Beth Anderson, Children's Writer

It’s a nonfiction writer’s worst nightmare! All your research, meticulous questioning, and writing suddenly hit with a sledgehammer of doubt…YIKES! It’s stressful just to think about it! But fortunately author Patricia Newman and her editor found their way through, and even added another layer of “interesting” to a gorgeous book!

Fake News?

by Patricia Newman

 

Imagine this scenario. You write a nonfiction book about a famous young cellist who, while practicing in her garden in 1924, hears a nightingale sing along. Our young cellist, Beatrice Harrison, convinces the fledgling BBC to come to her garden and broadcast the duet to their listeners.

Millions of listeners tune in to hear birdsong broadcast over the airwaves for the first time. Beatrice receives thousands of letters from people all over the world. Listeners’ backyard nightingales sing when they hear the broadcast. People without radios listen to friends’ radios via telephone. People who live in places without nightingales hear one sing for the first time. The broadcast is a triumph!

In July of 2022, a wonderful editor sees magic in Beatrice’s story, but before you sign your contract, the “BBC reveals that famous nightingale and cello duet was faked” (Discover Wildlife, 12 April 2022)

This exact sequence of events happened to me before I signed my contract for Beatrice and the Nightingale (Margaret Quinlin Books/Peachtree Press, 2026). I still remember the panic I felt then.

After writing a score of nonfiction books, I’d become an excellent researcher digging into primary sources, articles, studies, videos, and more. For Beatrice and the Nightingale, I read an annotated copy of Beatrice Harrison’s diary. I listened to recordings of her cello concerts. I read articles about how the BBC engineers visited Beatrice’s garden to place “a microphone in a thicket of oak leaves and connected it to amplifiers stacked in the summerhouse” (p. 30, Beatrice and the Nightingale). I had dates, details, and Beatrice’s own writings. Beatrice herself secured the permission of Sir John Reith, director of the BBC. When King George V of England met Beatrice, he said, “Nightingale, nightingale, you have done what I have not yet been able to do. You have encircled the Empire with the song of the nightingale with your cello” (p. 38, Beatrice and the Nightingale).

How could the duet be fake?

Luckily my editor said, “I would like to get to the bottom of what we know. I don’t think it kills the book. In fact, it makes it more interesting” (July 2022 email). So, I went to work!

In April 2022, a bird expert appeared on a podcast called Private Passions. He claimed the nightingale in Beatrice’s garden never sang at all and a bird mimic hired by the BBC had filled in. As I listened to the podcast, he played a supposed 1924 recording of Beatrice playing cello while a nightingale sang. But how was that possible? The 1924 broadcast was never recorded.

Then I turned to Patricia Cleveland-Peck, the editor who annotated Beatrice’s diary. Boy, did she have a few words to say! Would BBC boss Sir John Reith have “countenanced such a deception?” Would Beatrice with her musician’s ear have been so entirely duped? Would she have allowed such a scandal to tarnish her integrity? Did no one see the bird mimic? The garden wasn’t that large.

Throughout the editing process, we opted to keep my original manuscript intact, as I researched it from Beatrice’s diary, with only the usual editorial revisions for clarity, and addressed the alleged hoax in the back matter. As we worked with illustrator Isabelle Follath, a May 2024 BBC article proclaimed, “There is no way it was fake” (“New evidence uncovered on cello and nightingale,” 19 May 2024).

Phew! We sent the final files to the printer at the end of July 2025.

Nonfiction authors are often confronted with conflicting facts, and we do our best to make sense of them. The back matter of Beatrice and the Nightingale goes into the so-called fake in more detail. As I say in my author’s note at the end of the book, “I love this meeting of music, nature, and science.” I hope you pick up a copy of Beatrice and the Nightingale and judge for yourself.

 😃 When you enjoy a book, please support authors and illustrators by leaving online reviews.