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London Calling: BBC External Services, Whitehall and the Cold War 1944- 57

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London Calling: BBC External Services, Whitehall and the Cold War 1944- 57 London calling: BBC external services, Whitehall and the cold war 1944- 57. Webb, Alban The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1577 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] LONDON CALLING: SSC EXTERNAL SERVICES, WHITEHALL AND THE COLD WAR, 1944-57 ALBAN WEBB Queen Mary College, University of London A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) 1 Declaration: The work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed: '~"\ ~~Ue6b Alban Webb Declaration: The work presented in this thesis is my own. Signed: Alban Webb ABSTRACT The Second World War had radically changed the focus of the BBC's overseas operation from providing an imperial service in English only, to that of a global broadcaster speaking to the world in over forty different languages. The end of that conflict saw the BBC's External Services, as they became known, re-engineered for a world at peace, but it was not long before splits in the international community caused the postwar geopolitical landscape to shift, plunging the world into a cold war. At the British government's insistence a re-calibration of the External Services' broadcasting remit was undertaken, particularly in its broadcasts to Central and Eastern Europe, to adapt its output to this new and emerging world order. Broadcasting was seen at the time as an essential adjunct to Britain's non-shooting war with the Soviet Union and a primary means of engaging with attitudes and opinion behind the Iron Curtain. Funded by government Grant-in-Aid, but with its editorial independence enshrined in the BBC's Charter, Licence and Agreement, this thesis examines, in the context of the cold war, where the balance of power lay in relations between Whitehall and the External Services. In doing so, it traces the evolution of overseas broadcasting from Britain, alongside the political, diplomatic and fiscal challenges facing it, up to the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Suez crisis. These were defining experiences for the United Kingdom's international broadcaster that, as a consequence, helped shape the future the External Services for the rest of the cold war. 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION p.4 I. RETHINKING BROADCASTING p.20 Chapter One: Charter Renewal and the Requirements of Peace p.20 Chapter Two: Negotiating the Relationship p.41 Chapter Three: The Coming Cold War p.55 II. THE COLD WAR CHALLENGE p.68 Chapter Four: Broadcasting to Central and Eastern Europe p.68 Chapter Five: Broadcasting to Russia p.113 III. THE COST OF OVERSEAS BROADCASTING p.145 Chapter Six: Austerity p.145 Chapter Seven: Drogheda p.163 IV. THE FORGE p.173 Chapter Eight: The Soviet Union p.175 Chapter Nine: Hungary p.193 Chapter Ten: Suez p.238 CONCLUSION p.284 BIBLIOGRAPHY p.291 3 INTRODUCTION '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.' SSC Memorandum for the Committee on Colonial Information Policy, June 19501 On 1 January 1947 the third successive Charter of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) came into effect. It was intended, by both the Corporation and the government that its passing should 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." It was with a sense of emerging out of the darkness of the previous 'six long, weary and perilous years', as the BBC's Director-General William Haley put it in his VE Day message to staff, that broadcasting was considered as having a continuing and vital function to perform as 'the newest of the great instruments of peace'.' 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 broadcasting in foreign languages began with an Arabic Service which was soon followed by Spanish and Portuguese programmes for Latin America. Transmissions to Europe began later that year with German, Italian and French translations of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's speech on 27 September 1938 during the Munich crisis 1 The National Archives (TNA), Kew, London. CAB134/102, Committee on Colonial Information Policy, CI(50)21, 'The Overseas Services of the BBC', Memorandum by the BBC, 19 June 1950. 2 William Haley, 'The Next Five Years in Broadcasting', BBC Yearbook 1948 (London: BBC, 1948), p.? 3 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume III: The War of Words, 1939-1945 (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p.642. 4 in a deliberate attempt to counter the reporting of international developments emanating from Italian and German foreign-language radio stations. It was this competitive impulse to ensure that those in other countries should be made aware of the British interpretation of events that became a founding principle of vernacular broadcasting and lay at the heart of the subsequent massive expansion of what would become known as the BBC External Services, not just in Europe, but to all continents during the Second World War. In this way, Britain's governing 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 that was held together by an imperceptible network of wavelengths with London at its heart." By the end of 1943 the BBC was making programmes in 45 languages (not including English) and at the end of the war broadcasts to Europe had already passed 50 transmission hours a day with the total hours broadcast by the External Services outstripping that of domestic broadcasting." This explosion in the overseas activities of the BBC during the war - the scope of its transmissions and the scale and multinational character of its workforce - altered the broadcasting remit of the BBG to a point where Haley was able to assert that in the ten years since the BBG started its previous Charter in January 1937, 'the horizons of broadcasting [have] immeasurably widened. The BBG's field is now the world'." This was indeed the case in 1947 by which time the competitive dynamic that had originally spurred-on the development of the foreign­ language services in 1938/9 was echoed in the uncertain postwar international 4 For the prewar development of foreign language services see, Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless, 1927-1939, ~Oxford: OUP, 1995), pp.342, 368-80. Briggs, War of Words, p.18; 'Broadcasts to Europe', BBC Yearbook 1945, (London: BBe, 1945), p.109. 6 Haley, 'The Next Five Years' p.11. 5 environment where 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 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'.' 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 fiscal uncertainty at home and high anxiety abroad, as postwar reconstruction gave way to a recrudescence of deep geopolitical schisms that posed an ominous threat to the recently achieved peace. Nevertheless, despite the high profile postwar role assigned to what is now known as the BBC World Service and public familiarity with it as an institution, the history of overseas broadcasting by the Corporation is little known and perhaps even less understood." Its services have yet to receive the kind of critical and detailed examination that their role in the political, diplomatic and cultural lives of the United Kingdom and those countries to which they broadcast would suggest they deserve. As such, the home of overseas broadcasting from Britain, Bush House, remains a relatively unexplained icon." As Philip Taylor has argued, the academic community has generally failed to integrate the media and other forms of cultural exchange into mainstream political and administrative histories. He notes that 'The Cold War ... looks very different when viewed through the films emanating from Hollywood and Peking or the broadcasts of Radio Moscow and the Voice of America than it does from the diplomatic papers of the 7 Broadcasting Policy, Gmd.6852 (London: HMSO, July 1946), para.58. a The SSG External Services were renamed SSG World Service in 1988. 9 Sush House was first occupied by the SSG European Services in January 1941. It was another 16 years before the whole of the External Services' operation was located at Sush House when the English language General Overseas Services moved there from 200 Oxford Street in 1957.
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