London Calling

Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War

Alban Webb

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781474227490
• eBook ISBN: 9781472515025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From its inception in 1932, overseas broadcasting by the BBC quickly became an essential adjunct to British diplomatic and foreign policy objectives. For this reason, the World Service was considered the primary means of engaging with attitudes and opinions behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Although funded by government Grant-in-Aid, the Service's editorial independence was enshrined in the BBC's Charter, Licence and Agreement. London Calling explores the delicate balance of power that lay in the relations between Whitehall and the World Service during the Cold War. This book also assesses the nature and impact of the World Service's programmes on listeners living in the Eastern bloc countries. In doing so, it traces the evolution of overseas broadcasting from Britain alongside the political, diplomatic and fiscal challenges that the country faced right up to the Suez crisis and the 1956 Hungarian uprising. These were defining experiences for the United Kingdom's international broadcaster that, as a consequence, helped shape and define the BBC World Service as we know it today. London Calling is an important study for anyone interested in the media and foreign policy histories of Great Britain or the history of the Cold War more generally. Winner of the Longman History Today Book of the Year Award 2015

Part One

From Total War to Cold War

1

Planning for Peace

The Second World War was the making of the multilingual ‘world service’ we recognize today. Expanding from one English-language service at the beginning of 1938 to well over forty by the middle of the war, it not only recast the scale and organization of BBC overseas broadcasting, but gave the Corporation a new strategic significance in the conduct of British military and foreign policy. This explosion in foreign-language broadcasting was consequently imprinted with wartime contingencies and exigencies, as was evident in the varying degrees of government oversight applied to programme output, for example by the Ministry of Information (MOI). The controlling impulse was strongest and most apparent in the case of Europe, to which BBC broadcasts, from September 1941, came under the supervision of the newly formed Political Warfare Executive (PWE).¹ Established to direct, co-ordinate and control political warfare and propaganda activities, such was the significance of BBC programmes to occupied Europe that PWE’s London headquarters were moved to the home of the European Services, Bush House, in March 1942.²

This intimate, though sometimes strained, relationship, which included the issuing of weekly directives by PWE Regional Directors to their broadcast counterparts, puts into perspective the extent to which the European Services had, for operational reasons, come under government control during the war. It also helps to explain some important conditioning factors when considering how the BBC transformed itself from an international broadcaster at war to one reorganized for peace. When considering its future role, the wartime BBC had expected that it would be necessary to maintain two separate overseas services ‘until the time comes when what we know as our European Division becomes an integral part of the BBC, free from the direct control of the PWE’.³ The segregation of these services from the rest of the BBC’s activities reveals the corporate mentality towards a branch of the organization that since its foundation (a definable European Service having emerged only in August 1939)⁴ had never been able to establish itself independent of the wartime context. Moreover, apart from the English-language services that had effectively avoided such oversight arrangements, the degrees of control hitherto exercised over foreign broadcasts posed a series of important questions for policy-makers in terms of prescribing the appropriate balance between editorial independence and government direction in the future. The wartime Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Sir Allan Powell, had been keenly aware of this delicate balancing act when he noted the ‘silken cords’ that linked the Corporation with the government could sometimes become ‘chains of iron’ when the controlling impulse was flexed.⁵ Resolving this dilemma took some time to work out.

In the autumn of 1943, nearly a year after Allied offensives at El Alamein and Stalingrad began to turn the tide of war against the Axis powers and publication of the Beveridge Report in the United Kingdom pointed towards a future free from the ‘five giants on the road of reconstruction’ – Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness⁶ – the BBC’s Director-General Robert Foot informed the Corporation’s Governors that he was ‘now engaged in clearing my own mind . . . with regard to the problems which will face us in the future’.⁷ After consulting senior executives and programme Controllers, he proposed a comprehensive review of the Corporation, its purpose and the activities of all its services in the post-war world. Foot’s review, co-written with William Haley who had been appointed to the new post of Editor-in-Chief from the Manchester Evening News in August 1943, defined in broad terms the reorganization of the BBC’s output. It envisaged that after the war there would be ‘five programmes, three in this country . . ., one European, and one Overseas Group comprising all the rest of the world excluding Europe’.⁸ Crucially, it was argued that the collective broadcast offer should be paid for out of the licence fee, as had been the case before the war, thereby insulating the Corporation from the kind of external governmental interference it had encountered since 1939, albeit in the pursuit of British war aims. It would take until April 2014, a further 71 years, before this particular ambition was achieved.⁹

Then, as now, the fate and future of the BBC were not entirely in its own hands. Both its constitution, under the rubric of its Royal Charter, and the nature of wartime practice required the intimate involvement of the government of the day. Accordingly, while senior management at Broadcasting House in London’s Fitzrovia began the process of reconceptualizing the radio world around them, policy-makers and officials in Whitehall and Westminster turned their attention to restructuring the government’s strategic communication operations. Responding to the request of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, to supply policy recommendations for a post-war transition period of up to two years, Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information, suggested a small committee to advise the government on ‘its attitude towards the future of radio broadcasting in this country’. Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, thought the BBC should be looked at in a wider context that examined ‘international as well as domestic issues’.¹⁰ Consequently, on 27 January 1944, the War Cabinet established a Ministerial Committee chaired by the newly appointed Minister of Reconstruction, Lord Woolton, to ‘enquire into future broadcasting policy’.¹¹ Here, the value of broadcasting across the world in English, a job the BBC had been doing since 1932, ‘for all those who think of the United Kingdom as home, wherever they may be’¹² was affirmed by the committee. And with six years’ worth of experience as to the value derived from foreign-language broadcasting behind them, there was little dissent among Ministers from Bracken’s view that the ‘broadcast voice of Britain has become a great influence in Europe’ and that ‘the Government will wish to have the BBC’s services to foreign countries continued after the war’.¹³ It was, nonetheless, taken as axiomatic that ‘the Government would have to exercise a much greater degree of control over overseas broadcasting than over home broadcasting’.¹⁴

With more than half of the BBC’s foreign-language services beamed across the channel, Europe, both strategically and in terms of the critical mass of effort the BBC had put into engaging overseas audiences, would prove to be the key to the wider shape and overall future design of the External Services. Haley, who by then had succeeded Foot as Director-General, met with the Broadcasting Committee in October 1944 along with Sir Allan Powell, the Chairman of the Board of Governors, and was invited to submit a paper on Broadcasting to Europe. Mirroring the government’s own provisional timetable to peace, the ‘first transitional period’, Haley reported, ‘will come to an end with final defeat of Germany’. The second, ‘when BBC broadcasting to a Europe nominally at peace would serve the ends of SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force] and of the British Government’, would last for one year. After this the third period would see ‘the Government . . . divest themselves of their present control over [the] European Division and return all responsibility for its activities to the BBC’.¹⁵ In thinking his paper through with the assistance of ‘a small divisional committee’, Haley tried to imagine what the post-war requirements of a liberated Europe would be. In terms of content, and unhampered by the editorial needs of war, ‘The most we should seek to do is to make available British news, British culture, and a projection of life to those who wish to make acquaintance with them’, a view which accorded with that of the Broadcasting Committee.¹⁶ But what of the make-up of the BBC’s continental audiences? Following the end of hostilities, Haley felt the profile of the BBC’s listenership would change radically: ‘Once the dark silence of Hitler’s five year blackout of news has been lifted there will not be the same overwhelming need for the clerk and the peasant in Europe to listen to the BBC.’¹⁷ This expectation ran in the face of the BBC’s wartime experience of broadcasting for mass consumption but Haley believed that with the inevitable redevelopment of indigenous broadcast networks, the Corporation could not expect to maintain such a numerically large and demographically wide audience. Therefore, it was argued that BBC broadcasts should be aimed at ‘a much more restricted circle; newspapers, publicists, [and] men . . . who take an interest in international politics’: in effect, the decision-makers, opinion-formers and male educated classes of liberated Europe.¹⁸ In pursuit of this, it was proposed that the number of services should be reduced to the ‘great European languages’ of French, German, Spanish, or Swedish, at least one of which this elite target audience could be expected to speak.¹⁹ When ministers met on 24 April 1945, just two weeks before Victory in Europe Day, to discuss ‘broadcasting to foreign countries’, it was generally agreed that they indeed should be reduced to a ‘comparatively small scale’.²⁰

Figure 1 William Haley, BBC Director-General, February 1952

Managing Editor at the Manchester Evening News from 1930 and then Managing Director of Manchester Guardian and Evening News Ltd., Haley joined the BBC as Editor-in-Chief in 1943 before becoming its Director-General the following year. After overseeing a fundamental reorganisation of the Corporation he left the BBC in 1952 to return to newspapers as Editor of The Times.

This, then, was the initial broad-brush strategy for post-war overseas broadcasting allying the removal of direct government intrusion into programming with a reduction in scale to reflect a peacetime remit of projecting Britain abroad. In practice, governing mindsets were to change significantly with the end of the war as an evolving global communications landscape revealed new challenges and opportunities. The BBC had originally envisaged a European Service, reduced from a wartime peak of 50 broadcasting hours a day (across all languages) to a peacetime level of 9 hours, within an overseas framework that encompassed broadcasting in English overseas, a Latin-American Service and an Arabic Service.²¹ Yet, within a very short space of time, not only had the locus and make-up of government decision-making changed but so too had some of the underlying assumptions about the role of international broadcasting in the future. The dissolution of the Coalition government in May meant that the Broadcasting Committee was unable to complete its deliberations. It was left to the new Labour Government and the Lord President of the Council, Herbert Morrison, to finish the job under the auspices of a Cabinet Committee (GEN 81).²² As this committee worked its way towards a finished report, a rather different vision of BBC foreign services reorganization began to emerge. Speaking off the record in November at the BBC’s annual General Liaison Meeting, Haley, who had met with Morrison’s committee in October, revealed

he had come to the conclusion, and the Government had agreed with him, that it would be far more sensible to build the Overseas Division service by service, from the bottom up; instead of making a global picture first and fitting in the services, as a result of which the Division would probably be either over-sized or inadequate.²³

This was a far more pragmatic and piecemeal approach to the future of overseas broadcasting than originally planned and a world away from the handful of languages recently proposed by Haley. It reflected a more flexible approach which was in keeping with conditions on the ground where there was ‘strong evidence that the European Service retains a surprisingly large audience and that our friends on the Continent are most anxious that it should continue’. Therefore, while there was an overall reduction in output after the war, the change was to be found in the volume of transmissions and not in the number of languages broadcast.

It was on this revised basis that GEN 81 presented its Report on Broadcasting Policy to the Cabinet, which was discussed and approved on 17 and 20 December 1945.²⁴ With the BBC’s current Charter, Licence and Agreement due to run out on 31 December 1946 after a period of ten years, debate about the future of British broadcasting moved to Parliament where a White Paper on Broadcasting Policy was duly considered in July 1946.²⁵ The constitutional settlement was finally enacted when the new Charter came into force on 1 January 1947, the first ever to deal with foreign language, as well as domestic, programming. However, it was only one element of the post-war reorganization of the BBC: the legislative framework within which the detail would be worked out.

Meanwhile, as the Corporation peered over the precipice of Charter renewal and imagined its role abroad in the future, senior management set about organizing its own thoughts in a paper on ‘The Principles and Purpose of the BBC’s External Services’.²⁶ As this important document acknowledges, the heart of its activities was news – ‘the kernel of all overseas broadcasting’²⁷ – about which the White Paper had laid down that the ‘treatment of an item in an Overseas news bulletin must not differ in any material respect from its treatment in a current news bulletin for domestic listeners’.²⁸ Reflecting this and outlining arguments that remained germane to its overseas task over the long term, the BBC argued the ‘purpose of such a news services is threefold’:

1. It acts as a prime source of fact and information for anyone who cares to take it, either professionally as journalists, publicists, politicians, or as private citizens.
2. It makes the truth available in places where it might not otherwise be known. By its presence, it forces newspapers and broadcasting in authoritarian countries themselves to approximate closer and closer to the truth.
3. Within the Commonwealth, where it is often rebroadcast on Dominion internal services, it has a different purpose. Here it provides both a wider cov...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 From Total War to Cold War
• Part 2 Through the Iron Curtain
• Part 3 Global Reach
• Part 4 Battlefields
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright