The Black Museum

Updated on Sep 30, 2024

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Similar Black Museum, National Museum of Crime, Scotland Yard, Barts Pathology Museum, Royal Cinema

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The Black Museum was a radio crime-drama program produced by Harry Towers in London. It was broadcast in Europe on Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not broadcast by the BBC until 1991.

In 1946 Harry Towers and his mother, Margaret Miller Towers, started a company called Towers of London that sold various syndicated radio shows around the world, including The Lives of Harry Lime, with Orson Welles, The Secrets of Scotland Yard, with Clive Brook, Horatio Hornblower, with Michael Redgrave, and a series of Sherlock Holmes stories featuring John Gielgud as Holmes, Ralph Richardson as Watson and Welles as Moriarty.

The Black Museum was based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard's Black Museum. The program was transcribed in 1951 and was broadcast in the United States January 1-December 31, 1952, on Mutual. More than 500 of the network's stations carried it. Ira Marion was the scriptwriter, and music for the series was composed and conducted by Sidney Torch.

Orson Welles was both host and narrator for stories of horror and mystery, based on Scotland Yard's collection of murder weapons and various ordinary objects once associated with historical true crime cases. The show's opening began:

Programme format and themes

Walking through the museum, Welles would pause at one of the exhibits, and his description of an artifact served as a device to lead into a wryly-narrated dramatised tale of a brutal murder or a vicious crime. In the closing: "Now until we meet again in the same place and I tell you another tale of the Black Museum", Welles would conclude with his signature radio phrase, "I remain, as always, obediently yours".

With the story themes deriving from objects in the collection (usually with the names of the people involved changed but the facts remaining true to history), the 52 episodes had such titles as "The Tartan Scarf" and "A Piece of Iron Chain" or "Frosted Glass Shards" and "A Khaki Handkerchief". An anomaly to the series was an episode called "The Letter" as this was the only story not about murder, but about forgery.

Broadcast history

In the United States, the series aired on the Mutual Network between January 1 and December 30, 1952. It was rebroadcast on KABC, Los Angeles, California, in 1963-1964 and on KUAC (FM) in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1967.

Beginning May 7, 1953, it was also broadcast over Radio Luxembourg sponsored by the cleaning products Dreft and Mirro. Since the BBC carried no commercials, Radio Luxembourg aired sponsored programs at night to England.

In the United States, there was a contemporary programme called Whitehall 1212 written and directed by Wyllis Cooper and broadcast by NBC, that was similar in scope to The Black Museum. It was hosted by Chief Superintendent John Davidson, curator of the Black Museum. It used many of the same picked cases as The Black Museum, and it nearly mirrored its broadcast run. The two shows were different in the respect that while Whitehall 1212 told the story of a case entirely from the point of view of the police starting from the crime scene, The Black Museum was more heavily dramatized and played out scenes of the actual murders and included scenes from the criminal's point of view.>

Episodes

The following episodes were broadcast:

Cases

The below-listed Metropolitan Police cases were used as the basis for episodes of The Black Museum:

Episodes yet to be matched with true case histories are:

The Canvas Bag

The Door Key

The Faded Tartan Scarf

The Iron Chain, Piece of

The Mandolin String

Notes - Kilroy was Here

The Open End Wrench

The Sash Cord, Length of

The Shilling

The Shopping Bag

The Silencer

Relationships and differences with source material

Two episodes, "The Car Tire" and "The Gas Receipt," were the same story with minor differences between the two. Another pair of episodes, "The Baby's Jacket" and "The Spectacles," were also based on the same case, as were "The Tan Shoe" and "The Leather Bag."

Four famous murder cases were dramatized on The Black Museum: John George Haigh, the "Acid Bath Murderer"; George Joseph Smith, the "Brides in the Bath Murderer"; Adelaide Bartlett, whose husband died from chloroform poisoning; and Florence Maybrick, who allegedly used arsenic from fly-paper to murder her husband James Maybrick (who was recently suspected of being Jack the Ripper courtesy of the 1993 publication of The Diary of Jack the Ripper).

In "The Open End Wrench" it's mistakenly stated that the culprit was executed in Dartmoor. No twentieth-century executions were carried out in Dartmoor. Built during the Napoleonic Wars to contain French and American POWs, it was, after lying idle from 1815 to 1850, later commissioned as a convict prison and used for dangerous long-term prisoners only.

The dramatized story of "The Hammerhead" was changed to make the victim's sister the murderer instead of the boy friend.

The episode "Small White Boxes" is the only story in which the real names were used rather than pseudonyms.

Listen to

The Black Museum in The Internet Archive's Old-Time Radio Collection

Zoot Radio, free 'The Black Museum' old time radio show downloads

References

The Black Museum Wikipedia

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