The Radio Front E-Book

Ron Bateman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 434

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Within seventeen years of the first public broadcast in Britain, the nation again found itself at war. As the Second World War progressed, the BBC eventually realised the potential benefits of public radio and the service became vital in keeping an anxious public informed, upbeat and entertained behind the curtains of millions of blacked-out homes. The Radio Front examines just how the BBC reinvented itself and delivered its carefully controlled propaganda to listeners in the UK and throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. It also reveals the BBC's often-strained relationships with the government, military and public as the organisation sought to influence opinion and safeguard public morale without damaging its growing reputation for objectivity and veracity. Using original source material, historian and author Ron Bateman tracks the BBC's growth during the Second World War from its unorganised and humble beginnings to the development of a huge overseas and European operation, and also evaluates the importance of iconic broadcasts from the likes of J.B. Priestley, Vera Lynn and Tommy Handley.

Leseprobe

In memory of my parents Ron and Joyce, who experienced the terror of aerial bombardment

First published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Ron Bateman, 2022

The right of Ron Bateman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9080 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Richard Blair

Introduction – Memories of the Radio Front by Dione Venables

1. When Radio Came of Age

2. Radio Prepares for War

3. Not the War We Expected

4. Striking the Right Chord – Wartime News

5. Courting America with ‘the Murrow Boys’

6. Make the People Smile Again

7. Crossing the Propaganda Line

8. Talking to Europe

9. The Voice of Hope

10. Divided Nation – Reaching out to France

11. Broadcasting to the Enemy

12. Hearts and Minds – The Eastern Service

Epilogue – The Invasion of Europe

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At the time of writing, Britain was in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic that resulted in strict limitations being put in place regarding access to essential archived material. I am most grateful to those institutions that were able to facilitate limited access to vital documents under very difficult circumstances. I would particularly like to thank the staff of the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, The National Archives in Kew, The Netherlands Photo Museum and the Priestley Archive in Bradford for their friendly co-operation.

Special thanks also to the Orwell estate, the J.B. Priestley estate and the BBC Written Archive Centre for granting me permission to reproduce original material. Thanks also to Dr Rosa Matheson for reading through the original manuscript and offering useful suggestions, and to Karen Mortimer for assistance in ‘cleaning up’ certain images.

I would also like to give a special thank you to the contributors who wrote the Foreword and the Introduction to this book. Now into her nineties, Dione Venables still has vivid memories of living in wartime London in a household dominated by ‘wireless’, and still hopes to discover more about her father’s wartime activities in connection with radio. Richard Blair’s father, George Orwell, was also involved with wartime radio as an architect of propaganda for the BBC’s Eastern Service. He too provides us with many valuable observations in the pages of his wartime diaries.

It was Orwell who once described the process of writing a book as being ‘a horrible exhausting struggle’. I was under no illusions that the task of disentangling the complexities and controversies of the BBC’s wartime radio propaganda programme would not turn out to be just that, although I firmly believe it to have been well worth that struggle!

Ron Bateman, July 2021

FOREWORD

BY RICHARD BLAIR

W hen I was asked by the author if I would write the Foreword to The Radio Front: The BBC and the Propaganda War 1939–45, I immediately thought of my father, George Orwell, and his time at the BBC, where he described the corporation as being a cross between a ‘lunatic asylum and a girls’ school’. One hopes that as there is now a larger-than-life-sized statue of him outside the BBC, that forgiveness has been granted. At the time of his employment between August 1941 and November 1943 as talks producer for the Eastern Services, he would have been regarded as just one of many employees. Although he had several published books and was regarded as an interesting and, indeed, influential writer, it was after he left the BBC that his final two books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, would propel him into the mainstream pantheon of one of the great English writers of the twentieth century.

When the BBC was founded in 1922 under its first director general, Sir John Reith, and his lofty ideals, its motto was ‘Nation Shall Speak unto Nation’ and it was the embodiment of neutral and honest broadcasting. However, it didn’t take the government long to recognise the power that this new form of communication could have in conveying important information to the population of not only Great Britain, but also the British Empire and other countries. Here was a powerful tool capable of being abused for the benefit of those countries who sought to spread disinformation and to bend the people to the will of the controlling authorities. Is it not interesting that some populations are more compliant to higher authority than others? It soon became clear to world governments that it was necessary to control the broadcasters of radio, and thereby control the population. ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’, goes the saying. As war approached with an inevitability that many failed to recognise, it was left to a few visionary people like Winston Churchill to see the danger. Mr Bateman relates an insightful story that during a meeting between British diplomats and Hitler in 1938, where both sides were ‘wooing’ India, which wanted independence, Hitler showed his real hand by suggesting, if there was resistance, ‘shoot Gandhi, if that fails shoot the Congress and keep shooting until they acquiesce’. This was persuasion by terror. This was how, by various degrees, Germany subjugated the German population with the power of radio.

Once the Second World War had started, the government was able to instruct the nation through the BBC as to how people were to behave as martial law was introduced: blackouts, travel restrictions, rationing, opening and closing of public establishments, air-raid instructions and a long list of ‘dos and don’ts’. There is no doubt the government tried to temper the rigidity of wartime conditions with entertainment on the radio, such as It’s That Man Again, otherwise known as ITMA. The lighter part of the BBC was broadcast on the Forces Programme, while anything more serious was on the Home Service. Interestingly, not only did Orwell work for the BBC, but his wife, Eileen, through the Ministry of Food, was also co-operating with the corporation. She, along with others, was charged with creating nutritious meals from some ‘interesting’ ingredients, not without a few clashes of personalities, although not necessarily from Eileen, but from her superiors, both at the BBC and the Ministry of Food. Orwell and Eileen suffered from ill health and eventually they both left, Orwell in November 1943. He was quite often confined to bed with chest problems, like bronchitis, which kept him away for two or three weeks at a time. This condition goes right back to childhood. ‘Baby has a bad chest’, or ‘baby is ill again’, was a common comment by his mother and was to culminate in his death from tuberculosis in January 1950. Eileen’s health was also poor, she being very run down since the death of her beloved brother, Lawrence, also known as Eric, at Dunkirk in 1940. It was common knowledge that they both suffered from ill health, compounded by being heavy smokers. Eileen continued to work until November 1944, five months after they had adopted a baby boy christened Richard. Orwell had dearly wanted to be a father and, in the absence of a baby of their own, had discovered that a patient of Dr Gwen O’Shaughnessy, Eileen’s sister-in-law, was having a child that could not be kept and made arrangements for his adoption, a solution that delighted Orwell and Eileen in equal measure.

But what was Orwell’s contribution to the BBC and the propaganda war? It must be considered within the context of Mr Bateman’s analysis of how the BBC and the War Cabinet approached the subject of giving factual information and while presenting it in its best possible light without resorting to downright lies, an approach that would surely have seen Orwell ‘running for the hills’. He always felt that his contribution to the war was of little importance in the wider context of what needed to be achieved in overcoming Nazi aggression. However, Mr Bateman has looked at the evidence and has written a factual account of the pathway that the BBC created from the early beginnings through to the end of the war, with all the problems it created and subsequently overcame as more and more experience was gained. Mr Bateman’s book is another serious and valued addition to the collection of works that have been written about the corporation over many years and it will no doubt stand the test of time.

Richard Blair

INTRODUCTION

MEMORIES OF THE RADIO FRONT BY DIONE VENABLES

M y father was, like so many of his generation, an inveterate wireless geek. On 14 November 1922, the 2LO Wireless Station in Marconi House, London, began broadcasting to the nation for one hour each day. Pa was in Geneva, Switzerland, at that time, designing the first electronic interpretation system for a host of language translators at the League of Nations building. They had been trying to interpret the speeches of the initial twenty-two nations struggling to communicate together to save the world in their own languages. Pa dreamed up a perfect solution, but he missed the 14 November broadcast when the wireless ‘hams’ in the United Kingdom were glued to their transmitters and receivers, awaiting the voice of Arthur Burrows. Out of the crackly static, at 5.33 p.m. came that distant but firm voice announcing ‘2LO Marconi House, London calling …’ And so the BBC was born, and with it this fascinating device called the wireless (soon to be renamed ‘the radio’) came into the lives of those geeks – and eventually into vast swathes of homes, from great mansions to two-room working men’s houses.

My own first awareness of the wireless must have been at a very early age because home to me was always a place where cables and aerials were festooned everywhere, apart from the kitchen and bedrooms, and my mother was often required to sit at the piano and sing into the microphone at three o’clock in the morning so that some crackly American ham halfway across the world could pick up music as well as speech. I remember the first time that I really took in the importance of our wireless was on 1 September 1939, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Hitler had launched an offensive into Poland at daybreak that day; two days later the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany to defend her allies. My sister June and I were called into the living room that morning where our parents were sitting close together, bent forward to catch every word of the prime minister’s sad, thin voice. Our mother was in tears and Pa had his arm round her shoulders, not far off tears himself. We thought that someone important must have died – and, of course, those first Polish deaths were to be the start of what escalated into a murderous conflict.

The radio was to become a device of supreme importance to the war areas, and to those countries that were not at war, but fearful for their peoples’ safety. It featured in every aspect of the increasingly mechanised process of battle, on the land, in the ships at sea and under the sea, and in the air. In 1943 Forces Broadcasting expanded and, under the aegis of the BBC, became BFBS (British Forces Broadcasting Service), providing news, entertainment and even connections between servicemen and their families. Communication became refined and daily more portable as war correspondents took radios into active war sectors and broadcast back to the BBC the events of battles as they were happening.

My war was, like that of so many others, an eventful one when, first, our flat was bombed early one evening while we were visiting our cousins just five minutes’ walk away. The loss of Pa’s extensive radio equipment was mourned (by him) more deeply than the rest of our possessions!

The second ‘event’, and June and I had a harrowing escape when our parents decided to send us to an aunt in Canada so that, with the invasion impending, Pa’s two precious daughters would not face the horror of that dreaded invasion and what pillaging German troops would do to innocent young girls. We were booked to sail from Liverpool on 13 September 1940, and our luggage went ahead and was stowed aboard. The night before we were due to travel to Liverpool our parents spent hour after hour talking. By dawn they had decided that they could not bear to be parted from us, so we would not set sail for Montreal after all but would remain together to face whatever was ahead. I bade a sorrowful farewell to my beloved panda and an aggressive-looking doll with silver teeth that had been packed in my trunk, and it was with absolute horror that, nine days later, a bulletin was released to say that the vessel we were to have travelled in, City of Benares, although in the centre of a convoy, had been torpedoed in the mid-Atlantic. Of the ninety evacuee children on board, only seventeen survived. I was not quite 11 on that day and it took many years, even into young adulthood, to persuade myself that two innocent children who had taken our places had not been killed because of us.

The third major event was when my mother and I were buried under the house we were staying in, outside Beckenham, when a flying bomb (affectionately known as a doodle bug) landed in the garden, blowing down all but one wall of the house. By that time, my father and sister were both at Bletchley Park – Pa’s knowledge of radio waves was being put to very good use.

Without Britain’s ever-advancing knowledge of radio frequencies used to break the German cipher systems, we are told that the Second World War would have taken two years longer to be resolved. Following the end of the conflict in 1945, the Bletchley Park ‘boffins’, as we called those who are today referred to as nerds, set to and produced Colossus, the room-sized first programmable computer. The BBC, having proved its worth and staying power throughout the war, despite having been bombed twice, set about employing the brightest of the young servicemen as they were demobbed from their fighting roles. Broadcasting icons such as Alvar Liddell, Bruce Belfrage, John Snagge, Audrey Russell and Marjorie Anderson trained up a host of new voices, and the BBC’s leap into television took radio into uncharted but exciting waters.

My growing up years were seriously defined by our constant love affair with our radio. The programme Workers’ Playtime was created in 1941 in order to lighten the mood of those who were working at full tilt in factories throughout the United Kingdom, making armaments and essential goods. Men between the ages of 17 and 45 who were not eligible for call-up were required to be factory workers, firemen, ARP wardens and anything else to which they could be put to good use. Single women aged 20–30 were also required to volunteer, but by 1943 nearly 90 per cent of women were doing some kind of war work. My mother had a part-time job in the London Censorship, checking letters to block out information that might be useful to the enemy. Having a very good singing voice, she used to sing along to programmes such as Music While You Work, Variety Bandbox and Workers’ Playtime, in which we were introduced to singers and entertainers such as Vera Lynn, Charlie Chester, and Elsie and Doris Waters, who were incidentally the sisters of actor Jack Warner.

During the school term we would gather around the wireless at 7.30 on Sunday evenings to listen out for the first strains of ‘Serenade’, which heralded violinist Albert Sandler and the Palm Court Orchestra. These musical interludes became part of the fabric of being at war and making the best of it! There were so many hard-working artistes keeping our spirits up, so that the mention of, say, Sandy MacPherson at the BBC Theatre organ, immediately conjures up the sound of ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ (seriously inappropriate at the time) and the imagined image of the mighty Wurlitzer organ, rising from the orchestra pit with flashing lights and majestic presence, with the little Canadian organist thundering cheerful cadences into every home in Britain. Workers’ Playtime was broadcast from a different factory every weekday, and it was a delight to hear the roars of approval from hundreds of hard-working munitions workers, taking a much-needed half hour away from their work benches, one day from ‘somewhere in Wales’, another day from ‘up in hill country’. The radio enabled the BBC to create a new kind of humour, less subtle but more relaxed than the humour we enjoy today, and in this way we came to know very well comedians such as Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, Jimmy Edwards, Vic Oliver, Bebe Daniels and Ben Lyon. Oh, I could go on for pages because they allowed me to howl with laughter all through my tenth year to my sixteenth, during which both Great Britain and yours truly had some pretty hairy experiences.

One of our greatest sources of amusement was the daily broadcast of Lord Haw-Haw, the American-born Briton William Joyce, whom Germany thought would be just the right man to undermine the British stiff upper lip. His daily broadcasts from Hamburg sneered at the certain terror of British citizens caused by the utter devastation being rained on London and our major ports and cities by the Luftwaffe, but his total lack of understanding of the attitude of the British population simply made his ridiculous assertions a source of constant mirth. At the end of the war in Europe, William Joyce was captured, tried and, in January 1946, hanged. He was 39 at the time. The ability of the people of these islands to be able to smile, if not laugh, through those terrible months, when we were all quite certain that we were to be invaded by the vicious and demented German dictator Adolf Hitler and his armies, was remarkable. Hitler’s storm troopers were trained to kill, and to destroy the very fabric of which Great Britain was made, so it has to be another of the many miracles that actually kept us afloat – and at arm’s length from Axis invasion.

At the centre of everything in nearly every household was the wireless, the beating heart of our world. The wireless permitted our King to broadcast messages of hope, and our charismatic Prime Minister Churchill to strengthen the backbone of the nation with stirring speeches such as the one he gave in Parliament on 13 May 1940: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields …’, and I can remember all too well how thin we became as food grew more scarce by the week and had to be rigidly rationed.

As time rolled by, the war spread across the world and the United States of America came to join us, and with them came their reference to the ‘radio’, as they called it, which became such a strong connection between the people of our two nations. The radio gave us mesmeric war correspondents such as Ed Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Edward Ward and Richard Dimbleby, who incidentally became the BBC’s first war correspondent, and their voices became as familiar to us as those of our parents. And at the end of that terrible conflict, the announcement of ‘peace in our time’ was lauded with the raised voices of the people young and old. Every radio was turned up to join singers such as Vera Lynn, and the songs that we all sang along with were never to be forgotten, however sentimental or silly the words were.

Remember the forces’ sweetheart Vera Lynn with: ‘There’ll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover; Tomorrow, just you wait and see …’ I suppose those never-seen ‘bluebirds over’ was all that lyricist Nat Burton could dream up to rhyme with ‘Dover’, but who cared – it was all part of the euphoria. Anne Shelton, Vera Lynn, Tony Bennett, Gracie Fields all sang their hearts out from our Pye wireless sets, and you may be sure that not one child of those years still alive today has forgotten any of the lyrics. The song that stays the clearest in my memory from that day was that of a young singer, whose name I cannot find, but who we were told was in a wheelchair and I can still hear that very clear youthful voice, trembling with the emotion around her as she sang from Piccadilly Circus:

When the lights go on again, all over the world; And our boys are home again, all over the world …

On VE Day, 8 May 1945, I was scrambling along the steep roof ridge of my best friend’s house and we were festooning red, white and blue bunting all along the roof and around the chimney stacks. We were 14 years old, bursting with excitement, and in the house below three radios in three different rooms were turned on full blast. The sounds of the nation’s joy filtered up to us, so we sat astride the long roof ridge and joined in with that anonymous young singer: ‘When the lights go on again, all over the world …’

It was so very good to be singing with the rest of our world on the Radio Front.

Dione Venables, March 2021

WHEN RADIO CAME OF AGE

The first official public broadcast that Dione describes in her remarkable introduction was transmitted at a time when barely one in 1,200 people in Britain possessed a radio licence. Year-on-year radio ownership continued to rise and by September 1939 almost three-quarters of UK households possessed a set, with most of the remainder having access to one. For the first time in British history, virtually the entire population, including British subjects in the dominions, could experience the same event simultaneously. Not only was the BBC able to bring major sporting events to the listening public, it was able to bring royalty to the people and take the people to royal occasions. The coronation of George VI in May 1937 was broadcast to a potential audience of over 2 billion people.1

The level of coverage that the BBC had achieved by the late 1930s was a timely milestone, for it was at this point that the radio became the medium by which people in Britain, and British subjects scattered throughout the many regions of the British Empire, would learn that they were again at war. The BBC later reflected with a measure of pride that, on 3 September 1939, those in Singapore could hear that the British Government’s ultimatum to Hitler had expired at the same time as those in London.2 Thereafter began the first war in which radio would play a significant role, in more ways than anyone could possibly have imagined of a medium not too distant from its infancy. As the war progressed, the BBC evolved rapidly from being a predominantly home organisation to a predominantly overseas organisation; at its twenty-first birthday celebrations in 1943, it was widely acknowledged that the BBC effectively came of age at a time when its purpose was primarily devoted to war.

Throughout the century of broadcasting that this and other books will seek to commemorate, the BBC has generally endeavoured to be truthful, objective and tread the fine line of impartiality, alongside its stated purpose to inform, educate and entertain. Such standards were considered sacred when the BBC transitioned from a private company into a public service corporation on 1 January 1927. When the first director general, John Reith, had applied to become head of the fledgling company in 1922, he had very little idea what broadcasting was, nor any awareness of the potential power within the medium of radio. Reith successfully negotiated a significant measure of independence for the BBC – a hard-won argument that held firm until the General Strike of 1926, when he was strong-armed by Whitehall into denying striking workers and their unions a voice over the airwaves. The broadcasting company was the sole conduit of news, and was told to dispel rumours, doubt and uncertainty, and to boost morale whenever possible, inviting accusations from opposition MPs and unions that it was effectively influencing public opinion.

Reith had reservations about the corporation being used as a mouthpiece of government, but knew only too well that Whitehall had the legal right to commandeer the BBC any time it chose, and to broadcast whatever message it wanted. The Trade Union Congress was also sufficiently aware of the fragility of the BBC’s limited independence, and warned its striking members that the corporation was ‘just another tool in the hands of the Government’. Despite an insistence from Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin that the corporation had not been coerced into compliance, and that ‘the power of broadcasting had triumphantly showed itself in a searching test’, the BBC was rapidly becoming viewed as an instrument of political power.3 The corporation was savagely criticised by opposition MPs in the aftermath of the strike, including Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, who had made repeated requests to broadcast a speech, only to be rebuffed on each occasion. The mantle of impartiality slipped again in 1931 over accusations of political bias following coverage of the general election. This time a grossly unfair imbalance of broadcasting time allotted to each of the main parties enabled a coalition government dominated by Tories to achieve a landslide victory – described by Labour leader Clement Attlee as ‘the most unscrupulous in my recollection’.* Propaganda might have been a dirty word at the time, yet there were people who knew how to exploit the potential of broadcasting, without recourse to the murky world of lies and deception.

When Reith resigned from the BBC in June 1938, it was acknowledged that he had given the corporation integrity; people still talk of ‘Reithian principles’, and staff at Broadcasting House often joke that ‘his ghost still stalks the corridors’. As director general, Reith never sat down on the job; he always stood and had an especially tall ‘desk’ made for this purpose. Hence, his subsequent replacement, Sir Frederick Ogilvie, cannot literally be said to have taken over Reith’s seat; however, the hot seat was about to get considerably hotter. In September 1939 the BBC was placed on a ‘war footing’ and, despite retaining its freedom to create and schedule programmes, it was required to seek advice from all manner of external government bodies. Even though censorship of programmes would still be carried out at source, the BBC’s new Home Service would be monitored under the watchful eye of the Ministry of Information (MOI), and its news bulletins by an independent Press and Censorship Bureau. The corporation would also be required to support the government as an instrument of both domestic and overseas propaganda. This would require European and Overseas Service editors to engage with other more secretive bodies dedicated to enemy-directed propaganda, beginning with the Department of Propaganda into Enemy and Enemy-Occupied Countries, split between Electra House (Department EH) and Woburn Abbey, and then in August 1941 by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). On top of this, with the constant threat of air raids and lack of available space, the corporation would become fragmented, with departments scattered among different regions of the country.

Regrettably, the new director general had little interest in propaganda, and was indifferent to its potential usefulness as a weapon of war. Shortly after taking up his position, Ogilvie informed the assistant director of programme planning, Harman Grisewood, that he believed the Germans to be ‘a very sentimental people’ and that the best thing we could do was to treat them to a rendition of Beatrice Harrison playing her cello to the sound of a singing nightingale.* Fortunately, as recruitment intensified at the corporation in response to the demands of war, the BBC was able to utilise the exceptional talents of people who recognised the potential of radio to become a valuable instrument of national and international propaganda. Here was a medium able to reach large numbers of people simultaneously, both at home and across international borders, virtually uncontrolled. In contrast to the written word, the direct and personal approach associated with broadcasting could more effectively appeal to the emotions of the listener. The ability of radio to infiltrate enemy-held territory and to transcend the borders of vulnerable nations extended the reach of international propaganda significantly in the 1930s, enabling governments to disseminate their views to overseas audiences directly. Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini all recognised the propaganda potential of radio, and made massive use of it in influencing both home audiences and populations abroad by establishing foreign-language programmes. These were typically aimed at showcasing the supremacy of their ideologies over western democracy.**

In contrast, successive interwar British governments remained sceptical or suspicious about the use of radio propaganda, and only later when the realisation set in that everything that was said across the airwaves had the potential to either damage morale or undermine military forces did the issue of censoring broadcasts appear on the political agenda. Among a small minority of backbench dissenters was Winston Churchill, who initially believed in the propaganda potential of radio and wanted the government to take over the BBC before Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin blocked all attempts to strip the corporation of its independence. As things stood, few in government realised that the comparatively liberal radio laws that the Baldwin Government initiated had rendered Britain particularly vulnerable to psychological warfare. As early as December 1930, workers in Britain were targeted by an appeal broadcast in English from Moscow with the aim of inciting British workers to revolt against their leaders.4* This was an early warning for a government committed to supporting the BBC’s independent status.

Baldwin eventually came around to the view that ‘in wartime, propaganda was a necessary evil and must be taken seriously’ – a view not shared by everyone in Parliament. ‘Propaganda’ was still a deeply disparaged concept meaning lies, exaggeration, thought manipulation: all things that were considered to be ‘the stuff of totalitarian regimes’ and not something that British broadcasting should seek to emulate. ‘Britons do not want to be told what to think or feel, or to become that mutton-headed herd of sheep that Hitler believes the German nation has always been, and always will be,’ complained Harold Nicolson at the MOI. ‘Whereas the totalitarian method is essentially a short-term smash-and-grab raid upon the emotions of the uneducated, the democratic method should be long term, seeking gradually to fortify the intelligence of the individual.’5

As late as 1944, the BBC still referred to such practices as ‘publicity’ rather than stoop to using the ‘awful word’ that the British Government had tried to ban from diplomatic vocabulary when the original MOI was disbanded after the First World War.6 Such an attitude resulted in Britain significantly lagging behind her potential enemy on the eve of war, with Germany broadcasting thirty-six foreign-language programmes compared with Britain’s ten.7

Such an attitude illustrates the striking difference between how propaganda was being viewed by different systems of government during the interwar period. Countries already employing propaganda as a weapon of state, such as Germany and the Soviet Union, had adopted it as a tool for the exclusive use of a single political party. In democracies that typically contained two political parties with a degree of mutual respect for one another, this couldn’t ordinarily happen, for to violently attack the other’s propaganda would be viewed as a slight on the true spirit of democracy. Initially there were concerns about the tone of political propaganda in wartime Britain, especially so when the Tory peer Lord Macmillan was named as the new Minister of Information, leading Labour leader Clement Attlee to suspect that the new MOI was ‘just another arm of the Conservative propaganda machine’.8* Attlee need not have concerned himself while Chamberlain held the reins of government, for even as late as January 1940, Macmillan’s successor, the former BBC Director General John Reith, was still seeking to understand what the Chamberlain War Cabinet regarded as being ‘the principles and objectives of wartime propaganda’.9

Meanwhile, by February 1939 members on both sides of the House had taken note of the considerable activity on the part of various foreign governments in the field of radio propaganda. Ministers were urged ‘to pay more attention to publicity, and to render moral and financial support to schemes which will make certain of the effective presentation of British news abroad’. By 1939, the total government expenditure on news services and publicity for foreign consumption was less than £500,000 – a fantastically small amount of money to be spent on something that could be of immeasurable importance, according to one honorable member: ‘If done correctly far less money would need to be spent on destroyers and bombers.’10**

In contemporary study, it has become commonplace to split propaganda activities into ‘white’ undisguised propaganda, where no attempt is made to deceive, and ‘black’ deceptive or covert propaganda. Grey propaganda typically leaves the recipient guessing the identity of the source. Because the BBC tried to stick rigidly to its principles of honesty and accuracy, its propaganda broadcasts typically remained within safe limits that rarely strayed into darker territory, as ‘black’ stations typically came under the control of Department EH and eventually the PWE. However, in the heat of conflict, the government had its own specific propaganda aims and endeavoured to shield the public from bad news by censoring the BBC, by providing false information, by obstructing reporters and by encouraging the ‘softening up’ of certain news items. This course of action might have occasionally been good for home front morale, but each time it happened it effectively handed the propaganda initiative to the enemy.*

In the first instance, it was incumbent on the BBC to help the public bear the strain of war, both as an efficient means of disseminating vital information, and as an effective filter between the grim realities of war and the anxious listener. When disaster occurred, or when situations became particularly grave, Whitehall drip fed information to the BBC in a calculated manner, and exerted pressure on the corporation to compile its news bulletins in a manner least likely to damage public morale or create anxiety. Such an approach created friction between the BBC and government ministers, especially at times when huge numbers of people were tuning in to the German broadcasts. With a seemingly irresistible appeal, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) became Britain’s first radio personality, sending millions of listeners running to their radio sets at the first sound of ‘Germany calling’ direct from Hamburg. Despite government pressure, the BBC refused to dignify Haw-Haw’s propaganda by issuing rebuttals, believing it would undermine its reputation as a trusted news source.

By the time of Dunkirk, the BBC had searched in vain for its own radio personality in an effort to implore the listening public to stay tuned at a peak time. After trying several uninspiring presenters, they offered the chance to the popular novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley. Little did they know that once the Yorkshireman got into his straight-talking, common-sense stride, his broadcasts would provoke a controversy that brought the political impartiality of the corporation into disrepute. Despite the official censors’ reluctance to interfere, the MOI eventually slung him off the air, to the immense disappointment of his 11 million-plus listeners, who were probably still smarting the next time they visited the ballot box. Meanwhile, Britain had inadvertently discovered its most effective antidote to Haw-Haw in the person of the incoming Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose speeches were arguably the greatest morale-boosting propaganda the BBC ever broadcast.

Another arm of the BBC’s home propaganda illustrates the ability of radio to raise morale through entertainment at a time of deep anguish – many listeners had either lost or been separated from loved ones, including their children. When the country found itself under serious threat of invasion, the radio became an effective counsellor and a steadying influence upon the listening public, who were facing the possibility of falling into the hands of the Nazis. The merits of the BBC’s wartime variety programming is an exhaustive subject that is often mired in sentimentality and nostalgia, with limited regard for either its propaganda value or the often punishing schedule to which top-line artistes adhered. Such nostalgic reflection often presents a past recreated for entertainment purposes free from the horror of war, and can easily result in a distorted or lopsided view of history. BBC Variety utilised its premier artists in an effort to achieve its morale-boosting potential in different ways. Neither Tommy Handley nor (Dame) Vera Lynn are revered for their propaganda value, and yet their positive impact upon the morale of the listening public and British troops has enshrined the names of both in the history of British wartime entertainment.

Handley was a comedian made for the radio who elicited a good many of his laughs at the expense of the enemy. His topical comedy show ITMA became a sensation to the extent that over 40 per cent of the entire population were listening in to what was essentially very good morale-boosting propaganda. Handley committed himself to an exhaustive and punishing schedule that almost certainly resulted in his premature death. Similarly, ‘forces sweetheart’ Vera Lynn is seldom regarded as an instrument of the BBC’s propaganda machine; her programme Sincerely Yours attracted over 16 million listeners, and yet for all its good intentions the show and its presenter came under fire in 1942 over the question of the perceived emasculating effect that Lynn and her ‘sentimental songs’ were allegedly having on the British troops.

In the second instance, the BBC effectively became the fourth arm of warfare as it facilitated efforts to win hearts and minds in war-affected areas, and in other potentially vulnerable regions around the world. Attitudes changed, and the realisation that propaganda was no less a weapon than a bullet took hold as the corporation extended its overseas reach significantly. By 1943, forty-eight languages were being broadcast, and there was never a time when the BBC transmitters fell silent. With a combined total of 133 hours of broadcasting a day, it sought to raise the morale of ordinary people living under occupation by countering enemy lies with truthfulness, and through facilitating contact between exiled government representatives and their oppressed populations.

The corporation also provided assistance in the form of skilled personnel to ‘black’ stations dedicated towards inflicting a programme of psychological warfare on enemy subjects and soldiers alike, and by aiding and assisting in the creation of resistance groups that evolved and emerged from the shadows inside the conquered nations. The spirit of resistance in occupied Europe owed much to the BBC, firstly as a force of inspiration and empowerment, and secondly through providing operational assistance. Britain’s solitary public broadcasting service, which barely two decades earlier seldom did anything more daring than broadcast a cellist playing with a nightingale, suddenly found itself transmitting coded messages that could mean life or death for large numbers of people.

In the absence of any forward planning, the BBC’s overseas radio propaganda effort relied almost exclusively on improvisation, and yet the corporation very effectively established itself as ‘the voice of Britain’. Its biggest worry was the risks associated with directing inflammatory propaganda to those who could not be helped militarily. For a listener in Nazi-controlled Europe to be discovered tuning into the BBC’s European Service could mean a death sentence, but listen they did, and subsequently reproduced the programme content in clandestine newspapers to extend the message further. On occasions, so successful was the BBC’s radio propaganda that the Nazis were compelled to confiscate all known radio receiving equipment, even if it meant abandoning their own propaganda strategy. The corporation also went to great lengths to broadcast carefully weighted programmes to the farthest regions of the globe, especially to India at a particularly delicate point in the history of the country. Populations needed to be convinced that they would be far worse off under Hitler – despite Gandhi having accused War Cabinet emissary Stafford Cripps of attempting to bribe India ‘with a blank cheque on a failing bank’.

Slowly, but surely, Britain’s radio propaganda found ways to make a difference to people’s lives; it really was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the men. Much of the story of the BBC’s European Propaganda Campaign is contained in twenty-two boxes of directives residing in the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge – a collection containing enough revelations of interest to fill half a dozen volumes. The vast majority of these directives were issued under the name of Noel Newsome, recruited from the Daily Telegraph, first as European news editor, then as director of the European Service. Newsome became a key figure in the organisation, described by Asa Briggs as ‘the most industrious, lively and imaginative of all the department’s wartime recruits’.11 Newsome had the full backing of the director of the Foreign Division of the Ministry of Information, and eventually European Service controller, (Sir) Ivone Kirkpatrick. He afforded Newsome a generous measure of freedom from the strict control of government bodies, including the Political Warfare Executive. Backed by the support and advice of Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, this essentially became the ‘dream team’, a highly efficient triumvirate that ensured the BBC would deliver propaganda within acceptable limits of truth in the firm belief that the protection of its reputation was sacrosanct.

Carefully controlled propaganda was a serious business in the days when all hopes for the conquered nations rested on Britain’s shoulders to stand firm and continue the struggle. However, if Britain was to emerge victorious, American listeners would have to be won over. By September 1940, it became an absolute necessity that the resilience of a people under siege from relentless aerial bombardment was broadcast right into the homes of American listeners. Since 1937 the European director of CBS, Ed Murrow, had been based in London, and having been asked to assemble his own team of news reporters to cover the war, he immediately became inspired by the efforts of the BBC’s wartime reporters to bring more realism into their reports. After much deliberation between Murrow and the MOI, the potency of radio propaganda was significantly enhanced with the presence of the actual sound of events taking place – be it guns or bombs, or even the simple sound of ordinary people hurrying to the air-raid shelter. For someone who was not even an employee of the BBC, Murrow became a familiar and highly influential figure at Broadcasting House. His influence certainly rubbed off on Lawrence Gilliam in the Drama Department, who recognised how the same enhancements could benefit the counter-propaganda element within the BBC’s ever-increasing feature programmes. Occasionally, this kind of realism could backfire, particularly when the BBC was accused of over-dramatising real life and death events for the benefit of the listener.

The full story of the BBC’s wartime propaganda activities does not lend itself to a strict chronological analysis. Domestic ‘white’ propaganda is more easily evaluated in such a manner; however, the study of overseas propaganda requires one to examine each dedicated service individually, as the propaganda was generally tailored for a specific audience. It was impossible for the BBC to ‘speak with one voice’ as listeners could comprise German factory workers, French or other European citizens living under occupation, or even native people in the dominions of the British Empire. Added to this, the corporation came under increasing pressure to allow the London-based exiled governments of conquered nations ‘free time’ on its transmitters, not only to maintain contact with their peoples under occupation, but also to counter the relentless tide of Nazi radio propaganda to which their populations were being exposed. This privilege was eventually conceded to those governments who had requested ‘free time’ when it was deemed appropriate; however, the resulting services have been largely ignored in previous BBC histories, beyond a cursory mention.

The BBC’s overseas propaganda operation was also complicated by the fact that Britain had no coherent propaganda policy during the first year of war. When Churchill decided to place all responsibility for ‘black’ propaganda in the hands of Hugh Dalton at the Special Operations Executive (SOE), it marked the beginning of fourteen months of continual inter-departmental squabbling that seriously delayed all progress. The fog of conflict eventually gave rise to a revolution of reorganisation in both the BBC and in government departments dedicated to propaganda. It became a complicated process of political sparring that the researcher is compelled to unravel, prior to examining how the BBC arranged its broadcasts to the individual countries. Similarly, at home, the ever-changing nature of total war also precipitated round after round of organisational changes at the corporation, the details of which would also fill another good-sized volume. Committees came and went; Ministers of Information came and went; and departments were scattered so far and wide that there was seldom a time when the BBC as a unified corporation could sit back and draw breath.

We begin our focus during the weeks and months dominated by the anticipation of war, when the corporation drew up plans that would involve reorganising itself in accordance with wartime requirements. Beneath a slew of advice from government sources, the BBC was compelled to consider how it could be most effective towards supporting Britain’s war effort.

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* The BBC’s decision to treat the three elements of the coalition as being separate and therefore entitled to their full allotted broadcasting rights had proved decisive. The government was also accused of having exploited the gold crisis to gain additional broadcasting time under the guise of ‘financial emergency’, thereby affording its ministers an almost complete monopoly of broadcasts at a critical point in the election campaign.

* The senior British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart believed this ‘sentimental’ label was a mistaken impression, rather they were ‘an emotional people’ – a trait which ‘can produce tears and savagery’. (Vansittart, p.37)

** The Soviets had been propaganda conscious since the October Revolution and began broadcasting in English, French and German in October 1929. (Tangye-Lean, p.212)

* This was a departure from an undertaking given by the Soviet Government in regard to propaganda, prompting Britain’s ambassador to Moscow to protest to the Soviet Government.

* The striking differences between the propaganda methods of different governments was highlighted by F. Bartlett in a paper titled Political Propaganda. (1940, p.16)

** One editor in New Zealand commented, ‘One Churchill speech is as good as a new battleship.’ (Briggs, 1970, p.10)

* During the Norway campaign, the BBC was given false news by the government regarding military movements in an effort to deceive the German High Command. The Germans were not deceived, but the public were and the BBC’s reputation nosedived, taking many months to recover.

RADIO PREPARES FOR WAR

T he Second World War differed from all previous conflicts in the sense that there was a degree of forward planning in the full realisation that it would be total. The concept of ‘total war’ can be interpreted in many ways; typically we imagine the entire military force along with the industrial manpower of a nation being hurled at the enemy, with disruption and destruction at home being wrought on a colossal scale. For the writer and broadcaster J.B. Priestley, total war was ‘right inside the home itself, emptying the clothes cupboards and the larder, screaming its threats through the radio at the hearth, burning and bombing its way from roof to cellar’.1 For the historian Arthur Marwick, the concept of total war added up to ‘a colossal psychological experience’, with the cumulative effect amounting to real and enduring social change.2

For Britain to effectively counter total war, able-bodied persons at all levels of society would have to be incorporated into the war effort, and direct radio appeals would become the ideal medium for the purpose. Government ministers would need to talk directly to the public to get their messages and appeals across. Volunteers would be needed across a range of Civil Defence positions if casualty rates were to be kept to a minimum, while other volunteers would be required to help defend the island from possible invasion. In times of emergency, the widespread popularity of radio facilitated critical opportunities to launch nationwide appeals instantaneously. When the British Expeditionary Force found itself in the situation of its greatest peril on the beaches at Dunkirk, would it have been possible to save so many of those men without the desperate radio appeals for experienced maritime personnel?

As in the last war, bodies had to be created to monitor the content of all media outlets to ensure as best they could that nothing damaging could leak out. War had come a long way from the days when they were fought by professional armies in far-off lands – when life at home in the mother country just carried on as normal – and gone were the days when the press enjoyed full freedom to submit war reports, unmolested by any censorship departments.

During the Great War of 1914–18, home front propaganda was rigid to the extent that the carnage on the battlefields of France and Belgium was not allowed to be reported. Little wonder that very few people realised that, every time the front lines moved in newspaper illustrations, the tiny gains or losses had come at the cost of thousands of lives. The government had introduced the Defence of the Realm Act four days into the war, giving the authorities unlimited power to stifle criticism of the war effort. In his book The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley claims that during the First World War ‘more deliberate lies were told than in any other period of history, as the whole apparatus of the state went into action to suppress the truth’.3 Lord Kitchener had banned reporters from the front line at the outbreak of war, and those who did try to embed themselves were captured and warned that they would be shot if they tried to return.4 Five reporters were eventually afforded access but their reports were heavily censored. British blunders and German victories went unreported, and even the Battle of the Somme, in which Allied troop casualties numbered over 600,000, went largely unreported, with the disastrous first day being described as a victory. Journalists admitted to feeling ashamed at the lies written and could only console themselves with the thought that they were sparing the families of men at the front from the horrors that their husbands and sons were facing.* Only later did the public learn the full facts, including the high casualty rates, the effects of shell shock and the widespread use of poison gas. Little wonder that in the minds of the plain citizen ‘wartime propaganda’ meant lies and deception disseminated by governments to suppress the truth. Such public mistrust would inevitably carry over into the later conflict.