drove all the way home – in a day!   We went weekly.  We moved from John’s attic to the Greenlaw hotel where we recorded in what had been a billiard room.  After the kind owner (who gave us the space for free) was declared bankrupt we were moved to the damp basement where we shared our room with rather doubtful sporting and exercise equipment.  Soon, under new management, we were to be thrown out. Peggy Spouse, of dancing fame, one of our most loved (I mean loved by the listeners) readers told us about Duns Working Men’s Club in the very nick of time – and we have been there ever since.

I wanted a good ‘jingle’ – and I knew there were copyright traps for using music.  Some talking newspapers merely waved the recording machine in the direction of the radio, or vice versa, and ignored any problems. But I thought we could do better: as I had paid for the Coker/Manson trio’s music by Edward Maguire, here there were no copyright problems.  So we used stretches of this. It was certainly different, but we kept at it.  We knew that when a listener started a tape, if the music was always the same, they would know immediately which tape they were starting. 

We learned the rules of the trade – no personal extras thrown in by readers, no bonus jokes or criticisms, our job was to read absolutely straight (I had to sack my husband – he was not pleased).  We learned how to cut down the articles so there was the least repetition – that way we could get more in.  We sussed that being such a rural community listeners liked to know who had died and who had newly arrived, so we kept in the BMD’s.  One of our Borders readers, a lovely old fashioned Borderer always read “to Mr and Mistress Smith, a daughter”.    And we grew and grew.  At best we were sending out almost 300 tapes each week. I did all the fund-raising for the first ten years.  We had occasional help from others on the committee. But this was rare.  Once, I believed thank you letters were being sent out by our ‘fund-raiser’ but she never bothered and it was only when the Church of Scotland wrote a very indignant letter asking if we had actually received what was quite a large sum at the time that I found out.  We nearly lost their support.  On another occasion, it must have been about 10 years ago now, we were down to almost nothing and I nearly wept in the committee meeting. Nobody else was moved.  Rufus remarked it was only a glitch!  And so it proved.

We discovered early, Ishbel and John Coy especially, that it was a great deal of hard work doing this every week!  We had to find more volunteers and we needed somebody to prepare and man the rota.  Two good kind volunteers took this on, but that too became onerous.  Eventually we lit on the best possible solution: we hired one of our volunteers as a paid part-time organiser. Peace returned to the ruffled workers and the newspaper was reliably set on course.

In fact, thanks to Wendy Moss, our organiser, and more recently Tom Ingoldsby, our technical wizard, we have never missed a single tape.  Once when Saturday’s duplicators found the tape had scrubbed itself, Sam and Peggy Baxter sat down and recorded the whole works themselves.  Many many brave volunteers have seen us through scrapes. My own worse scrape was to discuss Christmas parties with the recording technician under the impression it was turned off.  We got only one cross letter saying we should keep our social life to ourselves!

Technically the BTN is among the foremost in the country.  At one glorious moment, we published and distributed to all volunteers, a Best Practice manual!

It was brilliant but boring.  And very quickly out of date.  As I write this, I am truly impressed at the skills our volunteers have acquired, using complicated ultr-modern equipment, and truly grateful to the 140 or so different people who have worked with us to keep our beloved listeners properly informed.

Supplement written by Tom Ingoldsby 

I joined BTN in 2006 and saw a need to update the technical side of a very good operation. The recording equipment was getting well past its best and listeners were finding it increasingly difficult to buy tape players.

I undertook to research a change to digital recording and then to implement the change. In the end, it took almost five years to get to the position BTN is currently in, with digital recording and output using data sticks and this website.

What will the next 20 years bring? I wonder!