In August 1947, the BBC sent a joint Features and News team to report on and commemorate the independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent. The team consisted of a News reporter, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, MacNeice himself, Francis Dillon, the poet’s colleague from the Features Department, and a support group of technicians. Aged nearly forty, MacNeice had been working for the BBC for just over six years. His reputation as a poet was well-established: the following year would see the publication of his Collected Poems. He had been educated and spent most of his working life in England, but was born and passed his early childhood in the north of Ireland. His father, John Frederick MacNeice, was rector of St. Nicholas Church, Carrickfergus during the poet’s childhood, and became Bishop of Down and Connor in 1934. Unusually for a Protestant clergyman in the north, J.F. MacNeice was a supporter of Home Rule, and later, an opponent of Partition. His son shared this moderate nationalism and also his father’s love of the landscapes of the west of Ireland.