The Overseas Services of the BBC provide one of the most effective instruments for use by this country in maintaining the stability of the free world in the present struggle with Russian Communism. This struggle, often called the “Cold War”, seems likely to be long. It cannot be won quickly, though it might quickly be lost.
BBC Memorandum for the Cabinet Committee on Colonial Information Policy, June 19501
From 1 January 1947, the third successive Charter of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was intended to mark not only the continuation of the BBC as the monopoly broadcaster in the United Kingdom but also denote the transition from the wartime activities of its overseas services to the broadcasting requirements of peace.2 Emerging from ‘six long, weary and perilous years’, as the BBC’s Director-General William Haley put it in his Victory in Europe Day message to staff, broadcasting was considered as having a vital function to perform as ‘the newest of the great instruments of peace’.3 However, it was not long before fissures in post-war international relations plunged the world into a ‘cold war’. Once again, radio was pressed into service by the British government, this time as an adjunct to its non-shooting war with the Soviet Union, providing the opportunity to directly engage the hearts and minds of populations behind the Iron Curtain.
Broadcasting overseas by the BBC had begun on 19 December 1932 with transmissions in English to the Empire on shortwave but it was not until January 1938 that programmes in other languages were inaugurated, with an Arabic Service, followed quickly by Spanish and Portuguese Services for Latin America. Transmissions to Europe began in September 1938 with German, Italian and French news broadcasts started at the time of the Munich crisis, in a deliberate attempt to counter the propaganda of Italian and German radio stations.4 It was this competitive impulse to ensure that people in other countries should be made aware of the British interpretation of events that became a founding principle of broadcasting in other languages and lay at the heart of the subsequent massive expansion of the BBC World Service, not just in Europe but to all continents, during the Second World War. In this way, Britain’s geopolitical concerns and the intricacies of international diplomacy were dynamically and irrevocably knitted with the existing purpose of the BBC’s Empire Service, which had been to transmit the core values of the British way of life to the imperial outreaches and create a tangible (as well as metaphorical) border-defying community of interests, held together by an imperceptible network of wavelengths with London at its heart.5
At its peak, in 1943, the BBC was making regular programmes in over 45 languages (not including English) and by the end of the war, the number of hours beamed abroad exceeded that of domestic broadcasting.6 This explosion in the overseas activities of the BBC during the war, affecting the scope of its transmissions and the scale and multinational character of its workforce, altered the nature and remit of the BBC to a point where Haley was able to assert that in the ten years since the BBC started its previous Charter in January 1937, ‘the horizons of broadcasting [have] immeasurably widened. The BBC’s field is now the world’.7 This was indeed the case by 1947, when the threat of a Cold War was being defined not just in the minds of policy makers and military planners but also in terms of a wider public perception. The 1946 White Paper on Broadcasting Policy, the precursor to the Royal Charter, argued that ‘other Powers intend to continue to use the broadcasting medium to put their point of view . . . and we cannot afford to let the British viewpoint go by default’.8 To this end, the BBC was charged with the task of ensuring that the voice of Britain remained a force overseas at a time of intense economic uncertainty at home and high anxiety abroad, as post-war reconstruction gave way to a recrudescence of deep international schisms, which posed a grave threat to the recently achieved peace.
The character, reach and editorial practice of the BBC World Service, as we know it today, owe a very great deal to this critical post-war period of recalibration. The peacetime establishment of a publicly funded, editorially independent, multilingual global broadcast operation was a considerable leap of faith in the austere context of post-war Britain. It produced a model of international public service broadcasting that has been an important part, albeit a relatively unheralded one, of British civil society ever since. Without it, the capacity of the BBC’s domestic services to provide news and analysis on an international scale and of a genuinely global nature would have been severely diminished. It opened a window on the world while at the same time introducing audiences abroad to British culture, politics and institutions. Yet, the name ‘World Service’ itself is a relatively late addition in its more than 80-year history. Known as the Empire Service until November 1939,9 the Second World War recast both the context and the purpose of its output, partitioning the world between its European and other Overseas operations. These organizational entities were, after the war, finally brought together under the umbrella of the Corporation’s ‘External Services’, with respective Controllers reporting to an overall Director. It was not until May 1965 that the English-language General Overseas Service was rebranded as the World Service and another 33 years before this title was given to the collective overseas broadcast effort of the BBC, both in English and other languages, in 1988. For the majority of the period covered by this book, the ‘BBC External Services’ is the name that contemporaries would have recognized and is, therefore, the term that will predominate here.
Despite the high-profile roles to which it has been assigned by government and global public familiarity with it as an institution (with a current weekly audience in excess of 190 million),10 the political, diplomatic and cultural impact of the World Service over eight decades has not been matched by a similar appetite to explore its significance both as a broadcaster and as an agent of public diplomacy. In part, this is a problem of assimilation: as Philip Taylor noted, the academic community has generally failed to integrate the media and other forms of cultural exchange into mainstream political and administrative histories.11 Similarly, Nicholas Cull has pointed out that ‘Historians have been slow to pay serious attention to the details of the cultural components of the Cold War.’12 In this way, the story of international broadcasting has traditionally appeared in the margins of other historical narratives. Nevertheless, the cultural Cold War has become a subject of increasing activity in the last couple of decades. The end of the Cold War had the twin effect of opening up previously inaccessible archives (if only temporarily, in some cases) while at the same time loosening curatorial attitudes to Cold War-related materials.13 This has precipitated a ‘new wave’ of publications and a concurrent widening of the investigative landscape as the societal impact of the Cold War attracts an increasingly interdisciplinary approach.14 While this was initially a factor in the liminal presence of culture in Cold War narratives, requiring a complex pulling together of political, media, diplomatic, artistic, technological, sociological, geographic and cultural expertise, this interdisciplinarity is now a driving force behind an expanding literature.15 This in turn has revealed the extent to which governments competing in the geostrategic context of the Cold War were themselves implicated in establishing, fostering and sometimes funding these cultural battlegrounds.16 As David Caute notes, ‘the cultural cold war was shaped by the new primacy of ideology’, and between 1945 and 1989–91, argue Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Mark Donfried, ‘cultural productions became the most powerful tools for the promotion of ideological goals and strategies’.17 Amid the conventional stalemate of the Cold War, the result was ‘the continuous pursuit of victory by other means’.18
Radio was one such method that occupied the minds and activities of an army of policy and programme-makers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the case of the BBC External Services, the planning for and execution of this battle of the airwaves can be found in the reports and memoranda that passed within and between the BBC and Whitehall. Invaluable though these sources are, it is an unfortunate reality that very little remains of actual broadcast output, thereby placing out of reach the ability to listen to the broadcast rhythms and sounds of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the BBC’s Written Archive Centre, housed alongside the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham in Berkshire, is a wonderful and incomparable source of information about life in Britain since the 1920s and the United Kingdom’s engagement with the rest of the world since 1932. Embodying in every one of its files principles of public value, it lacks the capacity and resources necessary to satisfy the increasing and important research demands made on it. Meanwhile, at The Public Record Office, part of The National Archives of the United Kingdom, successive initiatives in the last twenty years have precipitated the declassification of previously restricted files, resulting in a steady stream of releases that illuminate the political economy of overseas broadcasting.19 What emerges is a more accurate reading of the ways in which the World Service ‘co-habits’, as Anthony Adamthwaite put it, with its funding stakeholders in Whitehall and makes accommodation with their strategic interests.20
This has been an important development in understanding the role of international broadcasting in the conduct of British public diplomacy: the assumed dividend that has until now underwritten government funding of the World Service. A euphemism for ‘propaganda’21 – a term that two world wars had done much to discredit – ‘public diplomacy’ was coined in its modern-day form in 1965 by former American diplomat Edmund Gullion as ‘the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries’.22 It is easy to see how those wishing to make full use of the levers of diplomatic power might look to broadcasting to fulfil such an aim. Indeed, the projection of carefully selected versions of British identity had been at the core of the Corporation’s mission overseas since the first broadcasts of the Empire Service. Yet, as becomes quickly apparent from the archives, any suggestion of a link between the BBC and government strategies of influence poses the dilemma of how to accommodate the often competing aims of the broadcast professional and the Foreign Office official. At the heart of this debate is the issue of credibility with audiences over the long term: in the provision of truthful news and associated analysis and the creative and cultural capital exercised in engaging listeners. In the context of the emerging Cold War, this was a domestic challenge that would have profound implications for the style, tone and ambition of British overseas broadcasting for generations to come.
The episodic institutional history of overseas broadcasting contained in Asa Brigg’s five-volume History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, originally published between 1961 and 1979, is an invaluable resource, which indicates both its genuine importance as the first official draft of the BBC’s history and the relative paucity of subsequent studies that have attempted to engage in a debate about overseas broadcasting from Britain. More often than not, it has been practitioner-based exposition and memoir that has lifted the curtain on broadcasting to foreign countries. From Tangye Lean’s 1943 Voices in the Darkness to John Tusa’s 1992 A World in Your Ear, broadcasters have been alive to the opportunity to explain the development, purpose and techniques of international broadcasting in their own terms.23 Likewise, those involved in managing overseas communication strategy in Whitehall have helped flesh-out what has been a relatively unheralded part of the government machine from policy-making, in the case of Charles Hill’s Both Sides of the Hill, to practise, as laid out in Robert Marett’s Through the Back Door.24 The BBC has itself provided regular, if rather self-promotional, accounts of the means and impact of overseas broadcasting in various publications, broadcasts and lectures.25 Until recently there have, however, been relatively few attempts to shed a genuinely historical light on the World Service. The clearest exception to this is the book by a former Managing Director of External Broadcasting, Gerard Mansell, Let Truth be Told, which, despite the obvious sympathies indicated in the title, successfully combines the sensitivities and intuition of the insider with evidence-based research.26
More recently, a revitalized appetite for researching the BBC World Service, directly linked to the increasing quantity and quality of primary source material available, has been evident. This can be seen in the study of the government’s overseas information services where it is now possible to examine in some considerable detail what John Black described as Britain’s ‘propaganda instrument’, the Whitehall machinery supporting it and the place it occupied in wider government policy.27 An example of this is the declassification of files relating to the Foreign Office’s infamous covert propaganda unit, the Information Research Department (IRD).28 Early accounts of its work were severely hampered by the lack of access to the official record,29 but releases in chronological tranches since 1995 have generated a new round of analysis as demonstrated in Hugh Wilford’s 1998 article, which sought to reveal ‘Britain’s secret Cold War weapon’.30 Combined with the Foreign Office’s less notorious, but just as illuminating, Information Policy Department (IPD), there now exists an archival spinal column which reveals the wider architecture of Whitehall’s anti-communist and propaganda activities.31 The result is an emerging literature on Britain’s machinery of persuasion, propaganda and political warfare after the Second World War as these sources are digested and processed into scholarly output. Important contributions in this field include, Andrew Defty’s detailed examination of IRD’s early years, James Vaughan’s excellent analysis of the failure of UK and US post-war strategic communications in the Middle East, John Jenks’ take on British propaganda in the Cold War and Lowell Schwartz’s valuable comparative study of the formation and application of US and UK propaganda policy.32
Only a few studies, however, have attempted to fully synthesize analyses of overseas broadcasting with government policy during the Cold War. As with Tony Shaw’s history of broadcasting at the time of the Suez crisis (ostensibly in relation to domestic coverage), and the recent Cold War History special journal issue on ‘Radio Wars’, they are required reading for anyone attempting to understand the intricacies of the relationship between the government and the BBC.33 Likewise, Gary Rawnsley’s comparative case studies of overseas broadcasting by the BBC and Voice of America (VOA) are well-judged assessments of the realities of Cold War broadcasting.34 What these otherwise excellent studies lack, however, is a sense of the wider context of the World Service’s editorial and institutional response to the Cold War, its translation into practice and the concurrent development of post-war relations with the government in general and the Foreign Office (FO) in particular. In this regard, Michael Nelson’s insightful War of the Black Heavens, a comparative history of the Western broadcasters (BBC, VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty), is better at highlighting the signifying moments and trends in the Cold War history of the BBC than providing a detailed examination of how they were negotiated. The story of how the BBC’s External Services came to terms with the Cold War and the tone, over time, of its fundamental relationship with Whitehall and the government is one that has, so far, only been partially told.
Covering the first decade in which the BBC once again took editorial control of all its overseas services, in English and other languages, this book examines how the External Services responded to the Cold War in its broadcasts over the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, revealing a missing dimension of Britain’s frontline engagement with international communism. This is done by exploring the evolution of the BBC’s post-war relationship with the British government which funded overseas broadcasting through a grant-in-aid, the geopolitical and diplomatic contexts in which the BBC broadcast, and the ways in which the BBC sought to engage strategically important audiences around the world, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. Incorporating analyses of policy, production and reception, this approach aims at illuminating the life cycle of British international broadcasting as well as understanding how editorial ethics, key personalities and audience assessment moulded a narrative of the Cold War that was to influence output for decades to come. The way in which the BBC subsequently set about translating the Cold War experience for audiences abroad, at the behest of Whitehall, quickly became a core element of its broadcast remit. As such, the tone of its broadcasts across the Iron Curtain was the outcome of continuous, complex and often difficult negotiations with the British government set against the broadcast experience and in-house editorial assessments of the Corporation, all played out in a highly charged and volatile international environment.
The need to rethink the purpose of overseas broadcasting forms the focus of the first part of the book. The Second World War had demonstrated the influence and importance of broadcasting abroad, both in its own right and as an adjunct to wider government strategies. It had also shown, in contrast with the German propaganda instrument, the value of building credibility with audiences through, as far as circumstances allowed, objective and truthful reporting. It had, however, become a very large and expensive operation which posed tricky questions about its ongoing financial and editorial management. Indeed, such was its perceived importance to Britain’s post-war diplomatic effort it was not immediately certain that an independently minded BBC was the right home for these services. These considerations found expression in the process of planning that started in 1944 and which led, three years later, to a new Royal Charter for the BBC. The settlement was intended to mark out a new era in British broadcasting: a return to normality for the domestic services and the institution of a permanent peacetime arrangement for overseas broadcasting. However, little time would be found for equilibrium as a new threat emerged on the international horizon and the world steered away from the devastation of hot war into the icy, and no less dangerous, waters of the Cold War.
This is followed by an examination of institutional and editorial responses, at the BBC and within government, to these new strategic conditions. The Cold War was not the only issue that concerned the External Services as they broadcast across the globe, but it did provide a uniquely common theme against which they would have to define themselves. And as it became clear to all but the most optimistic that the Cold War would be a protracted battle, the gearing of sensibilities as well as of practice towards it that took place within the External Services from the beginning of 1948 were to have an enduring effect on output until the collapse of communism in Europe 40 years later. Broadcasting was a ‘long-term weapon’ ideally matched for such an arms-length conflict, but defining the voice of Britain and establishing its multifaceted tone for the politically as well as culturally varied ears of the BBC’s many audiences around the world made for, as will be seen, a very considerable challenge. This was particularly so in the case of Europe, the first frontline of the Cold War, which the BBC considered ‘as the most important target’ and to whom nearly half its foreign-language services were beamed.35
What ensued was an acute phase of re-engineering of External Services output in response to prevailing geopolitical conditions which brought into sharp focus the essential principles of Cold War broadcasting. It also highlighted the varied geography of the External Services’ relationship with Whitehall: those terrains on which there was consensus and those where conflict and disagreement would mark and scar the landscape. This was a creative tension which required delicate negotiation if the constitutional equilibrium, as set out in the BBC’s Charter Licence and Agreement, was to be maintained. Surveying the global remit of its overseas services, the book will explore the wider context in which the BBC’s Cold War activities were framed as a geographic ‘world service’. It will also examine the strategic orientation of its services in the context of the post-war economic environment and the government’s willingness to pay for them. In this period of austerity, it is difficult to fully appreciate the challenges faced by the External Services without coming to terms with the political and budgetary pressures also bearing down on them.
The unresolved and fractious economic arguments which ran through the 1950s posed a genuine challenge to the BBC’s strategic autonomy and were subsequently to play their part in what would become a period of intense activity for the External Services as they came to terms not only with major international developments, but conflict on the home front with the British government. Events in Central and Eastern Europe in the middle of the decade also raised concerns about the efficacy of international broadcasting and the lengths to which outside broadcasters should and could interfere with the internal affairs of other countries. Meanwhile, in the Middle East the BBC’s credibility with audiences was stretched to near breaking point as it sought to reconcile political and public division at home with the projection of Britain abroad. The British government’s threat to seize control of the External Services at the height of the Suez crisis and the BBC’s determination to resist resulted in a new appreciation of the balance of forces between Whitehall and the BBC, which has remained the basis of the relationship to this day and continues to inform editorial policy at the BBC World Service.
It will be argued that the tone of the relationship between Whitehall and the BBC’s External Services, how they learnt to speak to each other after the Second World War, was instrumental in defining the task of overseas broadcasting from Britain during the Cold War. In conjunction with the journalistic abilities and cosmopolitan sensitivities of the staff engaged in making programmes, it was essential in establishing the voices with which the BBC spoke to its many audiences around the world. This ongoing, critical and often unobserved discourse between broadcaster, funder and audiences accompanied the regular diet of broadcast output whose tone was continually modulated to reflect the political, cultural, economic and practical imperatives bearing down on it. Examining the ecology of this relationship, from its post-war planning stages to its nadir during the Suez crisis, it is intended to provide an assessment of the BBC External Services through a cycle of experience that fundamentally shaped the principles and practice of overseas broadcasting and which continues to inform and frame the international output of the BBC into the twenty-first century.