British Broadcasting and the War

I

ON the evening of Friday, September 1, 1939, Whitehall flashed through to the headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Portland Place the order to take up its war stations. This was flashed on at once to every transmitting station and executive centre in Britain. Instantly, all over the country, engineers unsealed and obeyed an intricate code of instructions. As they worked against time, a press notice went out and a telegram for display in every post-office window, telling British listeners of the two wave lengths on which alone they would be able to pick up the service on the following morning.

That night put an end to a season of radio which had heard Bruno Walter conduct in the winter, Toscanini in the spring; in which Sir Henry Wood’s famous Promenade Concerts were beginning to delight with programs of exceptional promise their faithful latesummer audience; which was looking forward to an autumn week of specially arranged European programs. Today those happy programs sound as far away as the voice of Tutankhamen’s trumpets. A revolution in British radio had been carried through in a night.

Two national purposes inspired that revolution. There was, first, the general determination to ensure that essential services should be carried on in the severest conditions that could be expected within a Britain for the first time in its history liable to serious invasion from the air. The maintenance of an efficient radio service was recognized to be essential, both for the information and encouragement of people at home and for the conveyance of truth beyond the seas. This same policy lay behind the evacuation of millions of children from the great cities, the wholesale emptying of urban hospitals to make room for possible air-raid casualties, and the country-wide blackout of lights between dusk and dawn. In obedience to it the BBC rapidly dispatched its executive program staff to undisclosed bases remote from London and certain other vulnerable centres.

But the BBC had another national interest to safeguard. Wireless transmissions can, in certain conditions, afford direct guidance to enemy aircraft in steering their way to a target. The BBC transmission system had to be rearranged in a manner which would prevent any of its programs from guiding even a single enemy in the air. The nature of that rearrangement cannot yet be disclosed; but it lay behind the decision to restrict listeners in the United Kingdom on the outbreak of war to a single program service.

The confinement of the service to a single program hit the whole country hard. In peacetime, British listeners, except on rare occasions such as a speech by the King which is radiated by all transmitters, can choose between at least two programs, and often more than two. Now this freedom of choice between contrasted alternatives was suddenly taken away, and the real reason could not be publicly given. Listeners could not be told that at the back of this deprivation lay measures very properly taken to prevent aid to enemy aircraft. When the BBC explained to its perplexed listeners that their troubles were due to the requirements of national security, many of them supposed that it meant no more than the safety of its own staff.

The coming of the single program set problems to program planners which they had forgotten since the early days of radio, when, in novel but still peaceful conditions, an infant radio service was establishing its right to be heard.

On the Sunday on which war was declared, listeners heard first the Prime Minister and late that afternoon the King. During the few days in which the BBC staff was taking up its new posts in the country, programs had largely to be confined to news bulletins in a world which at a momentous hour seemed to have no news to offer; to gramophone records in a week when every artist in the country had been thrown out of employment. But the average Englishman likes recorded programs little better than does the American; and the spate of gramophone records in those first, few puzzled days excited rueful criticisms. Provision had been made for frequent news bulletins. At almost every hour came a fresh disappointment.

Here the BBC and the press suffered in common, and not the press of the United Kingdom only. Their troubles were partly due to lack of events. Danzig and Poland saw tragic happenings, but no British reporter could send home his impressions of them. The German radio, on the other hand, could bring nightly to the microphone men who were flying aeroplanes or steering tanks over the latest territories to suffer from German aggression. In part as was readily confessed in Parliament, this universal lack of news was due. to the fact that the British Ministry of Information was a novel excursion on the part of the government and had no such flying start as had Dr. Goebbels’s well-practised ministry in Berlin, while the British Defense Departments were little accustomed to treating their achievements as material for publicity.

II

Since those first few days of sharp transition, British radio programs have passed through two phases. In the first phase, much time was devoted to the issue of instructions and guidance to the people. Ministers in rapid succession came to the microphone to describe the work and announce the plans of their departments. New regulations on a perplexing variety of subjects — from fish and coal to military service and gasoline — were reported and explained over the air. The theme of evacuation was prominent. Parents left alone in the cities were given a picture of their children’s new life and well-being in the country. Their rural hosts and hostesses were advised how to deal with the sudden invasion which had come upon them. Some talks on first aid by a doctor found a ready audience,

I remember vividly towards the end of that phase a talk of a few minutes in which Sir Ian Fraser, who was himself blinded in the last war, quoted a remark of one of the blinded soldiers at St. Dunstan’s, to whose welfare he has devoted himself: ‘We have got the rest of the world beat in these blackouts.’ Sir Ian went on to advise listeners how to move in complete darkness; to keep, for example, a forearm instead of their pointed hands in front of them when groping along a passage, lest the edge of a door should strike them in the face.

Then, as the tide of official announcements and practical advice receded, the normal demand of listeners for entertainment reasserted itself. There was a fine saying current in England of the seventeenth century — a saying which George Herbert preserved in a collection of proverbs published after his death: ‘All the arms of England will not arm fear.’ There has been no fear in Britain; but there has been some danger of depression due to anxiety and darkness and waiting. The encouragement of cheerfulness has become a national concern, and the BBC welcomed the demand for more entertainment. It set itself with a good heart to restore to its broadcasts, as nearly as the confines of a single program and changes in the life and temper of a people allowed, their peacetime qualities.

Here are the main components of a forthcoming week of BBC programs. They cover between them nearly five sixths of the whole schedule.

I put the news first because the successive bulletins bring all Britain to its receivers. In peacetime, by friendly agreement with the press, no news is broadcast before six o’clock in the evening. Now news bulletins begin at seven and eight o’clock in the morning and are heard again at the hours of one, four, six, nine, and midnight. The nine o’clock evening bulletin has replaced the six o’clock as the most widely heard of the day. Almost the whole country listens to it. The BBC maintains in its news bulletins a peacetime tradition of plain truth and sober statement. Its announcers are discouraged from tempering these qualities by even a change in the inflection of their voices.

Music of excellent quality, both serious and light, has regained its regular place. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is playing several times a week, while other orchestras are being heard again. The public taste here seems to demand rather more classical music than in peace. There is a wealth of light music of fine quality. Plays are back in the program again. Here, too, the classics have come to their own. Scenes from Shakespeare have been welcomed; so has the last act of Saint Joan. Religious services have never been absent from the program and now, as befits a grave time, are more frequent than in peace. Good talks have reestablished themselves. A carefully planned series on art, which in September seemed in danger not only of postponement but of abandonment, has been reinstated.

Every week a loading Minister of the Crown broadcasts on national affairs. The leaders of the Opposition, too, are broadcasting upon them. Even if the present political truce should be broken, the BBC’s policy of freedom of speech would ensure them time upon the air. The more standard type of talk, too, wears a wartime coloring. Gardening talks, for example, that once told chiefly of the flower border, now deal with problems of food production in wartime, and tell millions of amateur gardeners how to preserve every shred of vegetable waste in compost form. Cookery talks are dealing with wartime recipes and devices. Some talks, of course, directly reflect the happenings of war.

The distinctive ways and tastes of the various regions of Britain are again being reflected in the programs. They take on perhaps a sharpened quality by reason of the fact that so many of those who formerly enjoyed them at home are now listening to them in exile. Welsh and Gaelic are once more heard upon the air. A new feature is a series of programs, ‘The Shadow of the Swastika,’ which is dramatizing vividly and in historical detail, with speech and sound effects and commentary, the rise of the Nazi movement. In very different style, the movement was satirized in a program called ‘Adolf in Blunderland.’ About this listeners’ opinions were sharply divided. ‘Full of scintillating wit,’ wrote one listener; ‘It made me sick,’ wrote another. In the world of popular entertainment old favorites are in demand. ‘ Band Wagon,’ for example, — a miscellaneous program held together by the personalities of two comedians much as are the Charlie McCarthy programs in America, — which before the war was attracting some seventy in every hundred of our listeners to their receivers, is back again and in high popular favor. An occasional race is broadcast from the track, an occasional boxing match from the ring. Football matches are reappearing.

The sudden doubling of the child population of many an English village has put an undue strain on school accommodation and resources. In time of peace the BBC broadcasts a regular series of school programs nicely adjusted to the requirements of teachers of different subjects. Specialization has had to be abandoned in wartime, since so many teachers are separated from their children; but the school audience has vastly increased.

Those other exiles, the British troops in France, have not been forgotten. As they set the seal of their approval on a new or an old wartime song, it comes more frequently into BBC programs. (A dance band is playing ‘We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line’ as I write these words.) The BBC has its own correspondents and a recording van with the army in France. Concerts that are entertaining the troops there are relayed in programs to the home listener. Home programs are reaching our troops across the Channel. A French sergeant wrote the other day to tell how happily ‘Tipperary’ and ‘God Save the King’ in the British program had welcomed some sixty members of a British Air Force Squadron as they were received by his regiment in the Foyer du Soldat of a small French village. It was a happy thought that lately led Lord Nuffield to devote $60,000 of a gift made for the benefit, of the troops to the purchase of radio receivers.

III

There was a black moment, immediately after the outbreak of war, when it seemed as though the international element in our broadcasting had been jettisoned. The BBC had developed a considerable exchange of programs with other countries. Last summer we were taking and enjoying two or three programs a week from the United States. Raymond Gram Swing was drawing an audience, it was calculated, of some two or three million British listeners for his weekly commentary on American affairs. Miners’ choirs in Lille and in Birmingham, carol singers of England and Germany, the carillons of Loughborough and Malines, the Children’s Hours of Birmingham and Frankfurt, had been linked in single programs. Happily that first fear has been removed. Nowadays Swing is talking to us again once a fortnight. France, Holland, Italy, and Switzerland are now supplying us regularly with programs. We have heard a recital by Alfred Cortot from France. We have enjoyed light music from Italy and folk music from Turkey. We have listened to the national songs of Switzerland and ‘Songs of a Thousand Lakes’ from Finland. An exchange of carols with Holland has been arranged for our Children’s Hour. There is talk of a program from China. Christmas Day brought us a Grieg Concert from Norway and the Sistine Choir from the Vatican.

Innumerable listeners on this side of the Atlantic are hoping that our traffic from the American ether will before long be fully restored. There is unmistakably abroad in England today a growing and disinterested desire to know better and understand life as it is lived in the United States. Meantime the BBC has been happy these last months to provide studio accommodation and other technical assistance to American commentators broadcasting from Britain to the United States. It has no other part in these programs, which, like press dispatches, are subject to such censorship only as may guard against the communication of facts of possible military value to the enemy.

The British listener tunes in, as his fancy leads him, to programs radiated by other countries, including the shortwave transmissions from America. At the outset of the war, a German decree made it a penal offense to listen to a foreign broadcast, and a crime punishable by death to communicate the results of any such listening to one’s fellows. (A Dutch paper has just reported a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment upon a German woman who listened to a foreign broadcast.) From time to time, reports have appeared of sets confiscated on the Western German frontier, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland. The hours devoted in the home German program to the contradiction of British broadcast statements suggest that these measures have at least not been wholly successful.

But, however that may be, the British listener knows no such tyranny. It has become an innocent form of popular amusement to pick up of an evening the voice of a man who broadcasts in English and who has come to be known throughout the country as ‘Lord HawHaw.’ In more serious vein British listeners tune in to the Continent, Germany included, for orchestral music at hours when the BBC’s single program is occupied with other affairs. It is pleasant to think that radio is thus preserving, when so many of its other channels of interchange have been stopped, that world unity of culture which is one of the objects, at least, for which the British people feels today that it is fighting.

That spirit the BBC is seeking to keep alive in the programs which it is now radiating powerfully beyond the British coasts. The Royal Charter, by which in 1925 the BBC was created, charged the new Corporation to ‘carry on a Broadcasting Service within Our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (but not including therein the Irish Free State), the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.’ There was little thought in those days of the voice of the BBC’s being heard overseas. Not till 1932 did the BBC take on the additional task of providing a short-wave service in the English tongue for the British Empire beyond the seas. There was still no thought of radiating any program in a foreign language. But by the autumn of 1937 all the leading European countries, with Russia as the pioneer and Germany, Italy, and France following in her train, were speaking freely to the world in a variet y of languages. Britain, it came then to be felt, must overcome, at least upon the air, the traditional slowness of her people to acquire the speech of foreigners.

When, in the first few days of January 1938, the BBC started to radiate a daily program in Arabic, it undertook the task on the clear understanding that the broadcasting of i ruth should be the rule of its oversea, as it had always been the rule of its home, programs. In March it went on to give news bulletins directed to Latin America in Spanish and Portuguese. On September 27 of that year— the day of Mr. Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation at the height of the Munich crisis — it spoke for the first time to Europe in her own languages. That night it broadcast news bulletins in French, German, and Italian. Gradually, as the international tension grew through 1939, it equipped itself to transmit bulletins in yet further languages. By November 1939, it was radiating the news twice or three times a day in Arabic, Czech, French, German Greek, Italian, Magyar, Polish, Portuguese (for both Portugal and Brazil), Rumanian, Serbo-Croat, Spanish (for both Spain and Latin America), and Turkish, and also speaking daily in Afrikaans to the Union of South Africa, these bulletins being included either in the service given to Europe during nineteen hours out of every twenty-four or in the more widely ranging oversea service addressed to the world, including notably the countries of the British Empire. Many of these have been picked up and retransmitted by broadcasting organizations in distant countries.

Two supplements in particular to these bulletins are of interest. In the BBC’s home programs there are often broadcast SOS messages, generally seeking the relatives of people who are gravely ill. From the day in 1932 that the BBC first radiated a program overseas until last October, the rule had stood that no personal messages should be included in it. Just before the collapse of Warsaw, the Polish radio station there was broadcasting nightly messages from people who wished their relatives elsewhere in Poland to know that they were safe, or inquiries from those who wanted to discover the whereabouts of husband, wife, or child. It was a moving experience to hear these announcements coming over the air into a London studio. I remember hearing the message of a wife who wished her husband to know that she had been safely delivered in Warsaw of her first-born child. After the Germans seized Poland, the BBC was asked by the Polish Ambassador in London if it. could by a similar service help some of the unhappy refugees who had been parted from their families. The BBC readily agreed. At the end, therefore, of the evening bulletin in Polish, there began to be broadcast, each day some seventy-five messages of this kind. Not all have found their mark. Many, it must be feared, have been addressed to the dead. But from neutral countries in Europe, from as far afield as Palestine, even covertly from within the German Reich, grateful reports have reached the BBC — from a mother who has found her lost son again, from a sister who has learned of her brother’s whereabouts, from a husband who has discovered that his wife is safe.

Another form of supplement to the BBC’s foreign news bullet ins is the short talk radiated after the nightly news. Such talks are accompanying the bulletins now in many European languages; a talk by Mr. Eden, for example, was included in the French service, and distinguished representatives of Poland were heard after the Polish bulletin. But they have most frequently followed the German news. There they are addressed primarily to listeners within Germany itself, though there is abundant evidence to show how widely they are also heard outside Germany. They seek generally to give an authoritative account of some subject about which German listeners are known to be kept in ignorance or to be expressly deceived by their government. Sometimes the talk appeals to German emotions. For example, a former British Guards officer, who in happier days had been entertained as a young man by the 2nd Regiment of Foot Guards in their barracks in the Friedrichstrasse and had drunk soup in the field kitchens of the Bavarian Infantry on manoeuvres, addressed the soldiers of the old German army. His talk followed the mysterious death of General von Fritsch in Poland. He recalled incidents of the chivalry of German soldiers which he had himself witnessed on the Western Front in the last war — recalled how he had seen a German machine-gun officer deliberately withhold his fire while a wounded Englishman was carried back from no man’s land into the British lines. What had happened, he asked, to German Soldatenehre? At the end of his talk a record was played of a singing in chorus of that fine old German lament for a comrade: —

This broadcast talk was singularly moving to hear even in London. The letters which it brought to the BBC from Europe showed how poignantly it had echoed in many German hearts.

IV

It is difficult now to remember that in the last war there was no broadcasting. The nearest approach to it was probably to be found in the device by which a telegraphist at the front would tap out in Morse, for the benefit of his opposite number in the German trenches, the news bulletin of the day. Those prophets who attempted in recent years to interpret the conditions of a future war forecast that the fighting in the ether would take the form of a battle not of speakers but of technicians. They thought that enemy transmitters would engage in a campaign of ‘jamming,’each side trying to render unintelligible to the world the radio services of its opponents. So far their prophecies have proved almost wholly false. There has indeed been some attempt to jam a few of the BBC’s foreign radio services. But in general the services of all countries have passed undisturbed to their destinations. Radio, to an extent which no one quite foresaw, has become the first source of international news and intelligence, is tending to replace the exchange of diplomatic communications, and is now a fourth armament of defense and attack. If the last war extended the terrain of battle to the air, this war has extended it yet further to the ether.

In 1914 a listening post was no more than a small hide-out beyond the trenches, in which a man was stationed to catch signs of unusual enemy activity above or below the ground. Now every country that wants to be equipped with a complete service of information must keep a vigilant and continuous watch upon the ether. This means that in modern war great listening posts must be established far away from the front. and manned night and day by hundreds of men and women, keeping in shifts a continuous watch upon an array of receivers.

In peacetime the BBC had equipped itself to listen on a small scale to an occasional program from overseas. This it did, sometimes for the sake of news, sometimes for the purpose of satisfying itself that other countries were keeping to their allotted frequencies. The process had come to be known internally as ‘monitoring.’ Now that war has come, the BBC has been appointed the nation’s listening post, and its modest peacetime service has been immensely enlarged. A multilingual staff of many nationalities works in shifts night and day throughout the seven days of every week, picking up from the ceaseless traffic of the ether some 250,000 words a night in twenty different tongues.

This traffic includes about 150 news bulletins every twenty-four hours. The men and women who handle it are performing a severe task. They must be equal to enduring much night work, because the heaviest burden of traffic comes during the hours of darkness. They must also be able to sustain the trying duty of listening without a break to programs that are often indifferently heard because of atmospherics or the interference of another station on a neighboring wave length. Every language must have its shift of experts, and the languages that must be correctly interpreted vary from French, German, Italian, and Russian to Arabic and Ukrainian. At times they need do no more than make notes of what they hear. At other times they must set in motion the recording equipment which will reproduce radiated matter for more intensive interpretation and study. They are assisted by a corps of shorthand writers.

The material thus collected from the ether at a number of different points is brought in by telephone, teleprinter, and dispatch rider to a single centre. Here it is rapidly distributed among an editorial staff chosen for their sound and up-to-date appreciation of international affairs. To that appreciation they must add a detailed knowledge of the special needs, often varying from week to week, of the departments which they are serving. Thus equipped, they must weigh and assess rapidly the relative importance of different items in the continuous tide of raw material which flows on to their tables. Their edited material must be assembled, rapidly copied, and issued at fixed times each day to the many different agencies for whose benefit this service is designed.

V

This review will have shown that the work of the BBC has undergone many changes even in these opening months of the war. If at some points its opportunities have been diminished, at others they have widely increased. The end of change is certainly not yet. The British listener, as has been made clear, has firmly retained his freedom to listen where he wishes and to criticize what he will. That freedom, it is safe to forecast, will certainly not be diminished. The BBC, too, has preserved liberties to which others besides itself attach importance.

Outside the British Isles it is believed almost universally that the BBC is a government agency. Even in peacetime this misconception sometimes causes us embarrassment. Our programs are heard far into Europe; and controversial voices, freely tossed upon the air in the discussions which our people enjoy, are heard abroad, and are apt to be regarded by puzzled foreign listeners as the authentic voice of the British Government. This misconception is natural enough in a world where most broadcasting organizations are either government concerns or commercial undertakings. The BBC is neither of these things. It is a public corporation controlled by a Board of Governors carefully selected to represent widely different political points of view. It thus enjoys an independence which the popular opinion of the country is vigilant to preserve.

That independence has been continued in wartime. Like the newspapers, the BBC is for the time being subject to censorship, in that it must not broadcast information likely to be of military value to the enemy. But, also like the newspapers, it exercises its own discretion in judging what information might be of military value, referring points of doubt to the censor as it thinks necessary. With that small diminution of its peacetime liberties, the BBC has set itself to ensure that, however long the ordeal by war may last, the voices of a true European civilization shall still ring in its programs. It likes to think that freedom of speech upon the air will have something to contribute, when the time comes, to a true European peace.