The Development of Communication Between the Government, the Media and the People in Britain, 1945-51 Martin Moore Ph.D. Thesis: Department of International History London School of Economics and Political Science October 2004 f B5SL ' ( WIN. j \ vmv. ) UMI Number: U192411 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U192411 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 THeses r. 3510 Library British Library of Political and Economic Science The Development of Communication Between the Government, the Media and the People in Britain, 1945-51 Abstract This thesis will argue that 1945-51 was a seminal period in the development of communication between the Government, the media and the people in Britain. The Attlee Government was the first British Government to fully engage with the dilemma of how a Government communicates with its citizens to sustain a credible democracy. To do this it established the modern machinery of Government communication and used the mass media extensively. Its experience, and in particular the crises it faced during its two terms in office, caused it to shift away from an idealistic vision of helping to develop an informed electorate towards the pragmatic use of information as a means of persuasion and a tool for engineering consent. The period laid the framework, in other words, of modern information management. In order to demonstrate this the thesis will show how the Government’s attitudes changed over its period in office, and how its approach towards communication altered. It will start by examining how and why the Government established the machinery of communication in 1945. It will then seek to explain why the Government’s relationship with the Press deteriorated so far and so fast, and with what consequences. It will try to demonstrate that there was the genuine possibility of radical reform of the Press and that it is important to understand why this did not happen. The thesis will go on to consider the closeness of the Government-BBC relationship after the war and how that closeness seriously damaged the credibility of the Corporation’s monopoly. It will assess the Government’s major experiment in film-making and why it found it so difficult to use film as a means of informing the public. And, it will show how the Government ignored, alienated and eventually collaborated with the newsreels. The thesis will end by assessing the distance the Government had travelled in its use of communication. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Establishing the Machinery and Methods of Government Communication 13 Chapter 2: The Government and the Press 1945-47 79 Chapter 3: The Government and the Press 1947-49 126 Chapter 4: The Government and the BBC 1945-51 184 Chapter 5: The Government, Film and Newsreels 1945-51 251 Conclusion 317 Appendices Appendix A: Committees and Commissions 324 Appendix B: Production of Government Information 330 Bibliography 331 Abbreviations Used in the Text BBC - British Broadcasting Corporation COI - Central Office of Information DG - Director General EIC - Economic Information Committee EIU - Economic Information Unit IRD - Information Research Department MOI - Ministry of Information PEP - Political and Economic Planning PRO - Public Relations Officer Abbreviations Used in the Notes CAB - Cabinet Records, Public Record Office EIU - Economic Information Unit FO - Foreign Office, Public Record Office HO - Home Office, Public Record Office IH - Home Information Services (Ministerial) Committee IH(O) - Home Information Services (Official) Committee IH(0)(E) - Economic Information (Official) Committee INF - Central Office of Information, Public Record Office IS - Information Services Committee (Ministerial) MH - Ministry of Health, Public Record Office NRA - Newsreel Association PC(0)C - Prosperity Campaign (Official) Committee RCP - Royal Commission on the Press ME-RCP - Minutes of Evidence to Royal Commission on the Press RG - Social Survey, Public Record Office Introduction Introduction This thesis will argue that 1945-51 was a seminal period in the development of communication between the Government, the media and the people in Britain. The Attlee Government was the first British Government to fully engage with the dilemma of how a Government communicates with its citizens to sustain a credible democracy. To do this it established the modern machinery of Government communication and used the mass media extensively. Its experience, and in particular the crises it faced during its two terms in office, caused it to shift away from an idealistic vision of helping to develop an informed electorate towards the pragmatic use of information as a means of persuasion and a tool for engineering consent. The period laid the framework, in other words, of modern information management. In 1945 the Labour Government did not think too much about the dilemma of how to communicate within a democracy. It had much else on its mind. The war was ending and there was the huge task of making the transition to peace. Moreover, the Government had plans to overhaul the entire economic infrastructure of the country. Yet it is important to recognise that Labour was in a distinctly different position from its predecessors as regards to communication. Pre-1914 Governments had not engaged with the dilemma because they had not needed to. Before 1918 less than a third of the adult population, under eight million people, could vote.1 This rose to 30 million, just under the whole of the adult population, by the 1930s.2 Prior to the Second World War the civil service, though growing, was still limited. 1 Electorate 1910: 7,694,741. Electorate 1931: 29,960,071, Butler & Sloman,British Political Facts (Fifth Edition, 1980), p.208. 2 Ibid. By far the largest increase was in 1918 itself. 1 Introduction And before the 1920s, it was not possible to deliver a similar message to virtually the whole population simultaneously.3 By 1945 this had all changed. Not only did almost the whole adult population have the vote but they had been politicised by the war. Everyone had a more immediate relationship with the state at the war’s end than at its beginning. This was not surprising since the ‘bureaucratic empire’ had, in Richard Crossman’s words, ‘been both enormously enlarged and dangerously centralized during the war’.4 Between 1939 and 1947 the total number of civil servants jumped from 397,570 to 722,294.5 In addition, the penetration of the contemporary news media was approaching saturation point. The national daily press, whose circulation had jumped from 3.1 million in 1918 to 10.6 million on the eve of World War Two, was now read by 87% of the adult population (its circulation would continue to rise to its all time peak in 1950).6 Over 30 million people went to the cinema, and saw the newsreels, each week.7 Almost 10 million homes had a radio.8 The significance of these structural developments should not be underestimated. For the first time it seemed as if the democratic ideal, of ‘common information’ for the whole community, could, theoretically, be fulfilled. Walter Lippman wrote in 1922, that whereas ‘the pioneer democrats did not possess the material for resolving the conflict between the known range of man’s attention and their 3 Thanks to the introduction of radio broadcasting in the 1920s and cinema sound in 1930 the inter­ war period was ‘the point in British politics at which the medium and the message became inescapably intertwined’, John Ramsden, Appetite for Power (1999), p.256. 4 Richard Crossman, The Lessons of 1945’, in Perry Anderson et al., Towards Socialism (1965), p.155. 5 Cabinet Paper, CP(47)150, The Number and Cost of the Civil Service’, 15-5-1947, CAB 129/18. 6 Murdock and Golding, The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press’ in Boyce, Curran and Wingate, Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (1978) p. 130. Hulton Readership Survey (1947). 7 Perilli, ‘Statistical Survey of the British Cinema Industry’ in Curran and Porter, British Cinema History, (1983), p.372, Table 1. 8 The number of households paying a BBC Radio Licence Fee passed 10 million in January 1946. See Programme Policy Meeting minutes, 29-1-1946, R34/615/4, BBC-WAC. 2 Introduction illimitable faith in his dignity’, the material, in the form of the mass media, was now available.9 By 1945 it was therefore possible for a Political and Economic Planning broadsheet to state that ‘it is high time, in consonance with democratic principle, that fuller and simpler explanations be given to the great majority of people, who have a right to know why and what their government has done, is doing, and wishes to do’.10 In addition to these structural changes, Labour’s attitude in 1945 was fundamentally different from its pre-war predecessors. Communication, if not at the forefront of their mind, was implicit in much of the new Government’s thinking. The war had generated a huge confidence in the potential positive influence of the state. Peter Hennessy has said of the new Ministers in the administration that, They really did think that Jerusalem could be builded here’.11 But it could only be built if the Government organised it, planned it, and led it.