Alwyn Turner on the political radicalism of L. du Garde Peach

I'm enjoying Alwyn Turner's new book A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars, and not just because my name turns up in the acknowledgements at the back. As Andrew Marr says in his New Statesman review, 

Turner builds his account on newspapers and popular magazines. This produces a bottom-up, sharp and often surprising read. 

And Turner's research is commendably thorough. Here he is on L. du Garde Peach, sharing far more than I knew about the author of most of Ladybird Books' Adventures from History series:

If the stage and screen were tightly censored The same was not quite true of the BBC, which had a greater tolerance for political work, so long as it was progressive without being revolutionary. The dramatist L. du Garde Peach, described by the papers as "broadcasting's most versatile playwright" was a committed writer – a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate, and a supporter of the League of Nations and the Peace Pledge Union – and some of his BBC work dealt with difficult subjects: the economic exploitation of Africa in Ingredient X (1929), rural poverty in Bread (1932), the Elizabethan roots of the slave trade in John Hawkins, Slaver (1933), local politics in Our Town (1935).

In Patriotism Ltd (1937), a satirical one-act drama, Peach depicted an arms company deliberately provoking conflict between the invented nations of Andania and Segoviaa And selling weapons to both. It was a story, he said, of "two countries brought to the brink of war by a mixture of buffoonery, self-interest and opportunism which you will find nowhere else in the world except in most of the Chancelleries of Europe. Advance notices said it had a "simple directness that is continually amusing", and talked of the way it exposed "bland cynicism on the part of the firm and its customers".

Three days before its scheduled broadcast, however, the government leaned on the BBC, and the piece was withdrawn, on the grounds that "it might be mistaken for a comment on current national affairs". Which, of course, it was. "No direct veto has been exercised by the Postmaster General," it was reported, but the BBC was given to understand that such a broadcast would be looked upon in an unfavourable light." Peach, who was not personally told about the ban, was furious: "I regard the action as just another instance of BBC timidity."

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Otto.