In April 1941, the Greek Section of the BBC Was Preparing to Start Speaking for Greece, “The FREE GREECE”, from London and N

CHAPTER 5 A GREEK ORLANDO IN LONDON In April 1941, the Greek Section of the BBC was preparing to start speaking for Greece, “the FREE GREECE”, from London and not Athens since it expected that Athens Radio would soon be silenced by the Germans.1 On 22 April 1941, the Greek Section was entrusted and first broadcast the Athens signature, called “To Tsopanopoulo” (“The Shepherd Boy”), which was returned to the National Broadcasting Organization of Greece on 5 November 1944.2 As George Angeloglou, Head of the Greek Section of the BBC from 1939 until 1957, writes, “at the start of the war very few people in Britain knew very much about Greece or had ever been there”: “In fact in London and Cardiff Greek grocers had to put up huge posters in their windows saying, ‘This is a GREEK shop – not ITALIAN’ to avoid having their windows broken by angry anti-Italian demonstrators.”3 “Axis Blackmail of Greece” (The Times, 17 October 1940) and “War of Nerves on Greece” (The Times, 28 October 1940) were amongst newspaper titles preceding the Italian attack. On 29 October 1940, a Times article entitled “Italy Strikes Greece” reported that “fighting had begun on the Albanian frontier and that Greek troops were resisting stubbornly”; the Greeks were “united in their determination to resist foreign aggression” and the subheadings read “Greece as a United Nation” and “Greeks Holding the Frontier”.4 “In their long history, which had been a constant fight for liberty”, another article in The Times read, “the Greeks had known many enemies, but 1 George Angeloglou, This Is London, Good Evening – Edo Londino, Kalispera Sas: The Story of the Greek Section of the B.B.C., 1939-1957, Athens: Efstathiadis Group, 111. 2 Ibid., 112-13. 3 Ibid., 83. 4 “Italy Strikes at Greece”, The Times, 29 October 1940, 4. 114 Conversing Identities had been able to survive and ‘will survive’”.5 By 1942 Greece was still “Unconquered” and an “Example to the World”, having lost “all but honour”.6 On 26 March 1942, an article dedicated to “Greek Independence Day” reported statements made by various governement representatives “gathered in the midst of the second Greek War of Independence to celebrate the first”: Instead of saying “The Glory that was Greece” we could sing “The Glory that is Greece.” Greece made possible the modern development of our history by the action she took on a September day at the Battle of Marathon. Last year the tide of Nazi burning lava met its first impediments in the old mountains of Macedonia .... It was good for us in these dark days to remember Byron’s great courage, and to reflect how the Greek people plucked the flower of victory from the ashes of despair. They were suffering today as they suffered in 1827, from a cruel occupation: but once again they had aroused not merely the admiration but also the consience of the West.7 Radio features of the time also made connections between ancient and contemporary Greece with Louis MacNeice’s The Glory that Is Greece (1941) – where the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism was depicted as the fight of modern Greek soldiers against the Nazis or the ancient Greeks opposing the Persians – being a case in point.8 “The Greeks Are Human Beings” was the essay with which Demetrios Capetanakis tried in 1942 to challenge the image of Greece as “a world of unreal perfection, of suggestive sounds, of fascinating verse and beautiful but intangible forms” and, consequently, the public’s instant comparison to “the ideal of a Greek the other holds”. “Imagine a Greek seeing the person to whom he is introduced receiving the formal words”, he noted: “‘This is X, from Greece,’ as if they were the lines by which Marlowe’s Faust is introducing the ghost 5 “Guarantors of Liberty”, The Times, 31 October 1940, 2. 6 “Unconquered Greece”, The Times, 28 October 1942, 5; “Greece’s Example to the World”, The Times, 29 October 1942, 3. 7 “Greek Independence Day”, The Times, 26 March 1942, 7. 8 See Brian Arkins, “Athens no longer Dies: Greek and Roman Themes in MacNeice”, Classics Ireland, VII (2000), 4. .

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