In analyses of the media, much is said about the nature and meaning of the interaction and dialogue between broadcasters and their audiences. For the Grant-in-Aid-funded BBC External Services this meant the British Foreign Office as much as it did listeners overseas. The deliberations of the Woolton Committee in 1944 and the discussions of Morrison’s GEN 81 Committee, resulting in the July 1946 White Paper on Broadcasting Policy, represent the beginnings of this conversation in its post-war form. Over the next ten years, and as the vocabulary changed to reflect external pressures, key among them being the Cold War, and internal pressures, such as finance and governance, Whitehall and the BBC came to a negotiated appreciation of the tone necessary to allow that conversation to continue. Charles Hill’s return to a consultative, yet critical engagement with the BBC in 1957 reflected this. The result was the settling of relations between the two into a kind of attritional consensus: a robust and often combative discourse which managed to keep in focus the political and fiscal requirements of government alongside the editorial and professional demands of the External Services.
Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart, diplomat, former head of the PWE and regular contributor to the BBC’s Czechoslovakian Service, noted in 1950 that the government’s funding of the External Services meant that for ‘the cost of a small cruiser you could secure the services of a battle fleet’.1 The question that inevitably followed was who got to command this fleet of language services: the BBC which made the programmes or Whitehall who paid for them? The answer given by Morrison in 1946 was that the BBC would ‘remain independent in the preparation of programmes for overseas audiences’ albeit with a requirement to consult the government on output ‘as will permit it to plan its programmes in the national interest’.2 This was a fudge, albeit a politically necessary one, that provided the External Services with a constitution as opposed to a contract. The significance of this lay in the autonomy it gave the BBC to assert its interpretation of the purpose of broadcasting abroad based on professional expertise and the precedent of experience. It was only when the government tried to unilaterally impose its will, as it did during the Suez crisis, thereby rescinding this approach to managing outcomes that the relationship came under the serious threat.
The activities of Bush House were not entirely negotiated through the prism of policy versus practice. Finance was an equally significant determinant of the shape and direction of overseas broadcasting. From the outset, the gap between Grant-in-Aid income and rising BBC expenditure grew at a rapid rate. Austerity Britain provided the economic background against which decisions about broadcasting abroad had to be measured. Between 1947 and 1952, income had risen by 18 per cent while costs had grown by 50 per cent.3 The problems resulting from this tension forced a cost-benefit analysis of the global remit of the External Services which led directly to the setting up of the Drogheda Committee. Ironically, the effect of this was to ensure that decisions on the core spending issues were put into abeyance for another three years. However, by 1956 the disparity between income and expenditure remained just as acute and with the added strain of the Suez crisis the delicate balance finally broke. The immediate result was the government’s splenetic assault on Bush House and the biggest challenge to the BBC’s independence to date. In the longer term, though, it led to Hill’s far more considered and far more coherent White Paper on Overseas Information Services, a kind of second-chance Drogheda, and a settlement that rethought the strategic priorities for overseas broadcasting for a generation to come.
Yet, for all the domestic challenges, the External Services engagement with audiences overseas was the defining objective of both the government and the BBC. The post-war External Services, designed for a world at peace, had had little time to find a new voice before the Cold War enforced a change in the broadcast climate. It was to this end that Whitehall’s new machinery of control, in respect of overseas broadcasting, was first used in an attempt to re-engineer the tone of Britain’s voice abroad. And as Cold War tensions rose there was no more compelling goal than to try and influence attitudes behind the Iron Curtain. How, though, do you communicate with an imagined audience? The occupation of Central and Eastern Europe by Soviet-backed regimes in the years after the Second World War had severely limited the BBC’s opportunities to access audiences and comprehend their broadcast requirements. The flood of letters received after the liberation of Europe, indicating the tastes, aspirations and preoccupations of audiences, rapidly evaporated under the glare of official censors. Those that did reach the BBC – perhaps posted on a trip overseas or through a chain of forwarding addresses – were avidly read in Bush House for evidence of the BBC’s editorial affinity with listeners in the Soviet sphere of influence. Nevertheless, it was the case that the BBC’s Cold War audiences could never be satisfactorily quantified in this period.
In the absence of reliable and regular sources of information about audience needs and conditions in reception countries, the External Services were required to piece together a mind’s-eye picture of listeners and the political and social context in which they tuned into the BBC. Accordingly, this process of triangulation attempted to fit together a variety of sources: feedback from British Missions overseas, particularly in the ‘Aside’ series of telegrams; collaborative intelligence from other Western broadcasters such as RFE and VOA; anecdotal evidence from staff trips abroad, as with the visit to Russia in 1956; and the testimony of émigrés and dissidents, from Colonel Tokaev to the bedraggled masses leaving their homeland in the death throes of the Hungarian uprising.
At the core of this perpetual system of editorial calculation was the BBC’s own staff and the nature of the work they did. The Corporation’s open-source collection arm, the BBC Monitoring Service (in partnership with its American counterparts in the CIA), provided an unending stream of information from the world’s media – a contextualized backstory for the BBC’s own narration of events. But it was in the External Services itself, in the Talks and Features departments, the CRU, in the editorial selection of news, in its corridors and in the individual language sections, that the corporate understanding of audiences was translated into output. Despite a predominantly Anglo-Saxon management, Bush House’s multinational and cosmopolitan character (a consequence of the displacement of vast numbers of people during the Second World War, supplemented by Cold War refugees) offered an insight into, and cultural affinity with audiences no longer visible behind the Iron Curtain. In addition, the journalistic endeavour of BBC staff – the digestion and production of news and the daily intellectual engagement with the lives of listeners – itself became an intuitive part of the critical assessment of what tone of voice, or variety of tones, was appropriate for these constantly re-imagined audiences.
Such judgements were not, however, made in isolation, and the political and diplomatic context of these decisions was an ever-present feature as the BBC’s debates with the Foreign Office (FO) make very apparent. Indeed, at times the degree of integration between the two spheres, as with Jacob’s membership of the Russia Committee and CIPC and, later, Greene and Stephenson’s contribution to the Suez Advisory Committee, seems remarkable. Although demonstrating, especially in the case of certain individuals, the amphibian nature of post-war public service, these ties should not be taken as clear evidence of a shared outlook and communality of purpose, but rather as a binding together of expertise on both sides of the broadcast divide to produce a synergy of aims, often not without conflict, around the idea of the national interest. The collective editorial effort, in terms of communicating with the BBC’s Cold War audiences, was a mixture of political and diplomatic drivers, broadcast professionalism, fiscal restrictions, sociological and behavioural guesswork, shared cultural identities and the received wisdoms of broadcasting under war conditions for listeners living under oppressive circumstances.
The result was the recasting of broadcasts to the satellite states designed to exploit listeners’ sense of indigenous political and cultural tradition and history in order to emphasize the illegitimacy of their Soviet-sponsored governments. Or, in the case of the Soviet Union itself, to speak as a concerned friend and identify with listeners’ aspirations while exposing and discrediting the methods of control used by their leaders. Nevertheless, the establishment of these Cold War broadcasting strategies (within a peacetime regulatory framework) was an inexact science, with the potential to engender considerable discord between the government and the BBC over their application. This, along with the tensions associated with financing the External Services, was the fault line on which relations between the two rested. At the same time, it was necessary to acknowledge the limits of this broadcast offensive. While radio was able to tear holes in the Iron Curtain (despite the best efforts of Soviet jammers), there was nothing the BBC, nor any of the other western broadcasters, could do in providing material support for listeners. This was ably and repeatedly demonstrated in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany. What could be achieved, however, was to create a sense of solidarity through the spoken word, a social contract formed in the ether between broadcaster and listener, based on the long-term policy, as the architect of the BBC’s Cold War broadcasting machinery, Ian Jacob, adroitly described it, of ‘acquiring a reputation for stable responsibility which precisely responds to the needs of Britain’s international position’.4