7

Austerity

Changes in the tone of broadcasts over the Iron Curtain were defining characteristics of the External Services’ output into the 1950s, as the imperatives of the Cold War were knitted into its remit. Meanwhile, the fiscal relationship between the BBC and the government was the cause of constant instability and uncertainty. From the enshrining of peacetime Grant-in-Aid funding for the BBC’s overseas transmissions in 1947 to the renewal of this arrangement under a new Charter five years later, the amount of money provided by government and the means by which it was calculated were subject to the vicissitudes of the political and economic climate of the time. The cost of domestic policy initiatives such as welfare reform and nationalization, the increasingly complex pressures arising from Imperial, Commonwealth and European responsibilities, the slow recovery from war and the effort of reconstruction both at home and overseas resulted in economic crises that stretched the nation’s financial resources to breaking point. Added to these were the almost crippling costs of the escalating conflict between East and West (and the re-emphasis on defence spending) in which Britain attempted to maintain its position as one of the Great Powers. It was among this mêlée of competing financial priorities that the External Services sought its slice of the Exchequer’s cake.¹

At a meeting on 12 March 1947 attended by the Treasury, the Foreign Office, Dominions Office, Colonial Office, General Post Office, the Service Departments and the BBC, a reduction of £100,000 in the External Services budget was agreed on the basis of proposals submitted by the Deputy Director of Overseas Services, J. B. Clark.² This was the first step in a process of negotiation and renegotiation concerning the Grant-in-Aid over the next few years that pushed the External Services to the limit of their operational capacity and engendered an acute disagreement between the Corporation and the Treasury over the value to be placed on overseas broadcasting. By the end of 1947, BBC spending plans were again revised to accommodate a government request for a ten per cent cut in the overseas budget.³ As a consequence, from 1 April 1948 overseas services were forced to make major reductions in output.⁴ Although lunch-time broadcasts to Europe were saved, a revised External Services budget for 1948/49 of £4,025,000 saw daily programme hours for non-European Services cut by 20 per cent with a 25 per cent reduction in overall transmitter hours.⁵ The section which bore the brunt of this and future reductions was the Latin American Service, where daytime broadcasts were abandoned. Other government reductions had already led the British Information Services and the British Council to close down in four Central American countries, the Dominican Republic and Paraguay. The result was a major loss of influence for Britain in the region, with BBC bulletins unavailable as ‘an important source of news guidance for the afternoon Press in Latin America’, and with ‘no one to look after the distribution of transcription material and the Voz de Londres in these countries’.⁶

In the summer of 1948, just as the European Services were working towards an accommodation with the Foreign Office (FO) as to the tone of Britain’s voice abroad, there was increasing pressure within the Cabinet to examine the cost of the government’s overseas information services, of which the External Services were a key part. Still reeling after the end of Lend-Lease three years earlier, and having spent the majority of the $3.7 billion American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes by the summer of 1946, the implementation of sterling convertibility in July 1947 (a condition of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 which led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund a year and a half later) had induced an economic crisis in which a dollar drain of $650 million was lost before convertibility was suspended the following month.⁷ Over the next three years Britain received $2.7 billion of Marshall Aid but the government’s relative inability to exercise control over its macro-economic environment compounded the problems it had in meeting the needs of its micro-economic responsibilities.⁸ This meant that by the time of the Berlin blockade in June 1948 the government was increasingly willing to re-examine its spending plans and realize savings. For its information services, this was to result in harsh budget cuts.

A Cabinet memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stafford Cripps, put the cost of overseas information services in the summer of 1948 at £11,621,700, over a third of which went to the External Services via Grant-in-Aid.⁹ When added to the £5 million spent at home, he argued that ‘the total expenditure on these services had now reached a level which exposed the Government to risk of public criticism’.¹⁰ By the time this submission was considered by ministers at the end of October, much had been done by overseas Whitehall departments to orchestrate their response to Cripps. In July the committee of senior ministers on Anti-Communist Propaganda had decided to set up a small body consisting of the Parliamentary Under-Secretaries at the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office and Colonial Office, at the latter’s suggestion, to ‘co-ordinate the collection and presentation of publicity material regarding British Colonial policy and administration’.¹¹ It was intended that it would present Britain’s activities in this field as progressive and constructive while, in a more destructive vein, ‘give the world a true picture of Russia’s conduct in Eastern Europe and its own territories’.¹² This was the beginning of the Colonial Information Policy Committee (CIPC) and added to its permanent membership were the head of the COI, Robert Fraser, and Ian Jacob from the BBC. Consequently, by the time ministers discussed Cripp’s challenge to the overseas information services budget in October, CIPC was beginning to play a key part in prosecuting the government’s campaign against communism and would provide a galvanizing forum in which to mount a counter-attack against Treasury plans.

On 22 September, Bevin wrote to the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Philip Noel-Baker, requesting that CIPC ‘consider whether the work of our Information Services in and about the Colonies and in the Dominions, especially India, Pakistan and Ceylon, should not also be much expanded. The Under Secretaries would then draw up a three-year budget of expenditure on overseas publicity.’¹³ This move coincided with a subsequent development whereby the activities of CIPC were widened to cover ‘the whole field of overseas propaganda, with the object of repelling Communist campaigns by both positive and destructive counter-propaganda’.¹⁴ Mindful of being outmanoeuvred in this deliberate attempt by overseas departments to seize the initiative for setting the information services budget away from the Exchequer, Cripps appointed to the committee, with Cabinet approval, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury.¹⁵ When the Cabinet came to consider the Chancellor’s memorandum on 25 October, ministers were also informed of the Foreign Secretary’s view that far from being cut back, the work done by the overseas information services should be enhanced.¹⁶ This, however, was a difficult argument to make in light of the fiscal pressures on the Treasury and a final decision was put in abeyance. Nonetheless, by the end of the year overseas departments had control of an increasingly important part of the government’s anti-communist machine and, in the shape of CIPC, a vehicle from which a defence of the information services could be mounted.

A consequence of the widening remit of CIPC was the removal of Jacob and Fraser from its permanent list of members. Jacob, though, remained in close contact with the work of the committee and still received its papers (except for those put in a confidential annex) and continued to attend meetings at which matters affecting the BBC were discussed.¹⁷ As such, he was an influential occasional member of the committee. Meanwhile, as forecasts were made about the future of the government’s information services in Whitehall, more immediate concerns were raised at Bush House when at the start of 1949 the Treasury asked the External Services to accept a further cut of £280,000 for the coming financial year, later reduced to £250,000.¹⁸ Although this was achieved by deferring capital projects amounting to £200,000 and by making further ‘unspecified savings’,¹⁹ Jacob made it clear to the BBC Governors that ‘we shall be hard put to make two ends meet and any new developments will certainly have to be financed by reductions elsewhere’.²⁰ The finances of the External Services had reached a precarious balance and although a great deal of effort had been put in to carry out organizational and administrative efficiencies, any slack there may have been was fast disappearing. A ten per cent cut the previous year followed by a further reduction on that figure of around seven per cent left almost no room for manoeuvre.²¹

The devaluation of sterling in September 1949 from $4.03 to $2.80 proved to be an additional headache for the External Services with a special BBC Board of Management meeting required to approve ‘proposals which would at the least keep the expenditure in foreign currencies to the present authorised sterling totals and, wherever possible, reduce them below these totals’.²² The result was a £12,000 cut in programme allowances and the need for savings of £42,000, out of a total spend of £94,000, on offices in New York, Colombia, Mexico City, Brazil and Argentina.²³ Following discussions with the FO, who considered the already badly hit BBC services to Latin America ‘as the principal agent of Britain in the information field there’, it was decided that the ‘surfeit of radio, press and magazine fare which surrounds the people of the United States, the great distances, the immense population, and the absence of any centralized broadcasting system into which we might gain entry, make it a somewhat unprofitable field for work’. Accordingly, a 50 per cent reduction in expenditure on the New York office was made by cutting staff from 29 to 14 and putting an end to ‘specialised projects in the North American Service’.²⁴

The competing visions of the residents of King Charles Street (the road dividing the Treasury and the Foreign Office) on the future of the overseas information services resulted in a state of relative inertia as the strategy governing funding requirements remained unresolved while the annual bunfight for resources continued. In preparation for the 1950/51 financial year the BBC argued that the External Services would need an increase in its Grant-in-Aid of between £200,000 and £300,000 on the previous year.²⁵ This was reflected in an overseas information services budget estimate for that year of £11 million proposed as part of CIPC ‘Three Year Plan’. However, this found itself at odds with a new financial ceiling of £9.5 million for all services put forward by the Chancellor.²⁶ Attending the CIPC in November 1949 Jacob explained that a reduction in line with the Treasury’s figure would mean cuts in programme quality, time on the air, and the cancellation of complete services, ‘for instance, the whole of the dawn transmissions for Europe’ which was ‘our only way of reaching the skilled workmen class in a number of countries. . . . These would be serious disadvantages to set off against the financial savings that would be made.’²⁷ To underline his point and with the next year’s budget pending a decision, Jacob ordered a standstill on the construction of a major transmitter station being built in Singapore. This was a long-term and important capital project for both the government and the BBC and one CIPC had considered as ‘axiomatic that the BBC should proceed with’.²⁸ It was hoped a meeting of the Committee on Anti-Communist Propaganda on 19 December would bring matters to a head when it considered CIPC’s three-year plan for overseas publicity.²⁹ In addition to the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor, attending the meeting were Albert Victor ‘A.V.’ Alexander (Minister of Defence), James Chuter Ede (Home Secretary), Arthur Creech Jones (Secretary of State for the Colonies) and Philip Noel-Baker (Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations). Following Jacob’s lead, CIPC’s paper took the line that ‘a broadcasting service is not something that can be turned on and off like a tap, since its audience and its reputation can only be built up slowly and laboriously’. Moreover, radio ‘is our only means of injecting anti-Communist publicity into the “iron-curtain” countries’ and that ‘any reduction in the output of the BBC’s foreign language services at this juncture would be a false economy and would result in a loss of British influence which would take many years to recover’.³⁰

Although compelling for those engaged in the making foreign policy, the External Services’ case was not received with similar enthusiasm by ministers with a domestic portfolio. Cripps, for example, was possessed of a far more protean view of the aims and means of broadcasting to other countries. In the present context he viewed ‘the Overseas Information Services . . . as an aspect of defence’, and as defence spending at that time was also being reduced (before the flames of war flickered on the Korean Peninsula) so must that of these services. It was far better, he thought, ‘that we should concentrate largely on the anti-Communist side of overseas publicity and should consider abandoning certain spheres of operation altogether, e.g. Latin America’. Similarly, Attlee felt ‘that we should concentrate on the most dangerous areas. Could we not consider abandoning Information Services altogether in such parts of the world as Scandinavia?’³¹ This segregation in policy terms between anti-communist objectives and the rest of the world had clear implications for foreign language broadcasting (as opposed to English output and its associations with empire and commonwealth) and would prove to be the crux of the Grant-in-Aid funding issue for the following decade.

By the end of the meeting a compromise was reached whereby expenditure on the Overseas Information Services would be restricted ‘to as low a figure as possible between £10 and £11 millions’.³² Nevertheless, it did illuminate a clear divide between home and overseas departments in which the final arbitrating voice, that of the Prime Minister, was in sympathy with the views of the former. However, a period of extra time had been given to this debate and the scene was now set for some very hard bargaining over the next year and a half. In the meantime, as an overall budget decision hung in the balance, operating estimates had to be set for 1950/51. In this the External Services, perhaps as a result of Jacob’s special pleading, received a net increase of £195,000 (unlike other elements of the government’s information machinery) which went some way to maintaining the status quo at Bush House. The future, though, remained uncertain with next to no reserve funds, rising annual costs, the expense of countering Soviet jamming and ageing technical stock. As Jacob informed the BBC Governors in the spring of 1950:

As it seems unlikely that we shall be given any more money in the future than we have now, some axeing of the less essential Services to make room for necessary improvements seems unavoidable.³³

The failure of CIPC’s three-year plan to be formally accepted as a basis for future planning was a significant but unsurprising blow to the BBC as was the de facto acceptance of an annual budgetary ceiling for all overseas information services as the practical method of establishing expenditure. For 1950/51 this was initially set at £10.82 million with a subsequent agreement to keep costs down to £10.5 million.³⁴

The External Services had so far avoided the severest cuts which had been borne, for example, by the British Council and the Foreign Office Information Services. But as an estimate between £5.2 and £5.3 million for 1951/52 was prepared by Bush House it was clear that BBC services would face major reductions unless there was a fundamental rethink in Whitehall of the whole basis of government accounting for the overseas information services.³⁵ It was with this threat in mind that Jacob, along with the FO and others, set about challenging the prevailing budgetary mindset.³⁶ At a meeting of CIPC on 20 June 1950, Jacob launched the fight back against year-on-year cuts by suggesting a new line of argument which put the case for expansion rather than trying to hold back the tide of cuts. As he told his CIPC colleagues, ‘the £10.5 millions provided for overseas information work was insignificant compared with the £700 millions for defence; the Information services could do much towards winning the Cold War, but if that was lost all the money spent on defence would have been wasted’.³⁷ In this way, Jacob sought to change the terms of the debate over the cost of overseas publicity and in doing so take the initiative away from the Treasury.

Jacob’s thoughts were fed through to the Working Party of CIPC where they were co-ordinated with the needs of the other information services. In this forum Jacob and the Chair of the Working Party, the Head of IRD Ralph Murray, worked together on a paper that focused on getting the principle of an overall ceiling removed. This they did by arguing that rising costs produced not stabilization but progressive run-down, and that extra finance, not less, was needed as ‘a means of political warfare to strengthen the forces of democracy wherever they are most threatened’. The Korean War had ‘quickened the tempo of the struggle against the Kremlin and increased the importance of the role of overt as well as covert information work’.³⁸ ‘The prime need’, Jacob argued, ‘was to persuade Senior Ministers to adopt an entirely new attitude towards the overseas Information Services and to agree that a considerable increase of effort was necessary’. Money spent on information services should be regarded as a ‘form of insurance’ against greater expenditure if they did not play their part in the struggle between East and West:

The Information side of the “Cold War” . . . might be likened to a campaign which we must fight as efficiently as possible; and, as in a military campaign, it was necessary for us to have the funds readily available, so as to seize each opportunity as it presented itself, without being subject to long delays required to obtain Treasury approval for each item.³⁹

Consequently, the three overseas ministers approved the recommendations that a reserve fund should be established to allow for contingencies and that ceilings on expenditure should be removed ‘and a return to the more normal practice whereby the estimates are worked out in conjunction with the Treasury on the basis of the requirements which the Committee consider necessary’.⁴⁰ With strong opposition to these measures from the Treasury, Attlee called a meeting between the Exchequer and overseas ministries in an attempt to once again resolve the matter.

Just a month after succeeding Cripps as Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell informed fellow ministers on 14 November 1950 that he was ‘contemplating a decrease which might amount to about £2 million’,⁴¹ on the basis that while there ‘was value in some aspects of propaganda, particularly in the front line of the anti-communist campaign’ he felt that the government ‘could afford no “frills” at the present time’.⁴² Such frills included, for example, services to Latin America. It was also suggested by the Treasury that the BBC External Services budget for 1951/52 should be reduced to £3,750,000, £1.55 million short of the BBC estimate.⁴³ The Chancellor was ‘not convinced’, when the matter was referred to the Ministerial Committee on Information Services (ISC) in February 1951, the External Services ‘have been reorganised on to a new basis appropriate to even the present’ while overseas ministers noted that when it came to costs, ‘the floor rose while the ceiling came down’.⁴⁴ The British Chiefs of Staff had already been drafted in to support the case for overseas broadcasting, concluding that ‘it was most important to maintain to the fullest possible extent the Overseas Services of the BBC on account of their value in the prosecution of the Cold War’.⁴⁵ Following up this military analysis the Minister of Defence informed ISC members that ‘the Chiefs of Staff have once more drawn my attention to the damaging effects of a change of policy’ that ‘could not fail to cripple the BBC’s efficiency as a Cold War instrument’.⁴⁶ Needless to say the BBC had been at pains to canvas opinion at the War Office in advance of this meeting and had arranged an informal briefing at Langham House to highlight the type of cuts the Corporation might be forced to make.⁴⁷

Critical to the BBC’s case, and that of the overseas information services, was an appeal to view their influence, and consequently their value, as to some extent dependent on their global reach. Their credibility was enhanced as much by engaging with publics overseas as a cohesive force as it was by exploding the myths of Soviet communism. Sympathetic cultural ties, alongside more aggressive tactics, could deliver significant dividends as part of a defence spending strategy as well as giving the British government direct access to a genuinely worldwide audience. This type of effort and the influence derived from it took time to establish and once dismantled, could not easily be rebuilt. It was on this basis that they hoped to respond to Cripp’s earlier linking of a reduction in defence spending with one applied to the information services. However, in a reversal of misfortune the sheer scale of expenditure on the Korean War and the rearmament programme this galvanized meant that reductions in the budgets of other departments and dependent organizations were inevitable. In a report for the Board of Governors, Jacob seemed taken aback by what was happening:

It seems hardly possible that His Majesty’s Government would proceed in this drastic fashion at a time like the present, particularly as any Services now abolished would have to be started up again if there were a war, and in the meanwhile we should have lost the frequencies, the staff and the audience.⁴⁸

Continuing negotiations in search of a budgetary settlement before the start of the 1951/52 financial year saw the Treasury offer an overall spend of £9.8 million (£4.4 million for the BBC)⁴⁹ while the overseas departments countered with a figure of £10.8 million, the amount originally agreed for the previous year.⁵⁰ By the time of the decisive Cabinet meeting on 2 April 1951 Gaitskell had adjusted his offer to £10.15 million, with £4,750,000 authorized for the External Services, leaving the overseas ministers to argue that counter-jamming measures and planned improvements in services to Far Eastern and Arabic audiences along with European services would be badly affected.⁵¹ For his part, the Chancellor believed ‘some overseas services could be reduced or even abolished without serious loss to the national interest’.⁵² In truth, the die had been cast even before Ministers met. On 9 March 1951, Ernest Bevin, whose health had been failing fast and whose once formidable presence in the Cabinet was in decline, was made Lord Privy Seal. Although he was given responsibility for questions concerning broadcasting policy, real influence for overseas operations passed to his successor as Foreign Secretary, the former Lord President, Herbert Morrison. Morrison took a different approach to the financing of the information services and had a year earlier ‘indicated to the Prime Minister his view that, on the merits of the case, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was right’.⁵³ When the problem was brought before the Information Services Committee, which Morrison chaired, he was left unconvinced by the arguments supporting the External Services’ estimate believing ‘the targets of overseas broadcasting should be more carefully selected’.⁵⁴ As he informed colleagues around the Cabinet table, he had ‘discussed this matter further with the Secretaries of State for the Colonies and Commonwealth Relations, and had persuaded them to accept the lower figure proposed by the Chancellor’.⁵⁵

The attempt by the BBC and its partners in Whitehall over the course of three years to re-engineer governing perspectives and argue against successive reductions in the overseas information services budget and the BBC External Services Grant-in-Aid had ended in failure. The result for the BBC was extremely painful, coming so soon after the cuts of the previous year.⁵⁶ The following month the General Overseas Service in English was reduced from a round-the-clock operation to 21 hours a day. Spanish output for the Latin American Service was cut from five and three-quarter to three and three-quarter hours a day and Portuguese from three and a half to one and a half. Greek for Cyprus was stopped altogether and Afrikaans reduced from 45 minutes to 15 minutes a day. In services to Europe, French was cut by three-quarters of an hour a day, as was German for Germany, German for Austria by quarter of an hour and Dutch by six minutes. In all 40 staff posts were lost.⁵⁷ Meanwhile services to East Germany were increased from five to seven days a week and an extra hour was added to the Arabic Service.⁵⁸ Arguing for the wider expansion of the overseas information services budget had been an ambitious plan but with Bevin as Foreign Secretary one worth pursuing. With Morrison in the chair there was little sympathy for the concept that lay behind it and Jacob and Gaitskell were left at loggerheads as the financial will of the Treasury exercised its control over the Grant-in-Aid. Would, though, a Conservative administration have responded differently? Jacob and the BBC did not have to wait long to find out.

Drogheda

It soon became apparent that the same critical tension in relating value to expenditure existed regardless of whether Clement Attlee or Winston Churchill occupied No. 10 Downing Street. In February 1951, the senior Conservative, Richard (R.A.) Butler had argued, in response to the announcement that the External Services budget was to be cut again, that ‘this arm of broadcasting is one of the most vital that we can use in our general defence arrangements’.⁵⁹ Likewise, there was derision in the press over this latest funding decision with the Daily Mail noting, ‘The “Voice of America” booms, the Voice of Stalin roars, the Voice of Britain must whisper.’⁶⁰ Nine months later, however, the Conservatives also found themselves looking for a mechanism that would unlock the problem of funding in the context of vastly swelling defence expenditure as a result of the Korean War and a consequent desperate need to exercise control over the public purse.

To this effect, the new Conservative government established a small Ministerial Committee to ‘examine the requirement for Overseas Information Services for the coming year’ under the Lord President of the Council, Lord Salisbury. In truth, the committee had been given the task of cutting £500,000 from the overall budget which was done by squeezing even further the resources of the British Council and the COI.⁶¹ Nevertheless, the decision of the government in early 1952 to freeze the overseas broadcasting budget for the coming financial year at £4,750,000 resulted, according to Gerard Mansell who would take charge at Bush House in the 1970s, in ‘the most serious blood-letting the External Services were ever to know’.⁶² This was no understatement. Further cuts were made in Portuguese and Spanish services to Latin America along with the closure of the four remaining BBC offices there. The majority of breakfast and lunchtime broadcasts to Western Europe were eliminated with services to Belgium discontinued completely. In addition, the Arabic Listener ceased publication (a decision the government would come to rue four years later), and nearly all capital expenditure, desperately needed to update ageing transmitter stock, was deferred. Finally, and most dispiriting, 130 posts were abolished.⁶³ As Jacob informed the BBC Board of Governors in February 1952, ‘there is a real danger of our becoming inaudible in various parts of the world unless we take steps to regain our position’.⁶⁴

Deeply frustrated by the course of government inaction, Jacob agitated for an independent enquiry to help resolve this unsatisfactory state of affairs. Concerned at losing political control and the financial implications of such a move, the government resisted. However, the increased cost of jamming and the impact on domestic opinion of the External Services’ swingeing cuts forced a change of approach in Whitehall. In the face of increasing public criticism the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Nutting, announced to the House of Commons on 2 April 1952 the government’s decision to set up an interdepartmental Committee of officials:

Each successive year the Overseas Information Services have been subjected to the over-riding requirements of finance. . . . It is high time, in my view, that an enquiry was made into the political aspects of this field. We have, therefore, already taken steps to invite the departments concerned, together with the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British Council, to consider the whole range of our overseas information services from the political and strategic aspects.⁶⁵

This committee, chaired by Jack Nicholls of the Foreign Office who had taken over from Christopher Warner as Assistant Under-Secretary superintending information services was, perhaps surprisingly, not designed to find a solution. Rather it was a way of buying time and once again a means to generate a consensus of opinion with which to mount an assault on Treasury intransigence. It was to this effect that the committee reported on 14 July:

We believe we have established the necessity for, and the advantages of, efficient overseas information work. . . . We are clearly not qualified to express any opinion on the proper distribution of the national resources; we must therefore confine ourselves to saying that in our view the international situation, the Communist ideological onslaught on the free world, the need to right the balance of payments and the necessity of maintaining Commonwealth relationships, all demand an intensification of overseas information work and a measure of continuity in its financing, in order to permit operations to be so planned as to produce their full cumulative effect.⁶⁶

Two weeks later Nutting announced in the Commons, in response to a question put by the Labour MP Ernest Davies, the government’s decision to establish ‘a small expert advisory committee of independent people outside the Government service’ to make recommendations on the long-term policy of overseas information services.⁶⁷ The stage was now set for just the type of enquiry the BBC hoped would bring an end to the suffocating inertia of the previous years.

Under the chairmanship of the House of Lords’ Deputy Speaker (Lord Chairman of Committees) and former Director-General of the wartime Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Earl of Drogheda, the committee began its work in October 1952 having been asked

To assess the value, actual and potential, of the overseas information work of the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, Colonial Office, Board of Trade and Central Office of Information; the External Services of the British Broadcasting Corporation; and the work of the British Council; to advise upon the relative importance of different methods and services in different areas and circumstances and to make recommendations for future policy.⁶⁸

In order to do this, the Drogheda Committee set about establishing general principles that should guide its analysis of the various parts of the government’s overseas information services. For example, it was thought that ‘The aim of the Information Services must always be to achieve in the long run some definite political or commercial result.’ Equally, it was considered that ‘Information Services should be directed at the influential few and through them at the many.’⁶⁹ With regard to the BBC’s External Services the Committee thought that the value of overseas broadcasting would be further determined by three additional considerations: first, the extent to which listeners in reception countries had access to alternative and reliable sources of news; secondly, whether people in another country look to the West for ‘encouragement and guidance’ and; finally, where local broadcasting systems relied on the External Services to supply programming for output and where the BBC ‘performs an essential role as the centre of a broadcasting network which brings the voice of Britain to countries which naturally look to London for news’.⁷⁰

During the course of its deliberations, the BBC put a great deal of effort in furnishing the Committee with ample information supporting its argument in favour of increased financing. This work was led by the new Director of External Broadcasting, J. B. Clark, after Jacob’s departure in June 1952 on a six-month secondment as Chief Staff Officer to the Minister of Defence, at Churchill’s personal request, before returning in December to replace William Haley as Director-General.⁷¹ Clark noted that in his dealings with the committee the ‘atmosphere has been markedly receptive to expressions of anxiety at the limitation of BBC activities’ and both ‘collectively and severally all the members of the Committee seem well disposed to the BBC External Services’.⁷² Consequently, it was felt that the Corporation ‘has had a fair and full hearing at its various sessions with the Committee’. However, on the eve of the Committee presenting its Report to the government, concerns at the BBC started to emerge about ‘a somewhat dangerous and unwelcome inclination to contemplate the curtailment of services to Western Europe’.⁷³

The Report of the Drogheda Committee, which was declassified and released only in September 2008, was presented to the government on 27 July 1953, a year on from the report of the committee of officials.⁷⁴ Both the BBC and the FO had hoped ‘to use the weapon of the Independent Inquiry as a means of persuading the Treasury to make increased grants to cover rising costs for the maintenance of the existing services’.⁷⁵ However, as the Report’s recommendations revealed, such a clear strategy was no longer applicable. With respect to the BBC, the Drogheda Report recommended the return of the General Overseas Service to a round-the-clock service. Broadcasts over the Iron Curtain should be maintained and effective counter-jamming measures continued. Services to the Middle East in Arabic should be extended with those to the Far East further strengthened. The Latin American Service should be restored to previous levels and programmes to North America and the Colonies maintained at present levels. It was on the issue of Europe, as the BBC had feared, that the Committee had less palatable news. While it was recommended that services in English, German, Austrian, Finnish, Spanish, Turkish, Yugoslav and Greek should be kept, because of their political importance, it was proposed that others in French, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish should be eliminated.⁷⁶

The Report presented a genuine dilemma for the BBC. The Corporation had presented a robust case and felt that it had had a fair hearing. The Committee paid tribute to the BBC’s ‘high reputation as a news source, to its penetrative power though the Iron Curtain, its influence in the Middle East, the value of the General Overseas Service and the importance of the Far Eastern and Latin American Services’.⁷⁷ In addition, by recommending an annual spend of £500,000 over five to ten years on capital investment to improve ageing technical stock, the Committee was clear in its support of the long-term future of overseas broadcasting. However, services to Western Europe had been evaluated, the Corporation felt, on the basis of ‘irrelevant principles . . . made to apply to broadcasting as if they were native to it’.⁷⁸

In its defence of broadcasting to Western Europe the BBC argued strongly against the fifth principle laid down by Drogheda – that information services shall be directed at the influential few and through them at the many. This, it felt, was more suited to the choice of student for a British Council course or the activity of a British Information Officer among contacts in a foreign capital. Meanwhile, it utterly failed to appreciate or take advantage of ‘the greatest development in the propaganda field in the past century’, namely, that ‘Wireless has given to governments for the first time direct means of access to audiences overseas, which enables them to influence foreign governments by and through direct contact with the masses.’ In the case of France, it was as if the British government possessed in its own right a daily newspaper with a circulation equivalent to The Daily Telegraph. As such, the BBC argued, ‘any information service which is in daily touch with five million people is itself in a position “to make policy or mould public opinion”’. To disrupt the global flow of the External Services for tactical purposes, they said, would have a deep impact on the hard earned reputation of the BBC abroad as listeners had become well aware of the political considerations pertaining to overseas broadcasting: ‘Audiences are quite clear as to the motives for treating them in this opportunistic manner, and the BBC would in the shortest period acquire a new reputation.’⁷⁹

This dilemma was mirrored in Whitehall where a virtual impasse had been reached between the Treasury and overseas departments. Echoing the approach taken by Jacob and others on the CIPC, the Report recommended the removal of the information services financial ‘ceiling’ and proposed a substantial increase in overall funding. In addition to the increase in capital expenditure for the BBC it was proposed that annual revenue should also see an uplift of £485,000 to compensate for the erosion caused by under-funding in previous years. These were measures that the Treasury, under current fiscal pressures, did not feel it could nor should accede to and as Prime Ministerial thoughts focused on the challenges and associated costs of the country’s thermo-nuclear future and maintaining Britain’s position at the top table of international diplomacy, the necessary executive direction was lacking to enforce a resolution. Accordingly, a White Paper based on the Drogheda Report was not published until April 1954, and then without a commitment from government to enact any of its recommendations.⁸⁰

In November the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, eventually conceded that the government ‘have accepted the broad principles set out in the Drogheda Report’, but would not commit to a schedule of implementation.⁸¹ It was another month before it became clear that the government really did not intend to act on the Report any time soon. In a debate in the House of Lords the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Reading, noted the decision ‘not to abolish for the next year any of the Western European Services’.⁸² While this was a welcome reprieve for the External Services it also indicated that Bush House would not benefit from any of the increases in expenditure and expansion recommended by Drogheda. It also made plain that the strategic reorganization of overseas broadcasting was to be postponed at least until 1956 – an unfortunate legacy as the Corporation would duly find out.

The equivocal nature of these public announcements could scarcely conceal the genuine conflict of opinion among ministers. In the meantime, Whitehall’s continued indecision meant that Bush House, unable to make plans for the future, was once again forced to prepare for further cuts as the annual horse-trade among it, the Foreign Office and the Treasury returned to its normal attritional pattern. As J. B. Clark noted of the latest round of budgetary negotiations in November 1954, ‘the recommendations of the Drogheda Committee, which on balance called for considerable expansion of the External Services, has so far had no application to the BBC. On the contrary, we are now going slightly into reverse.’⁸³ Nevertheless, while on the surface inertia seemed to rule, there was a subtle change occurring in official attitudes on King Charles Street that although not fully appreciated at the time would, in the course of the next year or two, come to be hugely significant in Whitehall’s attitude towards overseas broadcasting.

In negotiations with other departments the FO had consistently supported the BBC’s argument ‘to maintain the status quo in relation to the overall scope of the External Services’. This was the line it had pursued at meetings of the Treasury Working Party on broadcasting services at the end of 1954.⁸⁴ However, debates within the department revealed the emergence of a far more pragmatic flexibility concerning the range of services broadcast overseas by the BBC. Prior to the publication of the White Paper and with government discussions, both within the Cabinet and in Ministerial Committee, stuck in departmental deadlock the FO was forced to reconsider its position. As a result, the BBC was informed that while the Foreign Office,

would not have taken the initiative in suggesting the elimination of services to the free countries of Europe, they feel that the position is one in which they may have to accept this unwelcome proposal in order to save the many good things elsewhere in the Committee’s Report. The alternative . . . might lead to a virtual disregard of the entire Report.⁸⁵

The practical acceptance by government at the end of 1954 of the latter course appeared to have made such a compromise unnecessary. This nevertheless masked the beginnings of a very real change of attitude in the FO where ever-worsening departmental budgetary constraints meant the BBC’s continued defence of its global remit would increasingly be judged against the more immediate diplomatic, political and economic imperatives facing the government. As Clark noted, Drogheda ‘has not allayed the recurrent budget troubles which it was really called into existence to cure’.⁸⁶ It had, however, planted the seeds of future discord that would contribute to the breakdown of relations between the FO and the BBC External Services just a few years later.