After the Second World War the BBC was in charge of the largest and most comprehensive international broadcasting station in the world. For the Corporation and the government this was emblematic of Britain’s post-war status as a victorious power, as well as indicating the significance of broadcasting in extending the reach of British influence at a time of depleted national resources. Over the next decade the BBC would continue, in English and other languages, to present Britain to the world alongside its core journalistic function of delivering accurate and timely news broadcasts. However, this brief period in which Britannia ruled the airwaves saw international competitors gain on and then pass the BBC in terms of scale. In 1947, the year of the BBC’s new Royal Charter, its European Service was broadcasting 272¾ ‘programme hours’ a week while the Overseas Service transmitted 479½ programme hours.1 A decade later the respective figures were 245¾ hours in the European Service and 356 hours for the Overseas Service.2 These totals represented a relative decline in the External Services output while its direct competitors, VOA, Radio Moscow and Soviet satellite stations, passed these levels of output by the start of the 1950s.3 Nevertheless, the reach and extent of the BBC’s overseas services was still hugely impressive, outstripping its domestic operation, and allowing the BBC to speak directly and daily to many millions of people around the world.
Publicly, the aims of BBC overseas broadcasting remained the same regardless of the audience being addressed. As the 1953 Annual Report and Accounts put it, programmes were intended ‘to form friendly links through information, culture and entertainment; to give news of world-wide importance as it is known in Britain; to show what the British nation as a whole was thinking about the news; and to reflect the British way of life’.4 While this was a central tenet of the Corporation’s broadcasting brief abroad, it was not evenly applied throughout. There remained a variety of approaches used by the BBC which reflected the political and strategic significance of particular reception territories as well as the cultural expectations and tastes of the audiences addressed.
Figure 7 Bush House canteen, November 1960
Resembling a cosmopolitan ‘united nations’, the Bush House canteen was the venue for cultural, political, intellectual and journalistic engagements of all kinds: perhaps the most important ‘office’ in the building.
Broadcasts in English had after the war become the largest single overseas service transmitting virtually around the clock, across multiple time zones and with a range of listener profiles in mind.5 At its core was the General Overseas Service which most closely resembled BBC domestic broadcasting and which offered ‘a comprehensive programme for British listeners in all parts of the world’.6 Intended to ‘reflect every aspect of life in the United Kingdom, and to play its part as a carrier of information to and from the members of the Commonwealth and Empire’, it also incorporated programmes for British Forces stationed overseas.7 Meanwhile, the BBC’s North America Service to the United States and Canada relied almost entirely on rebroadcasting by local stations and the BBC Transcription Service (producing hardcopy recording) in order to compete in this highly developed broadcast marketplace. In the United States, rebroadcasting of BBC programmes in December 1955 alone reached approximately 4,200 programme hours, reflecting American interests in, and cultural sympathy with, their cousins across the Atlantic.8
With 183 local stations rebroadcasting 1,800 hours of programmes and a further 328 stations transmitting 56,000 hours of transcription material in 1950, the Latin American Service also made good use of these alternatives to direct broadcasting from Britain. However, the cutting of shortwave services in Spanish by half and those in Portuguese by two-thirds in 1952 sparked a severe dwindling of source material and output was ‘reduced to a trickle’, leaving the projection of Britain in Latin America seriously weakened.9 In contrast, the importance of Arabic broadcasts, the nucleus of the BBC’s Eastern Service (including Persian and Hebrew), was never really under threat from cuts in the government Grant-in-Aid as regional tensions repeatedly underscored its significance. Listeners, according to the BBC’s Research Unit, were ‘provided with programmes which in their diversity amount to what is in effect a “Home Service”’, with ‘as much attention devoted to Islamic history and culture as to life in Britain or to world affairs’.10 Also part of the Eastern Service, programmes for India and Pakistan (English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Sinhalese and Urdu) blended a majority English-language listenership with a still considerable vernacular one in the decade after independence and partition.
Responding to the pace and importance of developments in the region, the BBC’s Far Eastern Service in English, Cantonese, Kuoyu, Burmese, Malay, Thai, Japanese, Indonesian and Vietnamese had to adapt quickly to major changes, albeit within relatively short broadcast periods (15–30 minutes). Reviewing output in 1949, the BBC’s Patrick Ransome wondered whether improvements could be made by engaging more directly with these events:
I realise, of course, that it would be dangerous to give colour to charges of interference in the purely internal affairs of highly nationalistic states, but the fact remains that our Far Eastern Service itself says nothing to Malaya about her Communist warfare, to Burma about her minority troubles, to Japan about her reparations or to China about her civil war. . . . Is not this pushing caution to the point of evasion?11
By degrees, however, this reticence was lessened and with a new high-powered transmitter at Tebrau in Singapore coming on-line in May 1951, the BBC spoke with a renewed confidence about the conflict in Korea, the rise of Maoist China and on other regional challenges in Indochina, Malaya and Formosa (Taiwan).
The predominantly English voice of the BBC’s Colonial Service (Hausa was introduced in 1957) complemented the General Overseas Service by providing programmes of special interest to West Africa and the West Indies, East Africa, the Falklands and Malta by direct broadcasting and rebroadcasting through local services. Throughout, associations with the United Kingdom were reinforced in, for example, cultural, educational and sports programming as part of a shared commonwealth of interests at a time when the prospect of independence was beginning to be made real in countries such as Sudan and Ghana (Gold Coast). In line with this development the Colonial Service also had a very important part to play in advising on the development of indigenous broadcasting services. By 1957, and in close co-operation with the Colonial Office, the BBC had supplied on secondment 45 members of staff to manage and oversee programme, engineering and administrative arrangements12 in, for example, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Gold Coast, British Honduras, Sarawak and Kenya. This rather considerable drain on BBC resources was, by the middle of the 1950s, something of a problem requiring the Corporation to establish a training programme for the Colonies which brought together students from the West Indies and Africa. As a consequence, the imprint of BBC public service principles and practice was left on broadcasting organizations in many of these newly independent countries over the course of the next generation.
Colonial broadcasting also gained an added significance in the context of the Cold War where the idea of ‘colonialism’ was used as a persistent and potent criticism of Britain by the Soviet Union. Responding to Moscow’s charges that ‘the social foundations of African colonies were rotten’, in March 1950 the BBC commissioned Martin Esslin and Walter Kolarz of the European Services to travel to West Africa, Tanganyika and Northern Rhodesia to collect material for a series of 15 talks and five features that would refute these allegations and reveal the reality of colonial administration.13 This was followed, as the colonial Cold War gathered pace, by four talks dealing with ‘the strategy and tactics of the Communists in the Colonial Field’ and a series of around twenty talks for mainly non-European services titled ‘This is Communism’.14 A renewed appetite to refute Soviet allegations subsequently found expression in early 1951 when J. Sherwood and Anatol Goldberg were sent to cover the creation of the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia.15 Reporting from Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, India and Pakistan, their programmes were explicitly intended to counter Soviet propaganda to Europe about conditions in the region.16 Meanwhile, the ‘positive achievements and purposes of the British Commonwealth and Empire’ were regularly juxtaposed with ‘the Russian record of dealings with subject peoples’ in Central and Eastern Europe.17 And it was in the context of the European radio race that the BBC had, by this time, been conducting a rather curious broadcast experiment.
When presenting his argument to the Cabinet for an anti-communist publicity policy at the start of 1948, Ernest Bevin had expressed his belief that it was up to Britain ‘to give the lead in spiritual, moral and political spheres to all the democratic elements in Western Europe’.18 ‘In short’, he told ministers, ‘we should seek to make London the Mecca for Social Democrats in Europe’ as part of a wider conception of a Western European ‘Third Force’ to act as a global balance between the laissez-faire capitalism of America and the expansionist communism of the Soviet Union.19 In March 1948 Christopher Warner enquired of Jacob how the BBC was ‘reflecting in their overseas broadcasts the changed international situation resulting from the recent events on both sides of the Iron Curtain’.20 In terms of European recovery Jacob noted that ‘until fairly recently the work of the European Service was hampered because the facts of the situation in this country and in Western Europe could barely support the theory that Western democracy was capable of standing on its own legs and fighting for something positive’.21 However, since the announcement of Marshall Aid and the setting up of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) to oversee its distribution, the failure of the Foreign Ministers Conference in November 1947 and the ‘call to action’ in Western Europe made by Bevin, Jacob felt that ‘the momentum of events has steadily increased, and we now have a tremendous story to tell’.22 But to what extent would the BBC allow itself to deliver this, essentially political, narrative? This was a question Jacob put before the Board of Management in April when he asked ‘what part broadcasting should play in furthering the general aims of Western European recovery’.23 Was it really the job of the BBC, he wondered, to ‘offer the same leadership in the field of radio that the country as a whole has offered in the field of economic cooperation’?24 Two days after the creation of a Western European Union with the signing, on 17 April 1948, of the Treaty of Brussels by Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, Jacob got his answer. With the ‘unity of Western Europe being of paramount importance’, the Board was in ‘general agreement that the BBC had a duty to take the initiative’.25
Already by the beginning of March the Dutch had proposed co-operative broadcasts among Britain and the Benelux countries, suggesting simultaneous broadcasts of music, short talks by a British speaker to be transmitted on the Dutch domestic KRO network and a feature programme describing the progress of European recovery.26 These ideas chimed not only with the development of plans within the BBC but also, it appeared, with the wishes of listeners across Europe. As Lean told Jacob, there was a new demand for a Western Union Programme which was supported by a great deal of correspondence from the European audience.27 Following the consideration of proposals by Lean and the Head of European Productions, Camacho,28 the Board of Management established a Committee on Cooperative European Programme29 – otherwise known as the Western Union Committee – to examine co-operation between the broadcasting organizations of Western Europe in order to ‘put programmes on the air designed to support the common purpose, economic, political and cultural, of Western Europe’.30
Before final proposals could be made about content, however, it was necessary to deal with a number of other considerations. For example, which countries in Western Europe should be included, or would wish to be included, in such a scheme? The first meeting of the government’s Working Party on Spiritual Aspects of Western Union in February had concluded that ‘the 16 ERP countries should be taken as a starting point’.31 This view was generally accepted at the BBC, but a series of obstacles soon emerged to cast doubt on the practical viability of such an approach. Such integrated planning required both a relatively high level of expertise on the part of the broadcasting organizations involved as well as a formalization of relations between them. Both of these conditions, however, militated against a scheme involving all sixteen of the Marshall Aid countries. Despite the desire of the Board of Management to get ‘the broadcasting organisations of the sixteen countries adhering to the Marshall plan to co-operate’, it was argued by Lean and colleagues on the Western Union Committee, and accepted by the Board,32 that ‘for reasons of manageability’ a conference should be called of the Western Union countries (incorporating Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg) while ‘keeping the ground clear from the start for expansion at a later stage’.33 Christopher Mayhew at the Foreign Office (FO) was of a similar view and informed the Working Party on Spiritual Aspects of Western Union that ‘making a start with the Five Powers would not prejudice any eventual extension of co-operation to the whole sixteen’.34
In addition to who should participate, there were other issues that needed to be resolved, not the least of which was who the audience for these co-operative programmes was intended to be. Lean had been keen to stimulate ‘the idea of Europe as a good investment’ in the Western Hemisphere while in Eastern Europe ‘one would hope for a sense of envy, admiration and something more disturbing than respect’.35 This wider analysis was also reflected in a Cabinet paper by Clement Attlee on European Recovery Programme Information Policy. Here he identified five principal audiences for ‘publicity from British sources about the European Recovery Programme . . . the publics at home, in North and South America, in Western Europe, the Dominions, and the Colonies’.36 In relation to the United States, he felt there was ‘a specific obligation to give publicity to the benefits received under the European Recovery Programme’, especially as examples of the use being made of US aid ‘will be listened for in America’.37
Decisions were also required on two essentially constitutional matters before the idea of Western Union broadcasting could be taken any further. Co-operative European programming challenged the concept of national sovereignty by diluting control within a multi-national framework. It was decided, however, at a meeting of senior programme staff that ‘on a voluntary basis and by mutual agreement’ the preparation of scripts for co-operative transmissions should allow a loosening of the Corporation’s national jurisdiction.38 Henceforth, the voice of Britain would, at certain times, be required to transform itself into the voice of Western Europe.
The second matter related to the quality of output and the policy governing the acceptability of shared programming. There had been little history of programme exchanges between the BBC and other broadcasters in Europe other than the supply of programmes for relay which was characterized by an overwhelming net export for the Corporation. For example, in 1947 the number of outgoing relays had been 442 while those being taken by the BBC was only 112,39 the majority of which were made up of news despatches and correspondent’s reports.40 The 1946 White Paper on Broadcasting Policy had ‘expressed the desire that the Corporation should accept suitable foreign programmes for rediffusion in this country’.41 Until 1948 this sentiment remained an intention, as yet unfulfilled. Not only did the BBC feel the need to respond to the political desire for collaboration with Britain’s nearest neighbours, but co-operative endeavours of this nature, as Mayhew reminded members of the Spiritual Union committee, were now backed by international agreement as Article III of the Brussels Treaty demonstrated: ‘The High Contracting Parties will make every effort in common to lead their peoples towards a better understanding of the principles which form the basis of their common civilisation and to promote cultural exchanges by conventions between themselves or by other means.’42 Broadcasting, and the BBC in particular, was ideally placed to undertake such a task and the committee discussed radio ‘as a medium in which 5-Power cooperation was both “possible and desirable”’.43
Programme quality had been the defining criterion of the BBC’s broadcast output, but Jacob now posed the question of whether ‘what might be called diplomatic instead of merely programme consideration would be given to all offers of programmes for relay’.44 As such, ‘each case would be assessed in relation to its effect upon the total responsibilities of the BBC’.45 Jacob acknowledged the concern that ‘the effect would be to debase programme standards by introducing political considerations’, but in what was a surprisingly frank assessment of the relationship between the Corporation and the government, he argued that ‘this is in fact a process that goes on all the time, since the BBC is an instrument of national policy and not merely a programme making body’.46 The BBC Board of Management agreed that ‘the process is justified by the belief in the intrinsic value of programme exchanges’.47 Accordingly, the exchange of programmes between the broadcasting organizations of Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg was embedded into the wider conception of Western Union broadcasting.48 What, though, was to be the detail of the co-operative venture? The Western Union Committee suggested two types of transmission and at the end of May the Board decided that the co-operation of the Western Union countries should be sought for the planning of a single pooled ‘symbolic’ programme to be broadcast by all the participating organizations (and, where possible, simultaneously).49 A further step would be to add a ‘mutual aid’ programme which would encourage co-operation ‘in obtaining and distributing basic material’ with which the different broadcasters could ‘independently edit and produce separate versions which they commit themselves to broadcast at significant times’.50 Consequently, on 1 July 1948 representatives of the five Western Union broadcasting organizations arrived at Broadcasting House for a two-day conference ‘to discuss the possibility of arranging in cooperation with one another programmes whose object would be to underline the community of interest and the importance of cooperation between their countries, and to bring about increased understanding between their peoples’.51
Indicative of the way this initiative cut across the boundaries between home and overseas broadcasting, the BBC Director of the Spoken Word, George Barnes, chaired this first conference. And it was here that the Board of Management’s proposals received approval. As a result, agreement was reached by all broadcasters that each country would arrange, in turn, a talk by a non-official speaker on a subject of topical interest for ten minutes over a ten week period in a series entitled ‘Western European Commentary’.52 These commentaries would then be broadcast in all countries during the same week either in the language of origin or in translation (or a combination of both). Participating countries would also broadcast, in their own language, a discussion between speakers from the five countries on ‘The Future of Germany’. In addition, a ‘European Concert’ (a symphony) would be broadcast by one country at a time and relayed at the same time by the others. It was further agreed that ‘any music programme in which the five countries could take part simultaneously was likely to contribute towards a feeling of community’ and should be arranged.53
A great deal of effort was invested in this project along with an unprecedented level of planned co-operation between European broadcasters. Driven by an enthusiasm for telling the story of Western European unity, it quickly transpired this was a story very few people actually wanted to hear. Preparing for the fifth Western Union Broadcasting Conference in May 1950, George Barnes informed his colleagues that ‘cooperative broadcasts have not succeeded’ and that the BBC should ‘make the others face the fact’.54 Consequently, it was decided among the broadcasters that ‘Definite programme commitments of any kind should not be undertaken but that there was a general obligation to interest our listeners in the life and activities of the other countries both individually and collectively considered as parts of Western Union.’55 This was a far cry from the rhetoric of spiritual union used a couple of years earlier with, in the intervening period, further examples of practical union in Western Europe with the establishment of the Council of Europe and the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. So what had happened in the meantime?
The real problem lay with the simple proposition that people in one country would have a genuine and continuing peacetime interest in the domestic activities of their near neighbours. The question of whether there was a sufficient appetite among the audiences for this kind of programming had always come second to the political taste for Western Union. Accordingly, the way Barnes assessed the first six months of the project prior to a third conference was a rather curious balance of principle exceeding reality. European co-operation, he explained, ‘is now a fact in defence and in trade, and a closer and wider union, even a political one, is being discussed. Thus the broadcast project is now part of a whole.’56 But, he continued, for the British listener the programmes had been ‘a complete failure’.57 The reason for this was twofold: ‘The programmes have hitherto had little unity to reflect, and have had to communicate an idea much more unfamiliar to the British than to the Europeans’; ‘Broadcast programmes are successful only when they are addressed to a particular audience and it is very difficult to address five national audiences simultaneously.’58 And yet he thought that ‘the need to continue what we have begun seems to me axiomatic’, as it did to the rest of the Board of Management.59 Among their international colleagues Belgium and Holland were keen to continue as was Luxembourg, as long as the project did not conflict with its saleable air time. Radiodiffusion FranÇaise, though, was of the opinion that bilateral as opposed to multilateral exchanges would be more profitable.60 By the time of the next conference in Luxembourg in October 1949, plans for expansion evaporated in the light of unfulfilled expectations. The Western European Commentaries ‘were agreed without any dissenting opinion to have been a failure’ and were dropped.61 And although co-operative plans for music programmes (classical, light and folk) remained active, imaginative responses to the problems raised by collaborative broadcasting failed to materialize.62
By 1950, by which time the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) was established and fulfilling the requirement of a technical centre for Western Europe, the Western Union broadcasting effort was effectively in a state of care and maintenance. The tempo of co-operation had reduced significantly and the BBC now proposed revised terms for working together in which ‘we will each in our own way with our own resources, in the light of our own knowledge of our listeners’ tastes and as often as we judge to be useful, put on programmes whose object will be to strengthen the links between the five countries’.63 Within the space of two years, multilateral collaborative action in support of European unity had given way to unilateral determinism.
The British government’s focus on a Western European Union was naturally political and strategic in its intent. The BBC’s response to this foreign policy initiative had been swift and practical. While changes in its broadcasts to Eastern Europe as a result of the Cabinet’s anti-communist publicity policy took time and required a great deal of negotiation between Whitehall and the BBC, broadcasting initiatives in relation to Western Europe were much more forthcoming and appeared, at first sight, simpler to design. It was the reorganized services to Central and Eastern Europe, however, which endured in a more complete form than the experiment of Western Union broadcasting. It was, nonetheless, an important enterprise that engendered a sense of closer co-operation between broadcasters and an understanding of each other’s needs and abilities that would assist in future co-operative programme initiatives. For example, the EBU’s greatest popular achievement, the Eurovision Song Contest, which began just a few years later in 1956, would have been unimaginable without the experience of Western Union broadcasting in terms of its technical requirements, the focus on simultaneously broadcast music and its symbolic and political ethic. Ernest Bevin could not have imagined this as a lasting legacy of his combined drive for a strategic Third Force and emphasis on anti-communist publicity, but its lineage is as undeniable as it is surprising.