![]()
Part One
National interests with a global reach
Projection, persuasion and intonation
![]()
1 āIt is a real joy to get listening of any kind from the homelandā
BBC radio and British diasporic audiences in the 1930s1
Emma Robertson
Introduction
In 1924, just under a decade before the official launch of the BBC Empire Service, John Reith had imagined potential listeners across the empire, and indeed the world, in his book Broadcasting Over Britain. These geographically dispersed listeners were conceived in much the same way as any listener within the British Isles unfortunate enough to be isolated from London. Thus, great metropolitan events and speeches could ābe heard and shared alike by the favoured few who are present as by others hundreds or thousands of miles away, and as in due time by our countrymen in the very outposts of the Empireā (Reith 1924: 220ā1). Radio broadcasting, still in its relative infancy as a public medium, was perceived as a means of connecting a national community of listeners āscatteredā across the world ā a British diasporic audience.
Economic and political considerations, coupled with a desire to perfect the technology, delayed the formal launch of the Empire Service until December 1932.2 In October of that year, a poem by Tom Pilgrim in World Radio (WR), entitled āBritain Callingā, echoed Reith's vision of a diasporic audience for the new service: one āof our race and nameā, āscatteredā beyond the British Isles (Pilgrim 1932). Broadcasts would be entirely in English ā the āfamiliar speechā of the āhomelandā according to the poem ā for this was not to be āpropagandaā intended to win over foreign listeners but a station dedicated primarily to (white) British āexilesā and their descendants in the colonies and dominions.3 The practices, politics and ideals of British imperialism had sent millions of native-born Brits overseas.4 Some had populated the white settler colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; all of which, by the interwar period, possessed legislative independence as British dominions at the same time as lingering political, economic, social and cultural ties to Britain.5 Other migrants carried out the work of empire in varied colonial territories: primarily in India, Africa and the Caribbean. In a lecture in 1933, Captain Graves confirmed that a key purpose of the Empire Service was to ākeep in touch with the isolated men in the back-of-beyond to whom any contact with this country would be a good thingā (BBC WAC 1933c). Even as the cracks in the empire became increasingly visible in the tumultuous decade of the 1930s, the BBC paid little attention to a potential (or indeed actual) ānativeā audience.6 By focusing on the first intended audience of white British āexilesā in the years prior to World War Two, I interrogate the subtle ways in which the Empire Service could sustain and reinforce British power overseas through offering powerful audible evocations of a homeland. More specifically, I seek to understand how individual listeners themselves (women and men) conceptualised the Empire Service project. Cohen's model of imperial diaspora, allowing for both etic (observer) and emic (participant) claims, provides a useful framework for theorising this diverse audience. For however settled migrants (and their descendants) felt, this was not necessarily incompatible with a sense of exile ā of being far from home (Cohen 2008: 17, 5).7
Listenersā letters provide a fascinating lens through which to explore understandings of diasporic relationships at the micro level. Whilst formal audience research methods were developed within Britain from the mid-1930s, the process of learning about listeners beyond these geographical borders remained necessarily rather haphazard, relying on letters and anecdote (Gillespie et al. 2011). The audience were regularly encouraged to write in, with official Summaries of Empire Correspondence (presented to senior BBC staff through the intermediary figure of Miss Quigley) revealing the significance attached to their letters (BBC WAC 1934a). Cecil Madden, an Empire Service producer, boasted of āfive hundred letters a weekā in the early 1930s; in 1933, 11,794 letters were received (BBC WAC 1934b). The Empire Programme Director confirmed that listeners could be influential, outlining as an example the introduction of fortnightly talks āby speakers who hail from other parts of the Empireā in view of the āvery sound criticismā that speakers āwere inclined to express the English point of view [ā¦] and to ignore the distinctive views of the Dominions and Coloniesā. He reassured potential (male) correspondents: āPlease don't be discouraged by the reflection that your views may be exactly cancelled out by the next man's, because you know his tastes are unlike yours. [ā¦] Listenersā personal experiences are the making of this serviceā (BBC WAC 1936b). Female listeners were soon making their own voices heard ā some framing their responses explicitly in relation to the gendered experience of being an isolated colonial wife.8
Unfortunately, letters from these early years do not survive intact, but extracts were reproduced in official BBC publications such as WR (distributed both in Britain and overseas), as well as in internal reports. The letters pages of BBC publications thus constitute an important ācontact zoneā (between broadcaster and listener, and between listeners) and a mode of intra-diasporic (and occasionally cross-diasporic) exchange in their own right. Yet academics have tended to sideline audience testimony in this form, in favour of āofficialā sources. Andrew Hill's nuanced psychoanalytical reading of Empire Service discourse is ultimately dismissive of listener agency: āthe listener occupies the position of one who is addressed, is provoked to respond and yet cannot do soā (Hill 2010: 5). As Simon Potter argues, letters do not provide any straightforward insights into the āsuccessā of the service (Potter 2008). The listeners who feature in the archives were self-selecting in taking the trouble to write or in volunteering for a panel; they were hardly representative. Their letters were then selected and edited by BBC staff; a process that, although not excluding critical responses, was likely to emphasise the positive. The challenges posed by the material should not, however, lead us to discount the insights it provides into the ways in which individuals responded to and conceptualised the medium of radio and broadcast content, in an imperial context.
My intention in this chapter is to offer a close reading of these letters as texts. Focusing on the recurrent themes of home, family and nation, I consider listener responses to some of the different kinds of sounds broadcast. How did short-wave technology, still a novelty in the interwar period, make possible new ways of connecting with the āhomelandā and of sustaining a sense of āBritishnessā in the dominions and colonies? Although the conclusions drawn about any one location will necessarily be limited, given the fragmentary evidence, the second part of the chapter will explore the importance of local context in relation to the conceptualisation of listening practices in the 1930s.
āOur patriotic imaginationā: pomp, pageantry and Big Ben
Even before the official launch of the service, the BBC started to build a small audience overseas for its broadcasts via the G5SW transmitter. As with the domestic service, national ceremonies and rituals featured heavily (MacKenzie 1986: 167). The sounds of royal processions, military parades and Big Ben were some of the earliest to feature. In November 1932, the New Zealand correspondent for WR presented their account of listening to experimental broadcasts. With the technology not yet perfected, there was a sense of wonder, amazement and pride at hearing sounds from London:
New Zealand listeners get out of our beds before the early dawn of a summer's day, and are completely satisfied if only Big Ben's chimes boom out in our own homes. There is a constant heavy hum [ā¦], and a rhythmic surge as the radio waves reach us. Then, to thrill us, from this noisy background, come music, military words of command, or the National Anthem. In spirit we are participating in a typical British ceremony, so that our loneliness in the great wastes of the South Pacific does not feel so great. Radio has linked us instantaneously with the heart of the Empire. We have not heard the whole programme, but our patriotic imagination has filled in the blanksā¦
(WR 1932a)
Here was not simply a āProjection of Britainā as Stephen Tallents imagined that same year, but an active construction of Britain by an audience creatively āfilling in the blanksā left by radio silences (Tallents 1932). Radio was perfectly suited to easing the collective isolation of New Zealanders by creating, through shared rituals, the sense of āsynchronicityā and āparallelismā identified by Benedict Anderson as characteristic of imagined national communities. The modern technology of radio offered a traditional mode of explicitly imperial patriotism (Anderson 1991: 188).9
Yet even as the New Zealand correspondent emphasised pomp and spectacle, there was recognition of the intimacy of the moment, of individual listeners in private, prematurely out of bed (perhaps barely awake), hearing Big Ben āin our own homesā. The word āhomeā had multiple meanings, being simultaneously the domestic/local site of listening and the national/global site of broadcasting. That these sites were at one and the same time distant and connected was key to the author's enthusiasm. At the end of the piece, āHomeā takes on emotional significance when attached to discourses of nation: āEngland is āHomeā [ā¦] and there is no ambiguity when the word is used. It means Great Britain, not a mere dwelling-place, but the spiritual centre towards which thoughts are always turningā (WR 1932a). The Empire Service, though distinguished in name from British domestic broadcasting, would be understood by some listeners through multilayered, deeply felt narratives of a national āhomeā in Britain. Radio permitted a new form of expression for the continued connections which were constitutive of a diasporic relationship, one imbued with both intimacy and immediacy.
Once formally established, the Empire Service included a varied programme of āactualityā, music, sport, talks and variety ā mostly taken from the domestic service due to financial constraints, though with some specially commissioned content (MacKenzie 1987: 43ā4). Initially, broadcasting was limited to ten hours a day, divided equally between five geographical zones: Australasia, India, Africa, West Africa and Canada. This increased to 14 and a half hours by the end of 1933, with the original zones abandoned in view of ātechnical developments whereby each transmission became receivable in various parts of the Empireā (BBC WAC n.d.). Still, place of domicile within the empire (rather than gender, age, race or class), was the organising principle applied to letters received and published by the BBC. Letters from ordinary New Zealanders echoed the official expression of loyalty to the feminised Mother Country, providing further evidence that New Zealand claimed a particularly close relationship to Britain.10 Of the four extracts in the 17 February 1933 edition of WR, two adopted explicitly patriotic language: one explained how the service ābrings our Motherland so nearā; the other emphasised, with some emotion, that, āWe in New Zealand are intensely patriotic and it fills the heart to hear the dear old home land talkingā. Letters from Canadians in the same issue took a rather more distant stance. One writer's critique was sufficient to provoke an official response in a front-page editorial, whereby their negative views were presented as unrepresentative. Nonetheless, the Canadians cited in this issue were generally positive about the programming. For example, one revealed satisfying new daily routines centred on BBC broadcasts: āMy wife and children look forward every night to hearing Big Benā. Two writers pointed out the difficulty of competing for reception with US ā āYankeeā ā stations, but one observed, āyou have no need to apologise on the score that [the programmes] are experimental. They are better by far than the general run hereā (WR 1933d). Canadians might frame their responses not simply within the geopolitical context of British imperialism, but with reference to their proximity to the USA. BBC staff were alert to this, with Malcolm Frost noting on his Empire tour in 1934 that British Canadian listeners were more likely to be ānationalā than āimperialā in their outlook (BBC WAC 1934d).
Big Ben was the undoubted star of the service, generating volumes of correspondence and rating top in listener surveys. In a letter from a Malayan estate, the first Christmas broadcast was recalled, made possible by a hastily erected aerial (a āHeath-Robinson contraptionā): āas we sat down to dinner that night Big Ben boomed through the house ā and to an exile that experience alone is far from being unmovingā (WR 1933c).11 It was the sound of Big Ben which stimulated nostalgia and motivated listeners to express their appreciation. This is not to deny the visual appeal of Big Ben as a metonym for London, England and Britishness more broadly, and illustrations in WR encouraged readers/listeners to fuse their aural and visual āmemoriesā.12 However, it was the chimes which dominated letters and allowed the expression of a specifically āBritishā sense of time in the world. One listener in Burma even reset their clock to Greenwich Mean Time to make it easier to follow programme schedules (WR 1934b).13 The experience of diaspora for British exiles could be both spatial and temporal, with the BBC enhancing their sense of disconnection from the immediate environment.
Discussions of relationships between the various colonies and dominions, which empire broadcasting had initially been intended to stimulate, were less common in the letters than were expressions of loyalty to Britain. This must partly reflect the nature of programming, whereby the majority of the schedule was occupied by content generated from within the British Isles.14 Nevertheless, the Australian correspondent suggested that a sense of intra-empire connection through shared ritual had some currency: āThe Christmas Day programme sent a thrill of pride through every Australian. Australians are particularly loyal to the Empire as an institution, and the thing that stirred us most was the roll-call. As the announcer went round the Empire, following the setting sun, we went with himā (WR 1933e). These imperial āroll-callsā became a regular Christmas event, preceding the King's speech until the abdication in 1936. Empire Day and royal occasions provided further opportunities for programming which connected colonies, dominions and the United Kingdom through an exchange of broadcast material (MacKenzie 1986, passim).
āShadowy touches of homeā: radio sounds of the everyday
Pomp, pageantry and the chimes of Big Ben were regular, popular and much-vaunted features of early broadcasts. Still, some listeners, particularly first generation exiles, yearned to hear more everyday sounds, suggesting a mode of ābanal nationalismā (Billig 1995). In 1932, before the official launch of the service, a woman in British Guiana pondered her own aural memories of Britain, hinting at the possibility of conflict regarding the version of āHomeā to be broadcast:
No, not for me those glimpses of the London of hard, white brilliance, reminding us that she has welcome only for the rich, coldly indifferent to such as must save for y...
