Jean Metcalfe

Jean Metcalfe (2 March 1923, Reigate, Surrey – 28 January 2000, Petersfield, Hampshire) was an English radio broadcaster.

Jean was the eldest child of Guy Vivian Metcalfe, a railway clerk with the Southern Railway at Waterloo station, and Gwendoline Annie, née Reed. Her family were a typical lower-middle-class family of the time. Their house had no bathroom and they used her father's Southern Railway privilege tickets to get them to their most ambitious holiday destination, Cornwall.

She excelled at elocution and art at the local county school, and formed a passionate love of the radio at home. She joined the Children's Hour radio circle, and entered competitions which entitled the winners to visit Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC. She excelled at school dramatics, and once played Queen Victoria.

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 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 for the Empire Service programme Books and People.

She was auditioned as an announcer for the new BBC General Forces Programme, a joint BBC–War Office 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.

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