The virtually unanimous condemnation of the Soviet Union’s repressive intervention in Central Europe contrasted starkly with the acute divisions of opinion within both British society and the wider international community concerning the United Kingdom’s policy towards Egypt following that country’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956. In reflecting this state of affairs in its domestic and overseas broadcasts, the BBC consequently found itself in direct confrontation with the British government over what was considered appropriate to broadcast from the perspective of the national interest. The result, in broadcasting terms, was the defining post-war argument between the government and the BBC, which shaped future relations between the two. When the Director-General, Sir Ian Jacob, was summoned to the Foreign Office (FO) on the eve of British military engagement on the Suez Canal it appeared to be an argument the BBC was about to lose.
At that meeting on 25 October 1956 with the Foreign Office Minister of State, Anthony Nutting, Jacob, accompanied by Tangye Lean, was informed that the government ‘had been giving thought over a long time to the external services, which in recent months had not, in their view, given value for money spent on them’. On the basis of a Cabinet discussion the previous day it was intended that £1 million, around 20 per cent of the money spent on broadcasting overseas, would be cut from the External Services budget. As a result, Nutting told Jacob, the majority of services to Western Europe would be abolished along with some for Africa and India. If this did not provide the required savings, further cuts in services to Latin America and economies in the General Overseas Services would be considered.1 Meanwhile, in order to ‘advise the BBC on the content and direction of the oversea programmes’ and thereby enforce a measure of governmental editorial control, a Foreign Office liaison officer with a desk in Bush House would be imposed on the broadcaster.2 Furious at the sudden presentation of these proposals without prior consultation, Jacob argued forcefully that these measures ‘would have the effect of destroying a large and integral part of the Corporation’s organisation built up to carry out work on behalf of the Government’. Nevertheless, as Jacob was forced to concede, the government had the right ‘to terminate prescription of services’ and at this moment of crisis, it also appeared to have the necessary appetite to do it.3
At the start of what was one of the most significant fortnights in international relations since the Second World War – with Britain, Israel and France colluding in a Parisian suburb to engineer a war against Egypt while blood was being spilt on the streets of Budapest – senior management at the BBC suddenly had to come to terms with a first order challenge to its editorial independence and the future of its overseas services. To really appreciate the scale and nature of the argument between the BBC and the government, it is necessary to understand not just the proximate, but also the underlying causes that brought it about. Anyone who overheard the tense and bad-tempered exchange between the Director-General and the Minister of State that day would have been struck by the similarities between Nutting’s proposals and the recommendations of the Drogheda Committee which, until then, had not been implemented. In this respect, the Suez crisis was the spark that lit a pyre of governing resentments under Bush House that had been long under construction.
Earlier, in February 1956, Nutting had proposed a re-calibration of overseas broadcasting and tasked Paul Grey, who was responsible for it, to ‘look once more into the question of the BBC’ which, at £5.14 million represented nearly 44 per cent of the overall information services budget.4 As Peter Partner has put it, ‘this request seems to have released a small landslide in Foreign Office thinking about the BBC’.5 The subsequent review by Grey on the ‘BBC External Services’, completed in April with the drafting assistance of the head of IPD, Cosmo Stewart, began a paper trail that led directly to Nutting’s meeting with Jacob on 25 October.
Grey thought it ‘questionable whether the BBC contribute greatly either to publicity overseas or to our anti-communist work’, except in ‘broadcasts to the iron curtain’. Moreover, the ‘conditions under which the BBC acquired its influence . . . during the war no longer exist this side of the curtain’. By way of contrast, the areas of contemporary strategic interest where direct sound broadcasting remained effective were considered to be the Middle and Far East and Central and Eastern Europe.6 These conclusions, echoing those of the Drogheda Committee, promised an estimated reduction of 188 hours from the overall weekly transmission time of 554 hours. In particular, Grey proposed the abolition of the language services to countries in Europe outside the iron curtain; reorganization of the German Service with East Germany as the principal target; retention and possible increase of English by Radio to Europe; the abolition of the Latin-American Services; retention and possible extension to Middle Eastern, South-East Asian, and Far Eastern Services; greater expenditure on sound and television transcriptions and exchanges. There remained, however, the tricky question of public reaction to these proposals. On this point Grey thought the abolition of a large part of the overseas services ‘would cause a certain storm in Parliament and the Press’. Nevertheless, if the government ‘based their view on the Drogheda Report and announced at the same time that they would provide money for activities in other directions’ the period of criticism might be ‘shortlived’.7 Ivone Kirtpatrick agreed, noting that ‘the protests will be loud and angry’.8 So too did Nutting, who added, with political astuteness, that ‘I have always wanted this kind of redeployment. But it can only be sold in Parliament if it is a redeployment.’9
The subsequent Cabinet paper and debate on 5 July 1956 resulted in the establishment of a Committee on Overseas Broadcasting (GEN 542) to ‘examine the scale and distribution of expenditure on oversea broadcasting’.10 Its chairman was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Douglas Dodds-Parker – an ex-SOE hand with a well-developed appreciation of the darker arts of overseas publicity. Only two months earlier, he had indicated his personal feelings about the BBC in response to the Corporation’s film on Khrushchev and Bulganin’s visit to the United Kingdom in April. In a letter to Paul Grey he fumed at this ‘disgraceful occurrence’, continuing that ‘Many people, far beyond the confines of the Tory Party, believe that there are sinister, extreme left, influences in the BBC who since the war have slanted news, etc, against HM Government’s long-term interests.’11 However, it was not until 11 July that the BBC was consulted on Whitehall plans for the redevelopment of the External Services. In a conversation with Jacob, Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd acknowledged the ‘mutual lack of confidence between Government circles and the British Broadcasting Corporation’ and the need for a ‘frank discussion’ on overseas broadcasting. Jacob’s pithy response was to argue that ‘the BBC since the war had been faced with an annual financial freeze. The orange was now just about dry.’ Lloyd for his part countered by suggesting ‘that the BBC was too respectable’ and should be prepared to be more ‘aggressive’.12 If this meeting had been designed to build bridges, it seems to have created as many anxieties as it sought to resolve.
Just before GEN 542 submitted its Interim Report to the Prime Minister, very much on the lines of Grey’s April paper, the Egyptian President, Colonel Abdel Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and within an instant the calculus of Whitehall policy making was changed. The report had proposed the abolition of the French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch services with further consideration given to those in Spanish, Finnish and Greek, and a reduction in the scale of the General Overseas Service. The intellectual journey to this point had, on the morning of 26 July, more to do with the unresolved outcome of the Drogheda recommendations than anything else. When news came through that evening of the dramatic turn of events in Egypt, all previous business between the BBC and the government immediately came to be seen through this new and threatening prism. This is the point at which the strategic reassessment of the overseas services of the BBC became fused with the problem of Britain’s evaporating influence in the Middle East and the government’s desperate attempt to rectify this by all means possible. The result was to assign to the mission of the External Services’ reorganization a zeal for punitive reform that owed far more to the inability of Britain to retain a credible purchase in the Middle East in an age of emerging Arab nationalism than it did to a well-thought out and implementable programme for change in overseas information policy and the BBC’s place within that framework.
Broadcasting to the Middle East
Although the atmospherics of the relationship between Bush House and Whitehall in 1956 were heavily charged with the effects of long-term discord over the distribution and funding of overseas services, it was already apparent by the beginning of the year that developments in the Middle East were to be a major preoccupation for the government and broadcaster alike in the months ahead. As the Director of External Broadcasting, J. B. Clark, noted in the spring of 1956, when surveying the ‘Political Scene’ for the BBC Board of Governors, ‘the focus of international political interest has not been on Europe . . . but on the Middle and Far East’.13 Meanwhile, British concerns over its ebbing influence in the region, punctuated by the Egyptian military coup in 1952 and subsequent seizure of power by Colonel Nasser, cultivated deep-rooted political and military anxieties about the threat this posed to Britain’s key strategic interest in the region – the Suez Canal. Notwithstanding the October 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, which extended the international status of the Canal Zone to 1961, as the last British troops left the Canal in 1956, senior ministers were acutely aware of the ‘vicious circle’, as a Defence Committee paper put it, ‘in which a reduction in our ability to influence events leads to a loss of prestige . . . [that] . . . in turn creates both the incentive and the opportunity for countries hostile to us to take action harmful to our interests’.14
Radio and particularly international broadcasting had not only followed the shifts in the post-war struggle for influence in the Middle East, but was an essential adjunct to regional political and diplomatic ambitions. As with broadcasting through the Iron Curtain, radio was a means of communicating competing regional visions with an unparalleled immediacy that made it a key component in the escalating diplomatic battle for control in the area. In this regard, Egypt’s well-developed domestic and international broadcasting operation represented a highly significant and potentially damaging threat to British interests. Launched on 4 July 1953 to promote Arab nationalism and attack its opponents, the Voice of the Arabs (VOTA) was the Arabic-language service for the Middle East from Cairo Radio.15 It soon commanded the attention of the British government as the emblem of a ‘virulent and highly effective Egyptian propaganda campaign against the Western powers, and particularly the United Kingdom’.16 By the beginning of 1956, Egyptian broadcast services had a reach that covered the whole of the Middle East, North, Central and Eastern Africa and were audible in Western Africa. As the British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) prophetically noted of the Egyptian government in July 1956, just days before Nasser used this formidable network to announce to the world the nationalization of the Suez Canal, ‘Cairo Radio is probably the most effective single propaganda medium at its disposal.’17
British authorities, meanwhile, were developing several strategies to enhance the prominence and credibility of UK policy in this increasingly competitive propaganda war. The British radio station in Aden and, more significantly, the Sharq-al-Adna Arabic-language station broadcasting from Cyprus – a nominally commercially music-based operation which was controlled by the British government – were highly valuable resources for transmitting Whitehall’s point of view. In addition, plans were also in place for the establishment of ‘a chain of low-powered VHF stations in the Persian Gulf’, including Kuwait, which would complement the material produced at a ‘proposed covertly controlled Arab Production Centre of transcripts’.18 These in turn would be supported by a build-up of clandestine, or ‘black’, broadcasting stations capable of beaming propaganda into the region, primarily from facilities in Cyprus.19 However, the formative nature of these plans severely limited the British government’s range of broadcast options in the Middle East, as was the case with Radio Baghdad, the centrepiece of the 1955 Baghdad Pact’s communication strategy, which was still not operational by the time of the Suez crisis. As a consequence, Whitehall found itself primarily reliant on the BBC’s services to the Middle East as the most effective means of presenting the British case to an Arabic audience.
Any analysis of the BBC Arabic Service in the run up to the Suez crisis would be hard pushed to find any great cleavages between broadcast output and British policy. Within the 28 hours of programmes broadcast a week in Arabic, in addition to English language services, ample opportunity was found to reflect government policy and British concerns.20 Programmes such as Mirror of the West, Topic of Today, British Thought and the British Way of Life and the popular audience correspondence-based Political Questions and Answers allowed the Arabic Service to transmit comparative, expositional and projection-of-Britain material in some detail. As J. B. Clark noted of developments in the Arab world, including Jordan’s decision not to join the Baghdad Pact and the sudden dismissal of the British General Glubb as head of the Jordanian military, the Arab Legion, ‘Listeners to the Arabic Service were left in no doubt of the British reaction to these events.’21
A prime example of this was the BBC/British government response to Nasser’s decision in October 1955 to accept the Soviet Union’s offer of arms, under cover from the Czechoslovak authorities. There was an undoubted synergy between Whitehall’s response to the arms deal with the consequent threat of Soviet penetration in the region and Bush House’s by now well-established Cold War rhetoric. Such was the closeness of the fit that IRD regularly sent BBC talks scripts such as ‘Communist Economic Offensive in Egypt’ by Alfred Zauberman and ‘The Colonialism of Anti-Colonialists’, ‘Khrushchev the Colonialist’ and ‘The USSR and Islam’ all by Walter Kolarz, to the Regional Information Office in Beirut to be translated and transcribed for dissemination in the Middle East.22 The arms deal provided the opportunity to attack Soviet regional intentions as well as Nasser personally for having invited this threat to Arab independence. Accordingly, all overseas services, according to Clark, ‘continued to hammer away at the theme of “Soviet Imperialism”’ into the summer of 1956 as a response to both this development and the persistent Soviet ‘diatribes’ against the western colonial powers and Britain in particular.23 The BBC was also at pains to emphasize the positive achievements of the British Commonwealth, drawing comparisons between ‘the Russian record of oppression and the British record of education for independence’.24 For example, the BBC’s Eastern Services produced a series of talks by Sir Ivor Jennings for the Arabic Service ‘on the development of self-government in British Colonies and Dependencies’ which was echoed in talks by Patrick Gordon Walker in the Pakistan Service comparing this with the fate of the Central Asian republics in Soviet Russia.25
Whitehall’s ‘Sovietisation’ of the Middle Eastern propaganda war certainly had its advantages – one line of attack for two strategic threats – and easily fitted into tried and tested Cold War publicity strategies. However, the argot of anti-communist rhetoric, Rawnsley persuasively argues, was a rather ineffective vehicle for projecting British influence in the Middle East.26 The need for closer attention to be paid in Whitehall to Britain’s specific publicity requirements in the Middle East was reflected in the April 1956 decision to give the Head of IRD, Jack Rennie, ‘a special brief to counter Egyptian propaganda’. On the surface this might have indicated more of the same from the head of a department that, since 1948, had been concerned with anti-communist publicity. But, as a Foreign Office note from May makes clear, IRD had been ‘given a new charter to include anti-subversive work in general in the field of propaganda and publicity, and, as an immediate objective, this work in the Middle East will, in IRD, take priority over anti-Communism’.27 It is important to appreciate, in this respect, the very large degree to which British publicity in the Middle East by 1956 was conditioned by and responding to the hostile propaganda coming from Cairo Radio. As Anthony Nutting recalled in print a decade later, when programmes ‘boomed forth from the “Voice of the Arabs” radio transmitter in Cairo, the British Government desperately tried to tighten its grip upon those countries where its writ still ran’.28 The fear of Egyptian radio’s influence prompted members of the Whitehall Committee on Overseas Broadcasting to describe Britain as being ‘engaged on what amounted to a “radio war” ’ in the region.29 As a consequence, BBC services were encouraged to join the battle with an extra half-hour of broadcasting time in the evening from 5 August, while plans were advanced for an Arabic transcription service (to supply radio stations in the Arab world) and the beaming in, at the Colonial Office’s request, of Arabic, Hindu and Urdu services to East Africa.30 These belated attempts to improve the reach of the BBC in the Middle East nonetheless concealed a history of parsimonious resourcing that went back to before the Second World War.
In his May 1956 paper on the ‘External Services of the BBC’, an attempt to pre-empt current government thinking on broadcasting, Ian Jacob noted that ‘For a generation successive British governments have shown reluctance to finance propaganda services in Arabic corresponding to the size of the problem and the virulence of our competitors.’ The most damaging cost of this prevarication, he argued, was that the ‘BBC’s case for a medium wave relay has been shelved for nearly twenty years on grounds of economy.’ In a media environment that had become dominated by listening on medium wave, something embraced and enhanced by Cairo Radio, BBC Arabic and other regional services that transmitted predominantly on shortwave simply did not have the reach and audibility to compete on equal terms. What Jacob advocated was the installation of a medium-wave transmitter on Cyprus at a capital cost of £250,000.31 On this, there was an accord of outlook with the FO, in keeping with the recommendations of the Drogheda committee. But the persistent refusal of the Treasury to countenance the release of funds necessary to achieve it led Tangye Lean to conclude that there was ‘no prospect of our being able to carry out the extension of the Arabic Service’.32 Indeed, by June 1956, and with the Treasury looking for an overall saving of £100 million from the public purse, the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, proposed to the Cabinet the slashing of expenditure on the External Services by £1 million.33 A review into British broadcasting in the Middle East commissioned by Eden in May nevertheless recommended that the BBC’s Arabic Service should be broadcast on medium wave.34 Whitehall quickly followed suit and in July the powerful Policy Review Committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, invited the Foreign Secretary to arrange for a medium-wave relay station to get underway in the Middle East.35
On the eve of the nationalization of the Suez Canal there existed two critical debates in Whitehall over the External Services of the BBC, one which brought to a head years of unresolved tensions about the funding and distribution of the overseas broadcasting effort and another which focused on the political and diplomatic preoccupations of the time. The unifying theme between the two was the sense that BBC services to both Western Europe and the Middle East had become ineffective. From Drogheda onwards Whitehall considered the former as superfluous because its output did not contribute to the government’s overseas publicity objectives there.36 By contrast services to the Middle East were ineffective, not because the job they did was undervalued, but because they did not have the reach and impact necessary to maximize their usefulness to government. As the Committee on Overseas Broadcasting, GEN 542, pointed out on 12 July 1956, the objectives of overseas broadcasting were not the same around the world: ‘the emphasis in Europe was on culture, but in the Middle East we were engaged on what amounted to a propaganda war’.37 With the Treasury unwilling to provide the financial resources to fund both it was an obvious political decision which would survive. In this way the fate of the overall distribution of the BBC’s External Services became fused with the course of events in the Middle East.
Controlling tendency
The growing conviction within government that something should be done about the BBC’s External Services found expression in an improved appetite for more centralized direction over output. On 25 July, the Policy Review Committee asked Selwyn Lloyd ‘to consider by what means the Government could best secure a larger measure of control over the context of broadcasts to the Middle East and Far East’.38 A blueprint for reorganization had already been established by Paul Grey in his April paper on the ‘BBC External Services’ and was now advanced in Douglas Dodds-Parker’s Committee on Overseas Broadcasting. Meeting just hours after the Policy Review Committee it was suggested the ‘possibilities were either to arrange with the BBC that its broadcasts should be used as an instrument of Government policy, or to make use of a different organization and reduce Government expenditure on BBC overseas broadcasts’. This was perhaps an example of rhetoric exceeding realism, but it was nonetheless an indication of the extent to which the political debate in government was by now willing to contemplate radical solutions with respect to the BBC. Practical considerations were brought to bear, however, and it was pointed out that ‘to use overseas broadcasting as a means of disseminating what would be known to be United Kingdom propaganda was open to serious objections, which might outweigh the advantages of abandoning a wholly impartial approach’.39 This view was echoed by Grey who felt that ‘it would be strongly resisted by the BBC as destroying their present independence and thereby damaging their reputation abroad; and H.M.G. themselves might find that there would be disagreeable consequences, including responsibility, both in Parliament and abroad, for every word broadcast’.40
Substantial obstacles to government seizure of control for overseas broadcasting were also contained in the 1946 Broadcasting Policy White Paper which stated ‘that the Corporation should remain independent in the preparation of programmes for overseas audiences’. Nevertheless, the government retained the right to provide guidance and various liaison arrangements had been devised over the years to satisfy this impulse. For example, there was daily contact between the heads of the BBC language services and the regional desks of the Foreign Office, while special information was passed through the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent. ‘Aside’ and guidance telegrams specifically for Bush House consumption were sent by British Missions abroad in addition to telegrams on the Foreign Office and Whitehall distribution (below ‘SECRET’ grading) which were circulated to selected External Services personnel. Specifically to assist broadcasting over the Iron Curtain the Foreign Office maintained ‘a special desk which gives the BBC virtually an hour-to-hour service of information and comment’. Yet, in the climate of July 1956, existing mechanisms of influence appeared inadequate for the job the government wanted done. However, to effect such radical change would, as Grey cautiously noted, require rewriting the Licence and Agreement if not the BBC’s Charter itself.41
GEN 542’s Interim Report, delivered to the Prime Minister on 2 August 1956, assumed ‘the BBC continues to be the agent used by the Government for general external broadcasting’. However, the Corporation’s overseas output was ‘quite out of balance with political requirements’. Broadcasting to Western Europe accounted for about one-third of the total cost of the External Services while ‘expenditure on services to the Middle East and the Far East combined is less than one-tenth’, with not much more than that spent on services over the Iron Curtain.42 It was little wonder, then, that the Committee concluded that in the case of Western Europe ‘Direct broadcasting is, in our view, now a relatively uneconomic means of making our influence felt.’43 Ian Jacob, meanwhile, maintained that an increase in funding, not a cost-cutting exercise, was the only viable route to build up a global service with sufficient means to deliver genuine value for money for the British government. The perceived inadequacies of overseas broadcasting were the product of historic under-resourcing by government, not a reason for further diminishing it: ‘For lack of a comparatively insignificant fraction of national expenditure, a valuable aid to the British international position and an institution of world-wide fame, is being eaten away year by year, with a corresponding loss of sympathy and understanding throughout the world.’44
When Jacob met Kirkpatrick on 28 August 1956, in what Asa Briggs describes as an unpleasant, even threatening, interview, he was told that ministers ‘were increasingly dissatisfied with the BBC’. There were ‘two powerful schools of thought, one of which was disposed to favour governmental control in the overseas services and the other, the curtailment of the £5 million grant in aid to the BBC and its expenditure in other propaganda enterprises’.45 The second of these, combined with the style Kirkpatrick chose to deliver the ultimatum, echoed his rhetoric of ten years earlier when as a member of the Official Committee on GIS (which helped frame the post-war settlement of the BBC External Services) he left none of his colleagues in doubt as to his understanding of the future scope for government action:
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.46
A decade on, and now Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, he was in a position to assert his conviction of what it meant to broadcast in the national interest. This was political warfare of a domestic sort and an old hand like Kirkpatrick seemed to relish this opportunity to engage in a new radio war. As he later noted, ‘Sir Ian Jacob looked stricken like a mother about to be deprived of her child.’47
Figure 9 Ivone Kirkpatrick, Controller, BBC European Services, February 1943
A diplomatist and Head of Chancery in Berlin, 1933–38, Kirkpatrick joined the Ministry of Information in 1940 before becoming Controller of BBC European Services in 1941 under the auspices of the Political Warfare Executive. After the war he was appointed Assistant Under-Secretary in the FO responsible for information work rising to the position of Permanent Under-Secretary, 1953–57.
It was ironic that at the point when Suez became an all-consuming crisis in Whitehall, 26 July 1956, relations between the BBC and the government could not have been, literally, any closer. That evening Jacob attended a dinner hosted by the Prime Minister at No.10 Downing Street, marking the official end of the state visit of King Faisal of Iraq and his Prime Minister, Nuri Said.48 Among others in attendance were the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd and the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell. As news arrived during the evening of Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, those present were united in shock by Nasser’s audacious and highly successful propaganda coup. By the autumn, however, relations among the BBC, government and opposition would be remarkable for their disunity and, at times, their outright hostility reflecting a general disintegration of consensus in British political and public life over what should be done about Suez. Eden’s announcement in the House of Commons on 2 August, the eve of the summer recess, that ‘certain precautionary measures of a military nature’ were underway was immediately followed with a speech by Gaitskell comparing Nasser’s actions to those of Mussolini and Hitler in the years before the last war.49 However, a day later in a private letter to Eden, Gaitskell made it clear that the Labour Party could only accept ‘forceful resistance’ by Britain under United Nations auspices.50 This was the beginning of a cleavage in opinion that would become wider and more public in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, after the initial flash of public and press support in favour of taking a firm line with Nasser, there were concerns in government that it might all too quickly evaporate, thereby undermining long-term planning.51
What the government wanted was to maintain the momentum of anti-Nasser sentiment and there was a clear expectation that the BBC should acquiesce. For its part, the Corporation felt obliged to reflect ‘the conflicting views about British policy which had begun to be voiced after the House of Commons debate’. It was to this end that on 15 August, the eve of the London Conference of Maritime Nations – convened to deal with the canal dispute with Egypt – the BBC replaced a broadcast entitled Dancing by the Sea from Brighton on the domestic Light Programme with a Special Survey of the Suez Canal Crisis.52 This ‘round-up of opinion’ lasted 25 minutes and contained a short contribution from Major Salah Salem, editor of Al Shaab and former Egyptian Minister of National Guidance, giving an Egyptian perspective on the Suez crisis.53 Coming at the same time as the BBC’s initial refusal to allow the visiting Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, to broadcast in support of the government’s stance towards Egypt – an important part of Eden’s public relations campaign – the giving-over of airtime, no matter how little, to Egyptian representations at such a delicate moment confirmed in Eden and others around him suspicions that the BBC was against them.54 Were those responsible for this at the BBC, wondered Eden, ‘enemies or just socialists’?55 On 17 August Jacob was summoned back from holidaying at his Suffolk house and in a frosty interview with Eden was informed that if the BBC failed in its duty to ‘educate’ the country as to the ‘seriousness of the situation’, a Foreign Office official would be posted to the BBC for ‘liaison’ purposes.56 And as the Suez crisis deepened, political disgust with both the BBC’s home and overseas services threatened to eclipse the work the Corporation was in fact doing, under challenging circumstances, to support the government line abroad.
Great care had been taken in the External Services to ensure that the British government’s case was heard around the world, particularly in the Middle East, and that the themes pursued in output reflected Whitehall’s publicity strategies. Eden’s domestic television broadcast concerning the crisis on 8 August had been simultaneously transmitted by the General Overseas Service and given in full on the Arabic Service. Such was Bush House’s desire to cement in the minds of listeners the government’s message, that the Arabic translation of Selwyn Lloyd’s ministerial broadcast two days before the London Conference started transmission even before he had finished speaking in English.57 On the first day of the London Conference, 16 August, Guy Wint in Topic of Today on the Arabic Service argued that Nasser was damaging regional development by ‘scaring away those who are most anxious to promote international cooperation’.58 The Conference itself was very closely followed by the BBC in all services with two commentators specially assigned to cover proceedings for the Arabic Service, transmitting reports at very short notice from a studio at Carlton House Terrace. Special importance was also attached to broadcasting translations of important speeches in full, as was the case with statements by Lloyd and the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, ‘as it was rightly anticipated that only distorted versions of the speeches would be available to newspaper readers in Egypt and other parts of the Arab world’.59
Bush House was a willing partner in giving voice to the public themes expressed by politicians and statesmen as the crisis developed: Eden arguing that Nasser ‘is not a man who can be trusted to keep an agreement’; Lloyd describing Nasser as military dictator who ‘maintains himself in power by methods so well known to us from what happened in certain countries in the inter-war years’.60 Nasser’s pan-Arabic imperialist ambitions and the dangers of communism in the Middle East through Egypt’s links with the Soviet Union were covered in detail in the BBC’s Arabic output as were other Foreign Office targets such as the ‘futility of Nasser’s economic plans’ and the ‘intricacies of the Canal organization and the danger of running it without experienced pilots’.61 In this sense, the relationship with Whitehall was close and even Douglas Dodds-Parker ‘expressed appreciation of the vigorous line which has been taken’ by the BBC.62 Yet despite this obvious dovetailing of government aims with External Services output the outstanding characteristic of the relationship between the two was a growing sense of attrition. Against the reality of the substantial effort being made by the BBC to accommodate government attitudes in its programming, the perception in Whitehall was of a broadcaster failing to fulfil its duty to support national, that is government, overseas policy.
The return of Parliament on 12 September heralded ‘two difficult days’, as Eden put it, of debate on Suez during which Gaitskell condemned the military preparations being made and pushed the government to refer the matter to the United Nations. Demonstrations in London also demanded ‘No War Over Suez’.63 The following day Ian Jacob sought the advice of the Board of Governors on this ‘unusual situation for the BBC’, where ‘for the first time for many years there was a foreign policy issue of great gravity on which there was a sharp division on party lines’. Their reply, ‘that the BBC should do nothing to underline the existence of party division and disunity at a time of crisis’ was as political as it was unrealistic.64 For those actually making programmes such as Topic of Today and writing broadcast reviews of the British press it was impossible to conceal, except by deliberate censorship, the divisions evident within British society.
When the subject of ‘Oversea Broadcasting’ resurfaced at the Cabinet on 26 September the Prime Minister’s continued dissatisfaction with the conduct of the overseas services led Eden to order that ‘the whole basis of existing arrangements should be reviewed’.65 In doing so he gave executive authority to those in Whitehall, who sought to rewrite the post-war constitutional settlement for overseas broadcasting, resulting in the biggest challenge to its editorial independence that the BBC had ever faced. The first meeting of the Ministerial Committee on Oversea Broadcasting, GEN 554, on 9 October and chaired by the Lord Privy Seal, R.A. Butler, took as its starting point the question of ‘whether the Government should have greater control than at present over the content of overseas broadcasts by the BBC, even perhaps to the extent of assuming full responsibility for the content and operation of overseas broadcasting services’.66 Once again, the sheer impracticality of this was quickly apprehended. As the Postmaster-General, Charles (later Lord) Hill, pointed out, while it was incumbent upon the Corporation to consult and collaborate with government departments ‘the final content of those programmes was dependent on the BBC’s own interpretation of the national interest’.67 In the face of such a genuine obstacle the general mood of the committee appeared far more equivocal than might otherwise have been expected. Even Alan Lennox-Boyd, Colonial Secretary and one of Bush House’s more vocal critics that summer, felt that ‘while the BBC’s External Services handling of topics was sometime inept . . . it is necessary to bear in mind the very large volume of programmes put out by the BBC in which the British point of view was constantly kept before overseas audiences’.68 It was left to Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had been specially invited to this first meeting, to succinctly sum up the present difficulty: ‘In short, there was no logical half-way house between no control over the BBC and total control.’69
If total control was out of the question, in terms of both the Corporation’s continued credibility and the government’s liability for overseas broadcasting, another mechanism was needed for exercising influence over Bush House. At this point, Kirkpatrick made a decisive intervention. The ‘best course’, he suggested,
might be for the Government to advise the BBC that, while they recognised it to be inherent in the BBC’s constitution that it could not undertake propaganda activities, the Government regarded the expenditure of some £5 millions a year on overseas broadcasting out of a total expenditure of some £8 millions on overseas information services as a whole as being disproportionate.70
Consequently, the government would in future ‘no longer contemplate devoting so large a proportion to the external services of the BBC as at present constituted’. This approach would, he thought, ‘administer a psychological shock to the BBC and might bring the Corporation to consider more seriously than hitherto the problem of reconciling its independence under the Charter with the need to conduct its external services in the national interest’.71 The government’s right to prescribe the services it wanted the BBC to broadcast overseas at a cost it set was, as Kirkpatrick had predicted, the soft underbelly of the External Services’ editorial independence. At its second meeting on 18 October, GEN 554 agreed in principle to recommend to the Cabinet ‘a saving of at least £1 million in expenditure on existing BBC External Services, and that language broadcasts to all European countries (other than the Soviet Union and its satellites), Latin America, South Africa, India and Pakistan should be abolished to the extent necessary to secure such a saving’. Nevertheless, ‘subject to the creation of closer liaison between the FO and the BBC, the Corporation should continue to be the vehicle for overseas broadcasting’.72
The wish for ‘closer liaison’ provided the opportunity to propose the appointment of a liaison officer who would oversee ‘the whole range of the external services though he would, to begin with, devote special consideration to their presentation of the news on the Middle East’.73 Kirkpatrick likewise felt that in framing its output in the national interest the ‘Corporation would derive considerable help in this direction from the appointment of a competent liaison officer from the Foreign Office.’74 Not since the dissolution of the PWE and the end of wartime broadcasting measures had the government attempted to influence the BBC’s editorial line from within. The Suez crisis provided both the cover and, for those convinced of the all-consuming importance of toppling Nasser, the necessary conflict to insist on a derogation of the constitutional safeguards designed to prevent official control over overseas output.
With Jacob’s long-planned visit to the Commonwealth Broadcasters’ Conference in Australia imminent it was decided that ‘it would be useful if the Committee’s provisional conclusions could be disclosed to him before his departure’. Accordingly, on the same day that Britain secretly signed a pact with the French and Israelis in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres to engineer a war in the Middle East to overthrow Nasser, 24 October 1956, the Cabinet gave authority for a meeting with Jacob to inform him of the following:
After a decade of peacetime broadcasting and careful negotiation with Whitehall over broadcast objectives and outcomes the BBC External Services now found themselves on an unavoidable collision course with the British government.
On 25 October, Anthony Nutting, along with Dodds-Parker and Cosmo Stewart, met with Jacob and Lean. He proceeded to outline the government’s demand that the BBC make a saving of £1 million in the Grant-in-Aid of the External Services and, in pursuit of ‘closer and more formal liaison’, agree to the appointment of a Foreign Service Liaison Officer.76 At Jacob’s request Dodds-Parker drafted a letter to the BBC containing the provisions laid out by Nutting in order that ‘the existing pattern of the external services of the BBC might be redirected so as to be rendered more effective and to accord more closely with the policy objectives abroad of the Government’.77 However, in the time between the initial writing of this letter and its delivery to Broadcasting House the following day there occurred what Briggs has described as a ‘twist of fortune’ that even now is hard to explain satisfactorily.78 With Jacob due to fly out of the United Kingdom on the afternoon of Friday, 26 October a subsequent meeting between Jacob accompanied by the BBC’s Chairman, Sir Alexander Cadogan, and the Lord Privy Seal, R. A. Butler with Dodds-Parker was hastily arranged for that morning. The letter was then revised by the Cabinet Office official Burke Trend (who would later become Cabinet Secretary) along the lines of this second meeting. When the letter arrived at the BBC a few hours later, importantly still in a draft form, it contained the original suggested cuts in many of the language services and improvements in others to the Middle East and South East Asia, but the amount to be saved in the External Service budget had been radically reduced by half to £500,000.79
The reason for this change is still not entirely clear. Was it the ferocity of Jacob’s response to Nutting’s proposals that weakened the resolve of Butler the following day? Was it as the consequence of an intervention by the BBC’s Chairman who, as the wartime Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had access to Eden and other ministers and senior officials in Whitehall? Or was it just evidence of the confused, uncertain and increasingly unhinged state of affairs in government at the time? For BBC management and Governors there was little time to reflect on these motivational nuances as critical judgements of strategy had to be devised post-haste. The chosen solution, and perhaps the only realistic one available, was to delay.
The manner and timing of the government’s proposals, the lack of prior consultation, the apparent flexibility on the core budgetary requirement and the sheer administrative, logistical and technical impracticality of implementing these changes without a substantial period of preparation struck those involved at the BBC as highly peculiar, and was quickly interpreted as a means to exert immediate and considerable influence over output regardless of the genuine reorganizational aims these proposals otherwise reflected. However, while Jacob’s trip to Australia imposed a deadline of sorts on the BBC’s initial response, it was also something that could be, and was, used to the Corporation’s advantage. The letter had requested, probably in response to Jacob’s criticisms about the lack of consultation, an informal response from the BBC ‘so that we can take account of the Corporation’s views’.80 As Jacob departed across the Atlantic that evening his Secretary, Miss Torry, called the FO to say that the BBC had ‘no comment’ to make on the draft and ‘supposed that the BBC would now be getting the letter in final form’.81 Meanwhile, behind the scenes and under the executive authority of Sir Norman Bottomley, the Corporation’s newly installed Assistant Director-General (a former Deputy Chief of the Air Staff and air officer commanding-in-chief, Bomber Command), a formal riposte to these proposals was being prepared.82 The BBC was, in effect, calling the government’s bluff and, as it turned out, successfully so. On hearing of the BBC’s response, Dodds-Parker, aware of the ‘Cabinet hoops to be gone through’ before any action against the BBC could be taken, assumed ‘that the next step will be the circulation of the draft to the Overseas Broadcasting Committee’.83 Events, however, intervened and Butler’s committee would not meet again until 12 December by which time both the BBC’s and the government’s negotiating positions would be radically altered. Meanwhile, on the afternoon of Monday, 29 October, Israeli paratroopers landed east of the Mitla Pass in Egypt, 45 miles from the town of Suez. The following day in accordance with the Sèvres agreement, Britain and France issued ultimatums to both Egypt and Israel to ‘halt all acts of war’ and withdraw 10 miles from the Canal, with the extra stipulation for the Egyptians that they ‘accept temporary occupation of key positions on the Canal by the Anglo-French forces’.84 Following Egypt’s expected failure to comply, allied Anglo-French bombing of Egyptian airfields began on 31 October and five days later British and French paratroopers landed at Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal.
While the desire to exert greater control over the External Services had been the motor behind government planning on this issue through the summer of 1956, these new circumstances concentrated minds in Whitehall on the need for the BBC, home and overseas, to broadcast with a sense of national duty under wartime conditions. Accordingly, Bottomley and Harman Grisewood, who as Chief Assistant to the Director-General was on the front line between the BBC and No.10 during Suez, were invited to a meeting at the Ministry of Defence after Jacob’s departure.85 Here, according to Grisewood, they were told of the imminent military operations and informed of the government’s intention, though not possible to enact immediately, to revive wartime broadcasting measures which would involve an elaborate system of censorship and direction.86 They were, in effect, being asked to reconsider the BBC’s editorial attitude on the basis of Britain being a country at war. This was at odds not only with the direct experience of many in the BBC who could vividly remember the broadcasting requirements and meaning of war, but with public and parliamentary opinion and the government’s own rationale for military operations in the Middle East as a police action. As J. B. Clark pointed out at the end of November, the widening gap in Parliament on policy had been difficult but manageable for the External Services ‘because policy had not yet turned into considered intervention. The difficulties became acute when military operations were involved because Party conflict, instead of settling down, flared still higher.’87 Rather than acquiesce to the government’s line, the BBC’s response to domestic division and international condemnation of British action, particularly by America and the Soviet Union, was to administer the kind of heightened sense of impartiality the FO had been so critical of in the past. As the BBC’s 1956–57 Annual Report and Accounts pointed out in retrospect,
At no time since broadcasting began had there been such a lack of agreement in Parliament and in the country on a major matter of foreign policy. Never previously, therefore, had the BBC’s tradition of objective reporting in its external as in its home programmes led it to show to the world a large part of the nation deeply critical of the Government of the day on a matter of vital national concern.88
It was to counter just this type of editorial balance that the proposal of a Foreign Office Liaison Officer had been made. On 31 October Paul Grey telephoned the Acting Director-General, Norman Bottomley, seeking the BBC’s approval for an immediate appointment on an experimental basis. As he put it, ‘the FO wished to know what the BBC was saying in its External Services and the BBC ought to know what the FO was saying and thinking’. After consulting Cadogan, Bottomley rang back to say that ‘the BBC was willing to fall in with the Government’s suggestion’ on the basis of the terms of reference laid out in the Dodds-Parker draft letter. Accordingly, the Corporation received an important assurance that the
appointment would not, of course, be intended to derogate in any way from the existing degree of independence of the BBC and from their own responsibility for the programmes which they transmit. Its purpose would be to improve the arrangements for consultation between the Corporation and the prescribing Government Departments, and it would supplement, not replace, the existing arrangements for the transmission of information from these departments to the Corporation.89
The Foreign Office’s diplomatic choice as Liaison Officer, Lanham Titchener, seemed ideally qualified for this delicate task being someone who, as an ex-SOE man, understood the exigencies of political warfare and, as a former BBC television producer, appreciated the technical and editorial requirements of broadcasting.90 However, at the end of October 1956 he was stationed in Tehran and did not arrive at Bush House until 12 November, well after the Suez crisis had turned into a disaster for the British government. In his stead, on 1 November Duncan Wilson, who would later become British Ambassador to Moscow, arrived at Bush House.91 His work in that first 24 hours perfectly exemplified the essential problem of relations between the BBC and the government in this critical period and helps explain the de facto stalemate reached between the two. It also demonstrated the impossibility of achieving the ‘effective’ liaison that the Dodds-Parker letter had called for.
Conscious of the suspicion and resentment with which staff at Bush House would have greeted his arrival, Wilson was upbeat when he volunteered his assessment of a talk by Maurice Latey called Government and Critics, the External Services’ main comment piece on 1 November. As J. B. Clark later reported, Wilson thought the programme, which explained that the British government was forced to act because of the predictable delays in action by the United Nations, was ‘not only a brilliant piece of work, but the best justification until then which had been made of the Government’s action’ and was a theme subsequently taken up by the Prime Minister in his broadcast on 3 November.92 Yet at the same time Wilson was charged with complaining to Clark about the coverage given in the previous day’s press review of a Manchester Guardian leader which accused the British and French governments of ‘an act of folly without justification in any terms but brief expediency’.93 In this way, Wilson gave voice to the conflicting demands the government was making of the External Services at the start of the military phase of the Suez crisis. On the one hand, Bush House ably demonstrated the value to Whitehall of having independent and professional broadcasters make sense of Britain’s actions for overseas listeners. On the other, broadcasting as an adjunct to Britain’s military campaign required central direction and the stamping out of contrary and competing views. The one was incompatible with the other, a fact which had repeatedly dawned on ministers and officials in their deliberations earlier in the year and had resulted in the ultimatum put to the BBC on 25 and 26 October. In this sense, the imposition of a liaison officer was the manifestation of an unresolved problem, not the solution to it.
While news remained the truly independent core of the External Services operation, and the fly in the broadcast ointment as far as the government was concerned, there was a well-developed appreciation in the External Services of the need, under the rubric of the national interest, to also project an understanding of the motivations that lay behind British government policy and action. In this, Clark felt ‘the BBC’s critics were obscuring the difference between news and comment, for while the news could not be otherwise than objective and impartial, in comment it was possible to put the British case for action forcefully and effectively’.94 By ‘British case’, Clark evidently meant the government’s and as Peter Partner has put it: ‘There does not seem to be much evidence that the Arabic Service did anything but loyally try to present the British government’s policies in the best light it could during the Suez crisis.’95 In achieving this balance a liaison officer might have had some clear benefit, aiding the flows of information at a critical time, had it not been for the fact that Wilson and then Titchener were charged with the highly political task of influencing output to suit government wishes. In this, however, they were undermined by their relatively toothless terms of reference. So, while Wilson made suggestions ‘on the undesirability of news items ranging from the views of the Opposition to communiqués issued from GHQ in Cyprus on the bombing of military installations in Egypt’, editorial judgements, albeit conditioned by the cumulative effect of immense government pressure, remained with the BBC.96 Accordingly, while the government agitated for broadcasts overseas, either by omission or commission, to reflect the government’s line, Bush House remained adamant that, as laid out in the 1946 White Paper on Broadcasting Policy, 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’.97 As the former Director-General, Sir William Haley had pointed out earlier in the year:
It has been the primary conception of British broadcasting ever since it decided to speak to peoples beyond its borders, that it would pour through the world hour by hour, day by day, and year by year an unending, undeviating, irrigating flow of truthful news given as objectively and as impartially as British professional men and women could make it. The BBC does not attempt to have one story for its own people and another for the rest of the world.98
This was to cause particular problems in relation to the English-language General Overseas Service which, to the great frustration of the FO as Grey ruefully noted in a memo to Kirkpatrick, ‘escapes our influence almost entirely’.99 Reporting to the Cabinet, the Minister of Defence laid out the concerns of the Allied Commander-in-Chief, General Keightley, with regard to troop morale ‘in view of the conflicting statements on the wireless and in the Press about the value of operations’.100 Programmes detailing press comment and public opinion at home lay at the heart of this disquiet, particularly the news talks featuring the speeches by Eden and Gaitskell broadcast on 3rd and 4th November, respectively. In these, Eden attempted to invoke the image of war leader and spoke of the solemn duty that lay in front of the country. Gaitskell, by contrast, effectively appealed to the nation in general and disillusioned Conservative MPs in particular to force Eden’s resignation. As General Keightley later remarked in his perceptive and influential review of the military operations, ‘His Majesty’s Opposition “rocked the landing craft” in the early stages’ and, in the eyes of the government, the BBC helped them do it.101
It was the government’s own psychological warfare plans, however, and not the BBC’s reporting of events, which was to prove the Achilles heel of Britain’s communication strategy during the Suez crisis. In this tactical field of operations, as Keightley pointed out, ‘the Egyptians had it all their own way’.102 Emblematic of this failure to win the ‘psy-war’ were the shortcomings of the Voice of Britain radio station, the United Kingdom’s mouthpiece in the Middle East from the start of the military phase of the crisis. Brought into being on 31 October 1956, the Voice of Britain (VOB) was the focus of the United Kingdom’s psychological warfare operation and was intended to break the will of the Egyptian government and its people and prevent them from resisting the allied military intervention. However, in its planning, implementation and subsequent execution, VOB was a bungled, ineffective and ultimately counterproductive error of judgement. Formerly the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station (NEABS), it had been established during the Second World War by the British and was run by the FO in conjunction with the Secret Intelligence Service. Relaunched in 1948/49 and disguised as a commercial station, known popularly as Sharq-al-Adna, its headquarters were moved from Lebanon to Limassol in Cyprus where it broadcast entertainment programmes, mainly music, in an attempt to align itself with regional sentiment. Indeed, the FO had requested that the BBC nominate candidates from its own Arabic staff to ‘act as “stooge” directors of the Company’ – an offer the BBC felt obliged to decline.103 The major changes in the sequencing and planning of Anglo-French military operations (codenamed ‘Musketeer (Revise)’) necessitated by the signing of the Sèvres Protocol in October and the rapid mobilization to enact its provisions meant that that by the time VOB was hastily pressed into operation it had neither the capacity nor the expertise to broadcast effectively.
Arabic staff at Sharq-al-Adna refused to broadcast and walked out when it became apparent what the station’s new role would be. Such was the anger of its Director, Ralph Poston, at both the manner of the takeover and the damage to the government’s reputation in the Middle East that he thought would follow, not only did he refuse to broadcast, but had to be held under house arrest until he could be safely sent home.104 The result was a disaster for the centre-piece of Britain’s psychological warfare campaign during Suez. The Voice of Britain was poorly planned, chronically under-resourced and without merit. Its output consisted of entertainment records broadcast from Cyprus, news and talks by the FO in London, in addition to the warnings and threats to the people of Egypt emanating from the Allied High Command.105 And from 7 November (as well as one transmission on 2 November), relays of the BBC’s Arabic Service.106 The blatant and damaging use, by the British government, of broadcasting to subdue and intimidate listeners in the Middle East had immediate consequences for the BBC. Already understaffed, four of the Arabic Service’s expatriate staff resigned at the start of hostilities – one-third of its workforce.107 The activities of VOB eroded confidence in the independence of the BBC by association as well as diverting critical technical resources earmarked for the Corporation. Earlier in the summer, the government’s Policy Review Committee had agreed to fund a medium-wave transmitter for BBC output to the Middle East with the announcement of the decision to requisition the Sharq-al-Adna transmitter for this purpose scheduled for 20 October.108 Just days before the Sèvres agreement was signed, the announcement was postponed, according to the BBC Board of Management minutes, because of ‘a hitch in Whitehall’.109 Whether preparing the ground for the outcome of the meetings in Sèvres or not, the result was that at the eleventh hour the BBC’s 20-year pursuit of a medium-wave transmitter in the region was again put on hold.
Neither the BBC, nor the government’s attempt at political warfare and fear-mongering, gave the British authorities what they really wanted during Suez. Official and political incompetence could not hide the vast chasm that had opened up between the government’s objectives and the means with which to achieve them. With widespread global misgivings at the action taken by Britain, a subsequent run on sterling with an irate America blocking access to Britain’s International Monetary Fund account, a humiliating climb down was all that was left for the government. As a result, with British troops having advanced just over 20 miles down the Suez Canal from Port Said, Eden announced a ceasefire in the House of Commons at 6 o’clock on 6 November, effective from midnight that night.
The irony, in broadcasting terms, was that for all the criticism fired at them from Whitehall during the crisis, the BBC External Services remained the most effective and credible platform from which to promote British government interests and the wider national interest in the Middle East and beyond. This mission and the leverage it gave the Corporation in dealings with Whitehall were not lost on the BBC. It was also appreciated with considerable rapidity among those who so recently had been willing to dispense with the constitutional niceties of the government’s relationship with the BBC and the earlier hostile tone noticeably softened. Even the harshest of critics, such as the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, were eager to view the future of Bush House in a new light. In a paper prepared for the Overseas Broadcasting Committee at the end of November, once ministers had had time to digest the events of the previous weeks, he argued that it was ‘only when we have made up our minds what a broadcasting operation can do that we can fairly measure the performance of the BBC External Services’.110 Accordingly, the government was forced to rethink, in the light of very recent experience, its attitude towards overseas broadcasting requirements. The Suez crisis had been a hiatus, albeit a terribly destructive one on all fronts, but with Eden’s resignation on 9 January 1957 the balance of the broadcasting relationship with government took on more measured tones. The governing desire for a strategic reorganization within Bush House that had pre-dated Suez remained, but was now put on a more consultative and orthodox footing. The ‘bad dream’ of Suez, as Jacob put it, was finally over.111
At its most acute the Suez crisis exposed different appreciations of what it meant to broadcast in the national interest and the corporate obligations resting on the BBC. In both its domestic and overseas services, the government demanded, at a time of war, the Corporation’s adherence to its specific publicity requirements. The BBC, meanwhile, argued that without a national consensus – and there was none at the time of Suez – it could not, in its ‘news’ output (as opposed to other genres of programming), solely and explicitly give preference to the claims of one element of British society, in this case the government, over the widespread and competing claims of others. To do so, it thought, would be to act against the national interest and undermine the credibility of the BBC. As Jacob had made clear in his paper for the FO on the ‘The External Services of the BBC’ at the end of May 1956:
The BBC’s standing abroad is a national asset comparable with the country’s reputation for parliamentary institutions, a free press and a stable system of justice. . . . unlike other foreign broadcasting systems which have followed the tactical needs of the moment and earned a corresponding notoriety and lack of trust.112
In this analysis the BBC, and the External Services in particular, occupied a position of constitutional significance in the exercise of British influence overseas. While Whitehall may have imagined broadcasting abroad under Licence as an expression of governmental will, the BBC saw itself (and had done so for quite some time) as an institution whose very creed was a manifestation of the long-term national interest. As Jacob’s predecessor as Director-General, William Haley, had noted when reflecting on the future needs of censorship in war, ‘Something very vital to both the nation and the BBC would be damaged’ if belief in the BBC’s editorial independence were lost.113
Editorial independence was the public emblem of the BBC’s virtue, but the Corporation’s moral compass could not wholly discount the needs of the British government, especially when in crisis. Away from the microphone, and out of the public gaze, the BBC provided considerable assistance in the pursuit of covert government aims in the Middle East. Psychological warfare, as the Suez campaign had ably demonstrated, was a concept that appeared to many in Whitehall to have come of age, but which in practice fell well short of its intended objectives. Nevertheless, as military plans for Musketeer (Revise) progressed it became apparent that specific broadcast techniques would be at the forefront of the planned ‘Psy-War’ against Egypt.114 But where should the military go for the kind of specialist training this required? The answer was Bush House where in September 1956, just as the government was gearing itself to take on the BBC over its perceived inadequacies, the BBC’s Arabic and Greek services hosted a special course on ‘radio communications with particular reference to psychological warfare’ for ‘twenty Military Officers (Secret Branch)’.115
At the same time, the BBC was engaged in the activities of a highly secretive part of the Whitehall machinery known as the Advisory Committee. Chaired by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Douglas Dodds-Parker, it provided the link between the policy set in Eden’s war cabinet, the Egypt Committee, and the plans made for psychological warfare operations in Egypt, which were to be implemented by the Information Coordination Executive (ICE) formed out of IRD for this purpose. The BBC was represented on the Advisory Committee from the summer of 1956 by the future Director-General, Hugh Carleton Greene, and then the Head of Eastern Services, Donald Stephenson, allowing the BBC to put its expertise at the disposal of the committee’s highly covert objectives. This active participation in the government’s Suez strategy stands at odds with the febrile and overtly negative tone of relations between the two at the time. It does, however, point to the Corporation’s own extraordinary sense of constitutional ‘duty’ at a moment of national stress, through which an understanding of the wider context of the External Services activities should be read. It reveals an institutional sense of diplomatic, political and cultural guardianship towards the nation’s long-term interests that had become an essential part of Bush House’s outlook.
These ‘silken cords’, as much as anything in the turbulent weeks of October and November 1956, provided a seam of continuity in the relationship between Whitehall and the BBC. The picture on the more familiar battlegrounds of editorial policy and the External Services’ organizational remit was, however, more fractured than it had ever been. Yet, just as with questions concerning Britain’s post-Suez place in the world, so the new year heralded an opportunity for a ‘new deal’ between the government and the External Services. The person chosen to lead this initiative – and emblematic of the change in tone from aggression to constructive engagement – was an old broadcasting hand, the wartime ‘radio doctor’, Charles Hill. Postmaster-General during the Suez crisis, Hill was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster after Eden’s resignation on 9 January 1957, with responsibility for Information Services in Harold Macmillan’s new Cabinet. His style was a return to hard bargaining within a framework of collective negotiation. At a meeting between Jacob, Cadogan, Butler and Hill on 14 December 1956 it was decided that the Dodds-Parker letter of 26 October should no longer be considered as an ultimatum. Instead, it was ‘agreed that the draft letter should serve as a basis of discussions between the BBC and the Government’.116 The effect was to turn the clock back nearly a year and to take as their stating point the Drogheda-inspired agenda for reform drafted by Paul Grey in April 1956.
This is not to say that the antagonisms of 1956 were entirely forgotten. The external context in which government relations with the BBC played out may have changed, but many of the underlying tensions remained. This was particularly so in the case of the Russian Service where the battle between the Foreign Office and the External Services concerning the tone and vehemence of its output became a matter of public comment in June 1957 after the ‘Pharos’ column in the Spectator magazine argued that its inability to ‘either represent Britain or offend totalitarian susceptibilities’ made the Russian Service a ‘notorious waster of time’.117 This line was followed up in the magazine’s letters pages by some prominent members of the British academic establishment who accused the Russian Service of ‘moral compromise and appeasement’.118 It has been suggested that this was part of a concerted campaign against the BBC that reflected the modus operandi of IRD in its use of academics and media outlets to disseminate and give credence to its claims.119 While a definitive smoking gun remains elusive, so close were these printed charges to the language and concerns expounded by members of the Foreign Office’s Information Policy and Information Research departments internally during the previous year that there exists a strong correlation between the two. The effect of this intervention was the establishment towards the end of 1957 of a ‘Working Group’ on Broadcasting to the Soviet Union comprising the BBC, IRD and the Foreign Office’s Research Department.120 Its conclusions formed the basis of a re-articulation of the principles and purpose of broadcasting in Russian that reflected, to a much greater degree, Foreign Office analysis and outlook. It was certainly convenient, for the future of Bush House’s relations with Whitehall in the post-Suez context, that the figure most identified with the empathetic style of broadcasting criticized by the FO and the focus of its opprobrium, Anatol Goldberg, had, in the autumn of 1957, been quietly removed by the BBC from his post as head of the Russian Service and given a less politically damaging role as the External Service’s senior regional commentator and the Russian Service’s chief scriptwriter. This belated and somewhat qualified success for the FO in recalibrating the BBC’s output in Russian was more than matched by the achievement of Hill’s committee in redrawing the map of overseas broadcasting where others had failed. As recommended in the subsequent White Paper on Overseas Information Service, output to the Middle East and Far East was expanded at the expense of programmes to Europe: services in Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish were abolished while those in French, German, Italian and Spanish were greatly reduced.121 The result was a global realignment of the BBC’s multilingual broadcast remit that would remain essentially similar in character until the end of the Cold War.
Figure 10 Bush House, The Aldwych, London, April 1948
The home of the BBC European Services since 1941, by the mid-1950s it housed all of the BBC’s language services.