Joan is not credited by name in the photo information so Googling her is unlikely to turn up the image. I just happened across it.
It captures her to a tee.
Bill Jenkins
[During rehearsals for “Our World”] I do remember Joan Marsden, when asked to say something to test circuits, coming out with "This is Mother calling the World".Pat Heigham
Joan was quite fierce but ran the studio with impeccable discipline.A story from Panorama – true, as I was there…
Richard Dimbleby was the ultimate professional, but he had a lovely sense of humour. Fellow technicians will remember Joan Marsden (Floor Manager) known as "Mother" to cast and crew alike, who ran the studio with a rod of iron. One night, to illustrate the number of summonses sent out by one London borough, there was a huge pile of brown envelopes in front of R’s desk. On rehearsal, he leant forward, picked upon the top one, wrote on it, replaced it, and beckoned the camera to focus on it. It read: "To Mother – for Soliciting".
Geoff Hawkes
Yes, she always had a firm grip on the studio and was given to stamping her foot if any of her commands were ignored. You couldn’t fault her for professionalism and getting the studio organised with everything and everyone in place, which was why she was the FM of choice for the kind of shows she did. Didn’t she receive some sort of official recognition for her services to political programmes, an MBE or something like that? Well deserved, whatever.A story that’s always stuck in my mind was of an incident when I was doing a VO attachment. We were about to record a show one afternoon when there was trouble with the Ampex clock refusing to run, not an unusual occurrence. Everyone was getting more and more impatient with this including Dickie Higham and Jack Meyer who were sitting to my left. They were of the opinion that the problem was that the clock simply needed winding and that Joan didn’t know how to do it.
After muttering to themselves, and being confident in her errors, Jack pressed the talkback key and said in a slow, deliberate voice, “Hit the top, Joan”, with Dickie agreeing that was all she need to do and why wasn’t she doing it. What they hadn’t realised but I could see was that it was one of the newer clocks that was wound with a key on the back, not the top and that she and others had already done it.
A classic case of people thinking they know better than the expert. With me being a junior operator I didn’t dare point out to these esteemed gentlemen that it was they who had it wrong, as I deemed they wouldn’t have taken kindly to being corrected by someone like me, so I kept my counsel but have sometimes wished I’d had the courage to speak what I knew to be right.
Has anyone else been in such a position?
David Beer
Robert Robinson used to refer to Joan as The Duchess of Hammersmith as she had a flat the other side of Shepherd’s Bush Green.Bill Jenkins
This was Joan’s obit in the Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/mar/12/broadcasting.guardianobituariesDave Plowman
And what was the name of that block of flats? Had a radio shop on the ground floor where you could get valves tested.Was it “The Grampians”?
Bill Jenkins
Granville Mansions?Dave Mundy
Definitely, “The Grampians”. I bought my TMK500 meter in the radio spares shop in the front of the block, plus many Service sheets for TV and Radios.Alan Taylor
That was the building that also housed Babano books.Together with Haynes of Sparkford and their car repair handbooks, they were the publishers who kept many of us going in our youth … disregarding “Penthouse” of course.
John Sullivan (“Only Fools and Horses”) once told me that inside the cover, the Haynes manuals always stated something like Paris, New York, London and Sparkford. He lifted the gag and turned it into New York, Paris, Peckham …. but mostly Peckham.
Dave Plowman
Ah – is that were it came from?I have a T shirt with ‘The Bill’ on tour. Peckham, Mitcham, Camberwell, etc. Made by one of the rigger/driver/grips, Johnny Ridge. Happy days.
Nick Ware
It’s definitely “The Grampians” – you can street-view it on Google Earth. The last time I saw Mother was about twenty years ago, when we took our girls to see the pantomime at the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith. She was working as a volunteer usherette, showing people to their seats. As soon as she saw me she set about finding us better seats, which she did, bless her.Geoff Fletcher
Pete Ware was a fighter pilot in WW2 and always had a special rapport with Joan. He once told me that they had worked out that she was one of the plotters in her WAAF days who vectored his squadron (72) onto the enemy formations.I witnessed a very funny episode of her putting an idiot uppity director in her place on “Panorama” once in an incident involving Robin Day, but that’s another story.
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Joan Marsden
Stage and television studio manager
Born 20th May 1919; died 3rd March 2004
