Jean Metcalfe was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 radio broadcaster

Presenter

A presenter, or host , is a person or organization responsible for running an event. A museum or university, for example, may be the presenter or host of an exhibit. Likewise, a master of ceremonies is a person that hosts or presents a show...

.

Early life

She was the eldest child of Guy Vivian Metcalfe, a railway clerk with the Southern Railway at Waterloo station

Waterloo station

Waterloo station, also known as London Waterloo, is a central London railway terminus and London Underground complex. The station is owned and operated by Network Rail and is close to the South Bank of the River Thames, and in Travelcard Zone 1....

, and Gwendoline Annie, née Reed. Her family were a typical lower middle-class of the time, without a bathroom, and used her father's Southern Railway privilege tickets to get them to their most ambitious holiday destination, Cornwall

Cornwall

Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

.

She excelled at elocution

Elocution

Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone.-History:In Western classical rhetoric, elocution was one of the five core disciplines of pronunciation, which was the art of delivering speeches. Orators were trained not only on proper diction, but on the proper...

 and art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 at the local county school, and formed a passionate love of the radio at home. She joined the Children's Hour

Children's Hour

Children's Hour—at first: "The Children's Hour", from a verse by Longfellow—was the name of the BBC's principal recreational service for children during the period when radio dominated broadcasting....

radio circle, and entered competitions which entitled the winners to visit Broadcasting House

Broadcasting House

Broadcasting House is the headquarters and registered office of the BBC in Portland Place and Langham Place, London.The building includes the BBC Radio Theatre from where music and speech programmes are recorded in front of a studio audience...

, headquarters of the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

. She excelled at school dramatics, and once played Queen Victoria

Victoria of the United Kingdom

Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....

.

Career

Leaving school in 1939, she went to secretarial college and then applied for a job at the BBC in 1940. By bending the truth on her CV, inventing grandparents in Norfolk

Norfolk

Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...

 and describing her father's occupation as a "welfare officer", she succeeded in getting a job with the variety department, being paid £2 5s. 6d. (£2.27½) a week. Her first broadcast was on 21 May 1941, reading the poem "Spring, The Sweet Spring" by Thomas Ashe

Thomas Ashe

Thomas Patrick Ashe born in Lispole, County Kerry, Ireland, was a member of the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers...

 for the Empire Service

Empire Service

Empire Service could refer to* Empire Service — a train service in New York State* BBC Empire Service — a radio service, the forerunner to the BBC World Service. - a cargo ship....

 programme Books And People.

Forces Favourites

She was auditioned as an announcer

Announcer

An announcer is a presenter who makes "announcements" in an audio medium or a physical location.-Television and other media:Some announcers work in television production , radio or filmmaking, usually providing narrations, news updates, station identification, or an introduction of a product in...

 for the new BBC General Forces Programme

BBC General Forces Programme

The BBC General Forces Programme was a BBC radio station from 27 February 1944 until 31 December 1946.-Foundation:Upon the outbreak of World War II, the BBC closed the existing BBC National Programme and BBC Regional Programme, combining the two to form a single channel known as the BBC Home...

, a joint BBC–War Office

War Office

The War Office was a department of the British Government, responsible for the administration of the British Army between the 17th century and 1964, when its functions were transferred to the Ministry of Defence...

 venture which was the BBC's first worldwide service and the first to use female announcers. She joined the BBC Africa Service, and began her long period with the programme that made her a household name: Forces Favourites. This was a request programme in which members of the armed forces abroad, and their families at home, could ask the "compère" to play a favourite piece of music. She began the job after five hours of study with the programme's editor Margaret Hubble

Margaret Hubble

Margaret Elinor Hubble was a British radio broadcaster. She was best known as a presenter of Woman's Hour in the 1950s....

.

Personal life

Whilst doing the programme from London she met her male colleague at the Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

 end of the operation, Squadron Leader

Squadron Leader

Squadron Leader is a commissioned rank in the Royal Air Force and the air forces of many countries which have historical British influence. It is also sometimes used as the English translation of an equivalent rank in countries which have a non-English air force-specific rank structure. In these...

 Arthur Clifford (Cliff) Michelmore

Cliff Michelmore

Arthur Clifford "Cliff" Michelmore CBE is a British television presenter and producer. He is best known for the BBC television programme Tonight, which he presented from 1957 to 1965....

. They married on 4 March 1950. By this time, the programme had changed its name to the peacetime Two-Way Family Favourites. They had two children: actress Jenny Michelmore and the broadcaster and composer Guy Michelmore

Guy Michelmore

-Education:Michelmore was educated at the independent St John's School in Leatherhead, Surrey.-News presenter:Michelmore began reporting on Anglia TV's About Anglia before joining the BBC programme Newsroom South East in 1993. Guy left the programme to be replaced by Tim Ewart from ITN. His mother...

.

Woman's Hour

From August 1950, Metcalfe presented Woman's Hour

Woman's Hour

Woman's Hour is a radio magazine programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the United Kingdom.-History:Created by Norman Collins and originally presented by Alan Ivimey the programme was first broadcast on 7 October 1946 on the BBC's Light Programme . It was transferred to its current home in 1973...

on the BBC Light Programme

BBC Light Programme

The Light Programme was a BBC radio station which broadcast mainstream light entertainment and music from 1945 until 1967, when it was rebranded as BBC Radio 2...

. Where, at the time, the programme had a long list of forbidden topics. Self-effacing and gently spoken, she pioneered the art of interviewing stars in their own homes, including the wartime 'forces sweetheart

Forces Sweetheart

Forces Sweetheart is a title given to some entertainment women mainly in the Royal Air Force, although it was also later used in the United States.-First World War:The role had its origins in World War I...

' singer Vera Lynn

Vera Lynn

Dame Vera Lynn, DBE is an English singer-songwriter and actress whose musical recordings and performances were enormously popular during World War II. During the war she toured Egypt, India and Burma, giving outdoor concerts for the troops...

, the irascible television personality Gilbert Harding

Gilbert Harding

Gilbert Charles Harding was a British journalist and radio and television personality. His many careers included schoolmaster, journalist, policeman, disc-jockey, interviewer and television presenter...

, the song and dance man Frankie Vaughan

Frankie Vaughan

Frankie Vaughan, CBE, DL was an English singer of traditional pop music, who issued more than 80 recordings in his lifetime. He was known as "Mr. Moonlight" after one of his early hits.-Life and career:...

, and the stiff-upper-lipped film actor Kenneth More

Kenneth More

Kenneth Gilbert More CBE was a highly successful English film actor during the post-World War II era and starred in many feature films, often in the role of an archetypal carefree and happy-go-lucky middle-class gentleman.-Early life:Kenneth More was born in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, the...

. The Daily Mail

Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...

made her broadcasting personality of the year in 1955, and she won a Variety Club of Great Britain radio personality award in 1963.

Later life

She gave up broadcasting in 1964 to raise her family and did not return full-time until 1971, when she presented If You Think You've Got Problems, a programme in which a broad range of human problems were discussed, many of which would not have been allowed when she began her association with Woman's Hour. The programme continued until 1979, although the BBC objected to one of her programmes, on lesbianism, as it would be going out on a Sunday.

On TV, she made her début with Robert Beatty

Robert Beatty

Robert Beatty was a Canadian actor who worked in film, television and radio for most of his career and was especially known in the UK.-Career:Born in Hamilton, Ontario, Beatty began his acting career in Britain in 1939....

 in Saturday Night Out and did guest spots for Juke Box Jury

Juke Box Jury

Juke Box Jury was a musical panel show which originally ran on BBC Television from 1 June 1959 until December 1967. The programme was based on the American show Jukebox Jury, itself an offshoot of a long-running radio series....

and Wednesday Magazine. In 1986 she published an autobiography with her husband, Two-Way Story.