Hallam Tennyson

Who was Hallam Tennyson?

Beryl Hallam Augustine Tennyson was a British radio producer.

He was the son of Sir Charles Tennyson and his wife Lady Ivy, and the great-grandson of the Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He was educated at Eton College and Oxford University.

He married Margot Wallach in the autumn of 1945 in Kensington, London: they married in 1946. She was born 30 March 1921 in Moenchengladbach, Germany, and died 19 April 1999 in Highgate, London.

He was homosexual, a fact known to his wife at the time they married. He was convinced by a therapist that his homosexuality would be cured if he married a woman. He and his wife Margot nevertheless had satisfactory sexual relations, and they had a son, Jonathan Tennyson, and a daughter. He was stabbed to death in his bed in 2005.

Hallam joined the BBC World Service in 1956, working as a radio producer and becoming assistant head of drama. His own radio play The Spring of the Beast, an account of the friendship between Henry James and author Constance Fenimore Woolson, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as the Monday Play on 26 May and repeated as Afternoon Theatre on 31 May 1986. James is depicted as unable to overcome his inhibitions against loving either a woman or another man.