by Lynne Olson
In a letter spirited out of Czechoslovakia, a girl wrote, “People who are almost too poor to buy bread have now a radio. They need it. A man told me, ‘The stomach is hungry but the soul still more so. London is the only thing to feed the soul.’ ” A French journalist reported, “The initials BBC have quickly become part and parcel of the daily vocabulary of French citizens.”
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ONLY A YEAR BEFORE the Battle of Britain, the idea of the British Broadcasting Corporation serving as a beacon of liberty for the rest of Europe would have been laughable. For one thing, it had strongly supported the Chamberlain government’s decisions to appease Hitler and to refrain from military commitments to other countries threatened by Germany. Founded in 1922 but already the world’s oldest national broadcasting service, the BBC was a curious amalgam: although it received government funding and was ultimately answerable to Parliament, it was supposed to have editorial independence. Sir John Reith, a tall, craggy-faced Scot who was its first director general, viewed its charter differently. “Assuming that the BBC is for the people, and the Government is for the people, it follows that the BBC must be for the government,” he declared. Under Reith, the BBC squelched news that Neville Chamberlain found unpalatable and relied almost entirely on official sources for its news broadcasts. It provided no analysis, no context, and no alternative points of view.
When the government pressed newspapers and the BBC to go easy on Hitler and Germany, declaring that controversial foreign policy issues should not be publicly discussed, the BBC complied. Urged by Chamberlain and his men to downplay Hitler’s pressure on Czechoslovakia in 1938, the BBC minimized both Britain’s unpreparedness for war and the magnitude of the threat facing the Czechs. In the aftermath of the Munich crisis, a high-level BBC official wrote a confidential memo to his superiors accusing them of embarking on a “conspiracy of silence.”
Those who disagreed with appeasement, like Winston Churchill and a few other members of Parliament, were largely banned from BBC programs. In early September 1938, one of those MPs, Harold Nicolson, was told he could not broadcast a speech he had prepared because it urged British support of Czechoslovakia. In its place, the “very angry” Nicolson was forced to deliver an “innocuous” talk, but even then a radio engineer was standing by, ready to interrupt the broadcast if he so much as mentioned Czechoslovakia.
During the bungled British expedition to Norway, the BBC, having no foreign correspondents of its own, relied on government handouts that reported an unending string of successes for British troops. Leland Stowe, an American journalist covering the Norway campaign, was astonished when he heard a BBC announcer declare one night that “British expeditionary forces are pressing forward steadily from all points where they have landed in Norway. Resistance has been shattered…and the British and French are advancing successfully.” An American photographer traveling with Stowe stared at him in amazement. “Christ, what’s the matter with those mugs?” the photographer exclaimed. “Are they crazy?”
With Reith at the helm, the BBC was as out of touch with the lives of ordinary Britons as it was with events in war-battered Europe. Before the war began, it was, as one employee remembered, “an agreeable, comfortable, cultured, leisured place, remote from the world of business and struggle.” To set that highbrow tone, BBC announcers, whose voices tended to have “an exquisitely bored, impeccably impeccable Oxford accent,” were instructed to wear dinner jackets while at the microphone.
In a meeting with Reith in the late 1930s, the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who had just arrived in London, made clear that he and his American network had no intention of adopting the BBC’s nose-in-the-air attitude. “I want our programs to be anything but intellectual,” he said. “I want them to be down to earth and comprehensible to the man in the street.” With a dismissive wave of his hand, Reith replied, “Then you will drag radio down to the level of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.” Murrow nodded: “Exactly.”
The BBC’s ivory-tower attitude changed soon after Britain declared war against Germany. The most immediate differences were physical: Sandbags were heaped high around Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters, with rifle-toting sentries guarding its massive bronze front doors. The building’s graceful art deco interiors were divided by steel partitions and gas-tight doors, while its trompe l’oeil murals were covered by heavy soundproofing. The seats of the concert hall were ripped out to create a giant employee dormitory, with mattresses lining the stage and floor. And its announcers no longer wore black tie to read the news. “This,” remarked a BBC writer, “was the end of the boiled-shirt tradition in radio.”
But dramatic as the physical shifts were, the transformation in the BBC’s attitude and style was nothing less than revolutionary. After Reith was named head of the government’s new Ministry of Information in early 1940, the network began an extraordinary metamorphosis that by war’s end would weave it into the fabric of everyday British life, as well as make it the most trusted news source in the world.
In the newsroom, a throng of new producers and editors was hired, many of them former print reporters who brought with them a burst of energy and journalistic fervor. R. T. Clark, a classics scholar and former editorial writer for the Manchester Guardian, was put in charge of the domestic news service. Soon after he came on board, Clark, a cigarette dangling from his lips, signaled a seismic shift in the BBC’s news policy when he announced to his staff, “Well, brothers, now that war’s come, your job is to tell the truth. And if you aren’t sure it is the truth, don’t use it.” In an internal memo, he wrote, “It seems to me that the only way to strengthen the morale of the people whose morale is worth strengthening, is to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”
Clark’s philosophy was cheered not only by the new hires but also by a group of young staffers already on the payroll, dubbed the “warmongers,” who had been openly critical of their employer’s manipulation of the news and its refusal to allow critics of the Chamberlain government to broadcast. Arguably the most outspoken warmonger was a tall, dark-haired dynamo named Noel Newsome, who, as head of the network’s new European Service, was, in the words of the BBC historian Asa Briggs, “one of the most industrious, lively, and imaginative” of all the BBC’s wartime personnel.
The son of a country doctor from Somerset, the thirty-four-year-old Newsome had studied at Oxford, where he’d received a first-class degree in modern history. After several years of working as a subeditor for the Daily Telegraph and foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, he became foreign editor of the Telegraph—and immediately made clear his opposition to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany.
Hired by the BBC two days before the war began, Newsome objected to the government’s position that radio news should be used as an instrument of propaganda, the main function of which was to promote the official British point of view. Like R. T. Clark, Newsome argued for accurate reporting and vehemently protested when the government misinformed the BBC and other media about what was happening in Norway. “I cannot but resent most strongly that we were used as a blind tool,” he remarked.
While urging the BBC and the government to give editorial independence to the European Service, Newsome instructed his staffers to act as if they already had it. “Noel Newsome set the style and called the tune,” noted Alan Bullock, Newsome’s wartime assistant, who went on to become one of Britain’s most eminent postwar historians. Bullock quoted Newsome as saying, “What we have to do in this period of the war, when [Britain is] on the defensive, is to establish our credibility. If there’s a disaster, we broadcast it before the Germans claim it….And when the tide turns and the victories are ours, we’ll be believed.”
Most British policy makers, however, thought that the BBC should act as the voice of the government. In 1935, the Committee of Imperial Defence, a high-level Whitehall group that coordinated defense strategy, declared that in time of war, the government must take “effective con
trol of broadcasting and the BBC.” Curiously, one of the strongest advocates of that position was Winston Churchill himself. Even though, as a foe of appeasement, he had been kept off the air in prewar days, he became one of the most enthusiastic supporters of using the BBC for propaganda purposes when he reentered the government as Chamberlain’s first lord of the admiralty in September 1939. In fact, as first lord, he was directly responsible for the falsely optimistic reports about the Norwegian campaign issued to the newspapers and BBC.
When he became prime minister, Churchill continued to oppose the idea of independence for the network. Early in his premiership, he told a subordinate that the BBC “was the enemy within the gates, doing more harm than good.” On another occasion, he referred to it as “one of the major neutrals.” Yet for all his grumbling, Churchill ultimately decided against government control, thanks in large part to the influence of Brendan Bracken, the prime minister’s closest political adviser, who was appointed minister of information in July 1941. With Bracken, a longtime supporter of BBC independence, in overall charge, Whitehall held only a loose rein on the network. Two advisers were appointed to oversee all entertainment and news programs, but their supervision was relatively light-handed.
In the months and years to come, there would be spirited battles, to be sure, among BBC journalists, the Ministry of Information, and the Political Warfare Executive, Britain’s wartime propaganda agency. Overall, though, the BBC succeeded in holding the government at arm’s length for the rest of the war.
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WITHIN THE NETWORK’S EUROPEAN Service, the spirit of innovation and excitement was palpable. Virtually everyone working there was a newcomer to broadcasting, caught up in this grand experiment to bring truth and hope to millions of people under Nazi domination. Britons rubbed shoulders with dispossessed Europeans. Journalists, novelists, and poets worked with actors, college professors, businessmen, philosophers, former military officers—all thrust into a world they never could have imagined in their prewar days. Alan Bullock, an Oxford graduate who had worked as a research assistant for Churchill before going to the BBC, remembered it as the time of his life. Working in the European Service, he added, was like “being a historian, living through history, in history.”
When Bullock came aboard, the European Service was just two years old. Until 1938, the BBC, reflecting Britain’s insularity from Europe and the rest of the world, broadcast only in English. When it began its embryonic transmissions to Europe in September 1938, its first broadcast—in French, German, and Italian—was, ironically, the text of Neville Chamberlain’s speech in which he expressed horror over the thought of Britain going to war to defend Czechoslovakia.
When war broke out, the BBC’s foreign operation was still relatively small, with broadcasts in only seven languages. In just a few months, it exploded to forty-five languages, half of them beamed to Europe. The larger language sections, such as French and German, broadcast up to five hours a day, including talks by and interviews of exiled heads of state and other prominent figures. But for all the sections, news was the centerpiece of the broadcasts. It was “the rock,” Alan Bullock recalled. “When people are listening to you with very considerable danger and difficulty, news is what they want.”
Working up to sixteen hours a day, the maverick spirits in the European Service were waging a war in which, as one observer put it, “their only weapons were wit, intelligence and a passionate conviction that they were going to win.” And for two long years, they did so under the chaotic conditions of the Blitz.
Until the end of 1940, the European Service was based at Broadcasting House, which proved to be a prime landmark—and target—for the Luftwaffe’s attacks on London. In mid-October 1940, a bomb crashed into the BBC headquarters, destroying the music library and several studios and killing seven staffers. Less than two months later, it was hit again. With the exception of the domestic news service, which took up space in Broadcasting House’s subbasement, the BBC’s major departments were evacuated to buildings in other parts of London and the country.
The European Service first took shelter in an abandoned ice rink, complete with glass roof, in the west London neighborhood of Maida Vale. Horrified at the thought of being under all that glass during a bombing raid, Noel Newsome noted that “we were packed like cattle” into tiny makeshift offices in a place “which might at any moment become a slaughterhouse.” To his great relief, he and his colleagues were moved three months later to Bush House, a white sandstone behemoth near London’s financial center, which would remain home to the European Service—and, from 1958, all of the BBC World Service—until 2012.*
Noted for its impressive exterior of pillars and arches, its soaring central hall, its marble staircases and bronze-doored elevators, Bush House had been the world’s most expensive office building when it opened in the 1920s. Sadly, BBC staffers had no opportunity to enjoy the spaciousness and elegant art deco touches of its upper floors. Instead, because of the ever-present threat of bombing, they were jammed into its cramped basement, with its rabbit warren of corridors and minuscule offices.
The stuffy makeshift studios, usually shrouded in cigarette smoke, were also tiny. To improve the acoustics, canvas-covered screens were hung from the ceiling, and an oil lamp was placed by the door in case a bomb knocked out the electricity and extinguished the lights. Once, when General Bernard Montgomery was escorted into the bowels of Bush House for a broadcast, he stared in astonishment at the scruffy surroundings, then asked the BBC staffer accompanying him, “People don’t work down here all the time, do they?”
Indeed they did—and most seemed to enjoy the seething, more than slightly chaotic atmosphere, which George Orwell, who worked there during the war, described as “halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum.” So many staffers and guest broadcasters rushed in and out that it was hard to keep track of all of them. When King Haakon arrived one day for a broadcast, the harassed receptionist asked him: “Sorry, dear—where did you say you were king of?”
Labeling themselves “the Bushmen,” those working for the European Service considered themselves a breed apart from the BBC’s domestic staffers, who “seemed to be awfully stuffy and odd.” “It’s curious how independent of the mother house we were,” said the veteran BBC producer and executive Robin Scott, who got his start in the European Service. “I felt that they weren’t nearly as clever at the broadcasting game as the people in Bush House, who were not only winning the war but shaping the future of broadcasting.”
Each country section had its own editor and staff, usually a mix of Britons and natives of the country involved. British nationals wrote the news items and served as language supervisors to ensure that translations of the news copy were accurate. The translators and announcers, in turn, almost always came from the countries to which they were broadcasting. To make sure that a broadcaster didn’t stray from the written text, the language supervisor sat in the control room with his finger on a switch that would shut off transmission—just in case, as Alan Bullock facetiously said, some announcer “suddenly shouted hurrah for Hitler.”
The switch was almost never used. Nonetheless, prebroadcast conflicts often erupted between independent-minded foreign staffers and their equally forceful British supervisors, usually over the content of talks and other nonnews programs. Some of the exiled governments were allowed to develop their own programs, but they had to submit their scripts in advance. “We were very, very careful about what they were saying,” Bullock noted. “What we imposed was quite different from the normal censorship [for security]….We exercised a political censorship over them.”
Resenting such control, some European staffers were scornful of the British, whom they thought of as “ignorant, knowing nothing about Europe,” Bullock added. “But in the end, all the rows and arguments died away. They were insignificant compared to the fact that everyone shared a common purpose and that London went on broadcasting.”
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OR THE HEADS OF STATE and other prominent figures of occupied Europe, the BBC provided an invaluable opportunity to reconnect with their countrymen, whose confidence in their leaders had, in some cases, been badly shaken by their abrupt departure after German invasion. That was certainly true for King Haakon, who took to the air in July 1940 when a group of Norwegian members of Parliament, pressured hard by their German occupiers, demanded that Haakon abdicate and hand over power to a German-controlled governing body. In a BBC broadcast to Norway, the king rejected that demand as resolutely as he had Hitler’s ultimatum in April to cede power to Vidkun Quisling.
Assuring his people that he and his government had escaped not from fear or cowardice but to continue the struggle, Haakon declared in a deep, calm voice tinged only slightly with emotion, “The liberty and independence of the Norwegian people are to me the first commandment of the Constitution….I consider I am obeying this commandment by remaining king. I say today, as I shall say all my life: All for Norway!”
The king’s broadcast was heard by tens of thousands of Norwegians, and copies of his speech were surreptitiously circulated to those with no access to a radio. Faced with Haakon’s refusal to abdicate, the Norwegian parliamentarians broke off negotiations with the Germans, and the king once again became the focal point of Norwegian defiance. Soon after his broadcast, the country’s infant resistance movement adopted Haakon’s monogram as its symbol for fighting back against the Germans. “H7” (for Haakon VII) was scribbled everywhere—on the walls of government buildings, school entrances, barns, and jail cells, even on the sheer faces of mountain cliffs. An underground chain letter, entitled “The Ten Commandments of Norwegians” and widely circulated through the country, had as its first commandment “Thou shalt obey King Haakon whom thyself has elected.”
