Davies prepared to fulfill her ambition of a BBC career by learning shorthand and typing, and by reading for an honours degree in English with subsidiary Latin at University College London.
She had already established herself as a contributing writer to BBC programmes from 1943, in diverse offerings that demonstrated a light touch and included collaborations with musicians.
With the band leader Miff Ferrie, later better known as the long-time producer and agent for the British comedian Tommy Cooper, she wrote the musical entertainment Blow Your Own Trumpet!
[2] Her early contributions to radio sometimes seemed to develop a theme: For the magazine programme Divertissement transmitted on For the Forces in 1943, she wrote The Telephone, a 'story with a surprise by Betty Davies'.
Just the Job for Jones, with book and lyrics by Davies and music by her established radio collaborator Alan Paul, was a big enough event to attract senior BBC management and the theatrical press.
Presented at the Fortune Theatre, with members of the corporation's theatrical society, Ariel, making up the company, it was nonetheless a full-scale spectacle, produced by two of the outstanding talents in BBC drama and comedy.
The Third was not spared further attention – when a man turns up for a Third Programme interview he is, indicatively, bearded and in sandals; a spiv selling mouth organs seeks out the distinguished chief conductor of The Proms Sir Malcolm Sargent.
He added: Bachelor girl Betty wrote book and lyrics unaided in her Maida Vale flatlet.
How will Lord Simon, chairman of the Corporation, his fellow governors, Director General Sir William Haley, and other radio barons react?
A complaint about television's new intrusion into the home was sung: We feel bewitched and bewildered By acrobats thrown in your face.
By the time Davies became assistant producer on Mrs Dale's Diary, in June 1953, the BBC's first long-running serial drama had been airing for over five years, since January 1948.
Each weekday a new episode was broadcast, introduced by the title character, Mrs Dale, with a new diary entry on the latest domestic crisis.
Initially a feminine perspective on Britain's middle-class suburban family in a nation recovering from war and austerity, it was required listening for many.
In her essay, "They're 'Doped' by that Dale Diary: Women's Serial Drama, the BBC and British Post-War Change",[11] she wrote: Being a domestic serial Mrs Dale's Diary was from its very inception categorized (and devalued) as popular feminized mass culture, mainly written by women for a female audience and therefore it was not admired among BBC producers.
Already in April, he had [suggested] that a complete break with the current editorial policy was needed and that national events could be mentioned.
Her extensive experience in research for the BBC and credits as a writer stood her in good stead on the programme, where she continued until 1962.
Allen Andrews, writing in the Daily Herald, considered the programme and its audience at the time of that 2,000th edition, also talking to Davies for his article, The dream world of Mrs Dale.
to celebrate the double occasion, the 'bride,' standing by a cardboard cake, wickedly observes that this is radio's first shotgun wedding.
Like the Queen representing all that is good in government, Andrews muses, people accept the myth of Mrs Dale because 'it serves our purposes'.
In 2012, the actor Penelope Keith, a Mrs Dale fan herself and a serial star of television comedies, presented a programme for BBC Radio 4 called I'm Rather Worried about Jim,[13] taking its title from what had become Mrs Dale's catch-phrase that regularly repeated in her opening diary entry.
In The Independent obituary of the prolific and pioneering television dramatist Sheila Hodgson,[14] Jack Adrian wrote of her radio work with Davies: '... in the main Hodgson aimed to quicken the pulse in as diverting a manner as possible, as in The Long Drive Home (1967; directed by the legendary Betty Davies), which featured a clever murder plot set in the world of golf-bores with a cast (Timothy West, William Fox, Peter Howell, the inimitable Rolf Lefebvre) you could only have afforded on the radio. '
Martin Jarvis, the actor, director and renowned voice artist, worked with Davies in her last decade at Broadcasting House and stated that what he learned from her is still gratefully applied in his own audio productions.
Writing of her at the time of the celebration of Davies's life at the BBC Club, he provided vivid images of the famous headwear: 'In the years that I worked with her I never saw her bare-headed.
And then in her swooping, humorous, cultured vocal tones (reminiscent of the great Edith Evans but slightly more Welsh) she blurted, almost incongruously: 'Stick a pencil in your mouth, Martin dear, that'll tell the listeners!!'
So indelible was Davies's studio presence that in 2019 her hats were part of a story on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs: Dame Esther Rantzen,[16] well known as a television presenter and notorious for an eight-year clandestine relationship with her married BBC boss Desmond Wilcox, rehearsed a story she had often used to explain her departure from radio drama: 'But I got into making sound effect, so then a lady producer who always wore a hat, even in the studio, did a drama – I was in drama – where there was a distant skating accident, and I had to make the sound of a skating accident.
He was among the first writers to present the emigrant experience of the "Windrush generation" of West Indians who found themselves looking for employment in the cold streets of London.
Davies would return to BBC radio to produce Abbensetts' The Sunny Side of the Street for 29 July 1977, after her retirement.
The Caribbean writers provided good roles for actors and among the leading performers she worked with were Frank Singuineau, Mona Hammond, Rudolph Walker, Stefan Kalipha, Norman Beaton, Don Warrington, Tommy Eytle, Ram John Holder and the singer and actor Nadia Cattouse.
At the time of her death in 2018, David Roberts, the son of her first cousin, David Ceredig Roberts, wrote to Nigel Deacon's radio drama pages of his Diversity website[23] to recount some of her travels: 'while she was renowned for her globetrotting, from Antarctica to the Karakoram', he wrote, 'nothing beats the time I bumped into her by accident in the countryside near Cienfuegos in Cuba.
Zeppi - the great Zeppl - was a powerful obeah man in Trinidad, and the villagers of Tacarigua brought him all their problems.