Black Museum

The Black Museum was a radio crime-drama program produced by Harry Alan Towers, which was broadcast in the USA on the Mutual network in 1952. It was then broadcast in Europe in 1953 on Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not broadcast by the BBC until 1991. Towers was based in London, but this series was recorded in Sydney, Australia.

In 1946 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.

Towers visited Australia in the late 1940s and set up production facilities in Sydney. The Black Museum was produced in Sydney by Creswick Jenkinson on behalf of Towers of London. It had a top-line Australian cast including Joe McCormick, plus American actor Harp McGuire. Orson Welles’s introductions were recorded on tape in London, then flown to Australia to be added to the locally recorded performances. This was the first series to be produced in Australia in this way.

The Stars

Orson Welles was both host and narrator of 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. Robert Rietti played the lead roles and Keith Pyott was often in the cast.

Key Dates

The Black Museum was transcribed in 1951 and was broadcast in the United States in 1952 on Mutual. More than 500 of the network’s stations carried it. Beginning on 7 May, 1953, it was also broadcast over Radio Luxembourg, sponsored by the cleaning products Dreft and Mirro.

Other Information

The show’s opening began with Orson Welles saying: “This is Orson Welles, speaking from London. (Sound of Big Ben chimes) The Black Museum - a repository of death. Here in the grim stone structure on the Thames which houses Scotland Yard is a warehouse of homicide, where everyday objects - a woman’s shoe, a tiny white box, a quilted robe - all are touched by murder.”

The program was transcribed in 1951 and was broadcast in the United States in 1952 on Mutual. More than 500 of the network’s stations carried it. 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 and used many of the same selected 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 dramatised and played out scenes of the actual murders and included scenes from the criminal’s point of view.

In 2002, Towers produced The Black Museum for television and hired director Gregory Mackenzie to be the showrunner and director for the anthology series using the original narration by Welles. The adaptation was shot on location in London in a film noir style and the pilot starred Michael York as Scotland Yard Inspector Russell.

The Black Museum was based on real-life cases from the files of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. The 51 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.

Four famous murder cases were dramatised 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.