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’:
In addition, the paper gave voice to an article of faith for the Corporation that had been learnt through the tough experience of the war years: ‘it is not a function of the BBC’s external services to interfere in the domestic affairs of any other nation. The services do not exist to throw out Governments or to change regimes.’30 Instead, overseas broadcasting, and Talks programmes in particular, should ‘provide a means of displaying the British way of life’ and ‘British democracy at work and leisure’.31 As will be seen, there were times when such principles were somewhat challenged by broadcast practice.
Working out the formal institutional relationship between the government and the BBC was another area that occupied a considerable amount of time in advance of the new Charter. During the war, this had been the business of the Postmaster-General, the Minister of Information and the PWE covering technical, policy and operational issues. With the dissolution of PWE and MOI by March 1946,32 it was nonetheless thought ‘essential to retain some effective central organisation to handle Government publicity’. The result was the establishment of a new organizational structure, the Government Information Services (GIS) to co-ordinate the activities of the newly minted Central Office of Information (COI), the British Council, the Information Departments of concerned ministries, such as the Foreign and Colonial Offices, Information Officers at overseas Embassies, other official and non-official bodies, and the BBC.33 This would then define the ‘broad outlines to be followed by official publicity [that] will in future be agreed interdepartmentally through the Ministerial and Official Committees’.34 While the Postmaster-General was to remain responsible for technical issues, in terms of wider policy it was decided, after some initial hesitation, that the Lord President (who was responsible for the COI and oversaw the GIS) would act as ‘the Minister who will answer Questions on major broadcasting policy save where they fall clearly within the province of one of his colleagues’.35 The government’s reluctance for any one minister to be formally associated with responsibility for the BBC,36 an independent legal entity, was matched by the very strong desire of the Foreign Office (FO) to take the lead on matters of overseas broadcasting. In September 1945, the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, had asked his Cabinet colleagues for a ‘decision in principle that foreign publicity is an instrument for foreign policy, and that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs must be responsible for it’.37 This was supported three months later by the Official Committee on GIS and subsequently by the Cabinet where ‘in so far as the Government may accept responsibility for the policy behind overseas broadcasting services, the responsibility should lie with the overseas Ministers, each in his own sphere’.38 As a consequence, the FO took control of the day-to-day relationship between the government and the External Services of the BBC.
British governments have repeatedly emphasized the editorial independence of the BBC and programming content was publicly upheld, along with technical know-how, as within the Corporation’s sphere of influence. Nevertheless, successive BBC Licences had included two powers which offered ministers the opportunity to apply political pressure and the 1947 Licence was no different. The first stated that the ‘Corporation shall whenever so requested by any Department of His Majesty’s Government . . . send . . . any announcement or other matter which such Department may require to be broadcast’ while the second gave the Postmaster-General the ability to ‘require the Corporation to refrain from sending any broadcast matter (either particular or general)’.39 This provided the government the right to either force or prevent broadcasting by the BBC of certain material or particular programmes. But it was the influence derived from these powers, rather than their actual use, which was key as indicated by the wartime experience of the Postmaster-General, Harry Crookshank: ‘the existence of the right has on occasion facilitated agreement concerning the withdrawal of items to which serious exception may be taken without formal exercise of the veto’.40 As Lord Asa Briggs, the first official historian of the BBC, has persuasively noted, government ‘could always influence what might be called “the temperature” ’ of the BBC’s broadcasts’.41
Far more specific to the External Services, and far more pervasive, was the stipulation in the White Paper and then the Charter that the BBC would ‘remain independent in the preparation of programmes for overseas audiences, though it should obtain from Government Departments concerned such information about conditions in these countries and the policies of His Majesty’s Government towards them as will permit it to plan its programmes in the national interest’.42 This was the outcome of the Broadcasting Committee’s problem of how to exert a greater degree of control over overseas broadcasting. Through this guidance mechanism, the FO and other departments received their right of access to the External Services and the direction and preparation of programme output. The fact that this was accepted by the BBC also indicates the value it perceived to be getting by adhering to such a consultative relationship not the least of which was the genuine desire, with limited resources, to be apprised of conditions in reception territories and the wish not to misrepresent the ‘national interest’ by being unaware of British strategic priorities – something broadcasters would have been particularly sensitive to from their recent wartime experience. Understanding this balance was central to the first directive issued by Sir Ian Jacob when he joined the BBC as the new Controller of European Services in July 1946. When visiting the FO, Service Directors should ‘seek to learn all they can, they should listen to the views expressed, but they should not act on guidance received directly from the Foreign Office departmental officials without testing it by our long-term standards, referring as may be to me’.43 This was a point clearly understood by Haley who wrote in October 1946, ‘The desire to distort information is, in this country, rarely in evidence. The desire to suppress information, particularly news whose publication may be inconvenient from a short-term point of view, is more apparent.’ However, it was
precisely this kind of news to which the overseas listener is inclined to attach great value, and by which the independence and integrity of the BBC’s news services are judged. This, quite frankly, is not always understood in official circles but by now the BBC has had long experience in maintaining its point of view and persuading others of the strength of its case.44
Although increasingly well versed in defending itself against direct political pressure, there was another crucial element of the relationship between the BBC and the government that had very important implications for the independence of the External Services – finance. From the start of the Broadcasting Committee’s deliberations, the Postmaster-General had correctly linked the BBC’s disposition towards an increased licence fee after the war, from which all broadcasting activities could be funded, with the Corporation’s attempts to divest itself from financial dependence on the state.45 Until 1 September 1939, the BBC’s activities were funded out of a licence fee, but since then all costs had been covered by a Treasury Grant-in-Aid.46 When planning the Corporation’s post-war financial arrangements and the reinstatement of a licence fee, Haley originally estimated the cost of the European Services at £500,000 a year with the total per annum cost of overseas broadcasting loosely estimated at £900,000.47 Reflecting his vision at the time of a reduced overseas operation, he calculated that with an increased licence fee of £1 (up from 10/−) providing around £10 million in revenue it could be possible for this to cover the entirety of the BBC’s output.48
Such a significant organizational leap into the unknown, especially in the context of the variable broadcast demands of the post-war world, induced a sense of caution on the part of the BBC,
While stating the complete financing of the BBC’s sound broadcasting activities out of its revenues as a proper objective, therefore, I suggest we would have to seek some half-way house to begin with so that we could see how we went on. The presence of a provisional Treasury guarantee in the background need not deter us from reaching our goal.49
But as the real cost of maintaining many, if not all of the language services in Europe, the Middle East, Far East and South-East Asia, North and Latin America became apparent through 1945, it was agreed by the Cabinet in December that ‘the cost of overseas broadcasting should be borne by the Exchequer independently of any licence fee revenue’.50 A revised estimate for the BBC’s External Services of £3,150,000 ultimately secured the argument, turning a transitional funding expedient into lasting financial control for the government.51
Haley and the Board of Governors had been aware from an early stage of what the consequences of such an arrangement might be. It was recognized, for example, that ‘Subsidisation inevitably involves some degree of control’.52 This was also understood by the Official Committee on GIS at the beginning of 1946 where it ‘was pointed out that there was a close link between control of expenditure and control of policy’.53 While acknowledging that ‘the content of the [overseas] service should be the responsibility of the BBC’, Ivone Kirkpatrick, a member of the committee who was instrumental in defining the post-war relationship between the Foreign Office and the Corporation, explained that ‘the scope and character of overseas broadcasting should be ultimately fixed by the Foreign Secretary or other responsible Minister’. He then went on to lay out before the committee his view of the relationship between the BBC’s foreign services and the government in a clinical analysis:
This ultimate Government responsibility was inherent in the Government’s control over the grant-in-aid for overseas broadcasting. It was not intended that the Government should accept any formal responsibility for the conduct of the overseas services, but finance would be provided on the basis of an approved programme, and the Government would be fully entitled to bring pressure to bear on the BBC in order that the service should accord with the aims of Government policy. The ultimate sanction would be a financial one.54
Not only was this unnervingly prophetic of the approach he was to take with the BBC ten years later during the Suez crisis, but it clearly exposed, as the new Charter was being prepared, a disposition within Whitehall towards the kind of leverage the government might seek for its funding of the External Services.
The spectre of Parliamentary scrutiny over these funding arrangements was also perceived by the BBC as a potential challenge to its autonomy. The June 1946 Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on Estimates proposed an official audit arguing the Grant-in-Aid required ‘the same close financial scrutiny as is normally applied to the direct functions of Government’.55 This was despite the 1936 Ullswater Committee concluding that to criticize the BBC’s accounts ‘by comparison with the detailed Estimates presented to Parliament for Government services would be to overlook the constitutional difference between the two cases’.56 For Haley, who perceived the Select Committee’s recommendations as the thin edge of the wedge leading to the future scrutiny of all the BBC’s accounts, this raised ‘the one main issue – that of the BBC’s independence’.57 The result was a settlement brokered by the Treasury whereby the government’s Comptroller and Auditor General would ‘inspect and vouch’ a total figure rather than examine a detailed estimate.58
The Grant-in-Aid now tied the BBC to the machinery of government and the political and administrative currents that flowed through it. Meanwhile, back at Broadcasting House in the autumn of 1946 the Board of Governors congratulated Haley ‘on the amount of independence he had managed to secure for the Corporation’ on the question of funding.59 This may seem at odds with the original aim of BBC management to cut the fiscal link with Whitehall, but it indicates both how far the ground had shifted since negotiations on the post-war shape and purpose of broadcasting began, and the limited extent to which the BBC was able to dictate the terms of the new constitutional settlement. It had to be increasingly careful and tactical about how and when it exercised its influence. An example of this was the secret agreement Haley negotiated with the Treasury that went beyond the terms of the financial provisions of the Charter. As he informed colleagues, he had extracted a
written assurance from the Treasury that they would resist any encroachment on the BBC’s independence in respect of its Home services as a result of the agreement to afford the Comptroller and Auditor-General access to the accounts of the Grant in Aid Services . . . [which] . . . could be produced in the future for the Treasury or Cabinet, but was not for publication in Parliament or elsewhere.60
The fact remained, however, that along with the assistance in funding, the government had acquired an unprecedented level of peace-time control over the BBC and with it greater influence over its activities.
Speaking in the July 1946 Parliamentary Charter Debate the Lord President, Herbert Morrison, who with the Postmaster-General had presented the White Paper on Broadcasting Policy, publicly laid out his understanding of the relationship between the government and the BBC:
Clearly, it would be unthinkable for Broadcasting House to be broadcasting to Europe, at the taxpayer’s expense, doctrines hopelessly at variance with the foreign policy of His Majesty’s Government; but for reasons which I hope will commend themselves . . . it appeared to the Government to be equally undesirable that the Foreign Office should themselves become responsible for the foreign services. In the first place, the conduct of a broadcasting service requires a different sort of experience and imagination from the conduct of diplomacy. . . . Secondly, broadcasting is a fulltime job. Thirdly, and most important of all, we believe that the foreign services will better retain the respect of listeners abroad and of the public at home if, like the Home Services, they are removed as far as possible from the danger of being used to push the interests of political parties instead of the nation as a whole.61
Morrison then went on to explain how this balance between government control and editorial independence would be achieved,
The Corporation will accept the guidance of the Foreign Office on the nature and scope of its foreign language services, and there will be a very close liaison between the two of them. . . . But once the general character and scope of a service has been laid down, the BBC will have complete discretion as to the content of the programmes themselves.62
Determining what was precisely meant by Morrison’s term ‘character and scope’, echoing the phrase used by the Official Committee on GIS five months earlier, was a problem exercising minds at the BBC. Haley understood its meaning to relate to ‘the time and money devoted to the different language transmissions’ but was unsure whether ‘it will extend to actual content of a service’. It was possible, he thought, that the ‘Government might take a view it had a right to order what it was paying for’ – the quid pro quo of funding.63 That being said, there was at the same time in many parts of the government an understanding of, and genuine interest in, the value to be had from an avowedly independent BBC that could use its wartime reputation for credibility to represent British news, views and way of life to a world audience. To diminish this would be to erode the effectiveness of British overseas publicity policy.
The main conditions of the five-year Charter were clear. Overseas broadcasting would continue with a global remit and the External Services would accept guidance and funding from the government. Editorial independence of foreign broadcasting was affirmed, although due consideration would have to be given to the policies of His Majesty’s Government. It gave the government the right to prescribe to whom, for how long and in what languages the External Services broadcast, which was an extension of its willingness to fund these activities. Yet, at the same time, the Charter was a document of intent and did not offer a detailed set of instructions for the management and conduct of the External Services. Key government and BBC figures would be just as important as the institutional and constitutional architecture surrounding them, if not sometimes more so, in determining the temperature and tone of day-to-day relations. Rather, it provided a space in which an evolving appreciation of the post-war requirements of overseas broadcasting could be allowed to develop. In this respect, the commission to broadcast in the ‘national interest’ represented a conceptual frame as much as a practical demand around which political, strategic and editorial interests could be aligned without being explicitly linked. The lack of a detailed prescription for overseas broadcasting and reliance on broad policy strokes helped construct a constitutional distance between the broadcaster and Whitehall. It was, nonetheless, a fiction of a distance which concealed an ongoing negotiation concerning the ever-present competition that existed between notions of editorial integrity and independence, on the one hand, and the desire to exert influence over programme-making to bring it in line with British geopolitical interests, on the other. As such, in respect of its overseas services, the new Charter was an act of pragmatic politics between the BBC and the government.