AUNTIE’S WAYWARD WAR
It was a vital weapon for wartime morale. But behind the scenes, the BBC was fighting epic battles of its own – from a ban on Vera Lynn to skirmishes with Winston and a ‘fake news’ sex scandal. A new book spills the secrets of...
AT 8.15pm on October 5, 1940, a 500lb German bomb smashed through the seventh floor of the BBC’s Broadcasting House and bored its way down through the building to the music library on the third.
It didn’t explode until someone tried to move it during the 9pm news bulletin. The audience heard a muffled crump but the newsreader, Bruce Belfrage, continued almost without a pause (he later admitted to needing a ‘stiffener’ when he came off the air).
Seven staff were killed in the blast, there was a gaping hole in the side of the building and the BBC’s telephone switchboard was destroyed. But work carried on.
For listeners at home, here was an eloquent expression of British phlegm and a reminder of the central role the BBC was playing in the first big conflict of the broadcasting age, broadcasting the moments that formed our collective wartime memory – Chamberlain speaking from Downing Street, Dunkirk, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, Churchill’s fighting speeches and D-Day.
But if the BBC was a central player in the wartime drama, it was also a drama of its own. The Corporation of the pre-war years was rotten with class privilege and devoted few resources to journalism. It had no reporters at all until the mid-1930s.
By 1942, the BBC’s Foreign News Committee lamented: ‘We all share feelings of disappointment, indeed of shame, that British radio should be failing, after three years of war, to exploit its unique possibilities as a medium for reporting.’
But the war forced Auntie to grow up fast and, in time, the BBC produced magnificent wartime coverage, including reportage from the likes of Richard Dimbleby and Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, whose broadcasts brought the front line into listeners’ homes for the very first time and in many ways set the standard for news reports today.
But not before a series of embarrassing battles with feeble organisation, blimpish attitudes and with the great War Leader himself, Winston Churchill – not to mention the ever-present shadow of censors who thought that the comedian Arthur Askey could somehow help the Nazi war effort…
VERA’S BAD FOR MORALE
WHEN Sir Cecil Graves took over as joint Director-General of the BBC in 1942, he instigated a return to the ascetic founding principles of Lord Reith by cleaning up its popular music – eliminating what one of his lieutenants described as ‘crooning, sentimental numbers, drivelling words, slushy innuendos and so on’.
Graves appeared particularly repelled by the sentimental ballads of Vera Lynn such as (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover and We’ll Meet Again.
‘How could men fit themselves for battle with these debilitating tunes sounding in their ears?’ he demanded. ‘The BBC… could not avoid some responsibility for making this lady popular and so for depreciating the morale of fighting men. Besides, the theme of these songs was sentimental sex, and this mood at the best of times was not to be encouraged.’
A.P. Ryan, the Ministry of Information’s General Adviser to the BBC, came to the rescue of the Forces Sweetheart. He had just returned from a tour of camps, he told the BBC, and confirmed that Vera Lynn’s photograph was everywhere. ‘The strange thing was that the morale of the men was not adversely affected,’ he reported. ‘On the contrary, Vera Lynn seemed to cheer them up… if the BBC put a stop to Vera Lynn we would be doing harm to the troops – and in their eyes look very foolish.’
Vera was allowed to sing on.
WINSTON’S PLAN TO TAKE OVER THE AIR
HE MAY have been a broadcaster of some brilliance, yet Winston Churchill was no fan of the BBC. His belief that the BBC needed to be cut down to size long pre-dated the war. In 1933, he told the House of Commons: ‘These well-meaning gentlemen have absolutely no qualifications and no claim to represent British public opinion.’
He hated the craggy Scotsman Lord Reith and seems to have had an equally low regard for Reith’s wartime successor, Sir Frederick Ogilvie.
Within a week of moving into No10 in May 1940, Churchill was demanding that Duff Cooper, his Minister of Information, come up with ideas for ‘establishing more effective control over the BBC’.
Even before he became Prime Minister, Churchill treated the BBC as if it were his own personal fiefdom. Then First Lord of the Admiralty, he apparently felt he should be able to ring down for a broadcasting slot rather as if he were ordering breakfast in a good hotel.
A puzzled BBC memo in late December 1939 recorded: ‘One of Mr Churchill’s secretaries telephoned to say Mr Churchill would be glad to broadcast on January 13th or 14th.’ He was told his desired slot was already booked.
For all that, Churchill’s speeches are central to the way Britain looks back on its Second World War story, especially during that summer of 1940, when so much hung in the balance.
And the myth is so powerful that it has distorted the historical record. The Dunkirk speech, for example, was delivered in Parliament, but never actually broadcast. The recording we now know was made by Churchill in 1949 for a disc of his speeches produced by
Decca. And people quickly began to imagine they had heard him giving the speech on the BBC.
THE NAZIS BEAT THEM TO THE BIG STORY
ON THE outbreak of war, responsibility for the BBC was passed to the Orwelliansounding Ministry of Information and the Armed Services censored every BBC dispatch, which led to farcical delays in getting news stories out.
The most serious instance was the handling of the German air raid on the British fleet at Scapa Flow in March 1940.
The raid by 14 Luftwaffe bombers was a nasty shock, but hardly a major defeat – HMS Hood was hit by a bomb which killed four officers, a 27-year-old islander became Britain’s first civilian victim, and a local aerodrome was damaged. But the way it was ‘spun’ by the Germans made it seem much more serious. German Zeesen station broadcast news of the raid in English and, by the time the BBC caught up, almost 12 hours later, newspapers around the world were repeating the German version of events.
The men from the Ministry, nicknamed ‘The Ministry of Aggravation’ within the BBC, could be heavy-handed.
During a live show in 1940, Arthur Askey ad-libbed about the unusually hot summer, saying: ‘I’ve never known such weather in Manchester.’ This prompted a complaint from the Ministry that references to weather were banned because they might help the Germans plan air raids. ‘I am having [Askey] written to and reproached,’ a BBC executive replied, ‘and told it helps the enemy make their weather maps.’
GOING TO WAR ON HAW-HAW
LORD HAW-HAW is one of the oddest anti-heroes in the history of radio: a traitor and, in his way, a genuine star. By turns funny and sinister, brilliant and strange, William Joyce broadcast his daily show Germany Calling from Hamburg and was listened to by millions desperate for whatever information they could get. His success caught the BBC on the hop. Theatre critic Harold Hobson wrote to The Times: ‘The dear fellow is a figure of national popularity. He is the hero of a revue. That ineffable voice of his has an irresistible fascination.’
By late 1939, the War Office suggested the BBC put P. G. Wodehouse on air to mock Haw-Haw – but six months later, Wodehouse was captured by the Germans and later in the war was persuaded to broadcast for them instead.
The BBC’s The Postscript series, presented by the novelist J. B. Priestley, proved an inspired response. His first Postscript, broadcast in the aftermath of the Dunkirk evacuation, shows how Priestley had already begun the rewriting of history. ‘What began as a miserable blunder, a catalogue of misfortunes and miscalculations, ended as an epic of gallantry… Out of a black gulf of humiliation and despair, rises a sun of blazing glory.’
With their unabashed patriotism, the Postscripts drew vast audiences, despite worries in high places about Priestley’s Left-wing leanings. When Priestley made an impassioned plea for a new social order in post-war Britain, it was too much for Churchill, who formally complained. Nothing has come to light to show that Churchill silenced Priestley. But there is no doubt that Priestley’s broadcasts were brought to an end for political reasons.
OUTRAGE OVER ORGY REPORT
THE BBC’s own broadcasts to occupied Europe became known as ‘white’ propaganda to distinguish them from the ‘black’ propaganda pushed out by stations run by the Political Warfare Executive, whose most imaginative member was former Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer.
Delmer later wrote: ‘I longed to show the difference between the stodgy news presentation to which the BBC bowed down, and the sharp and vivid style of Fleet Street.’
He had no scruples about lying. His first venture was a radio station designed to sound like a network run by Nazi loyalists who had doubts about the conduct of senior officers. Delmer’s liberal use of smut soon got him into trouble.
The signal could be picked up in Britain and soon reached the ears of Lord Privy Seal Sir Stafford Cripps, who complained about ‘very lurid descriptions of a German admiral’s orgy with his mistress and four sailors’.
‘In one house where people listened… two young women had been physically sick,’ Cripps wrote. ‘If this is the sort of thing that is needed to win the war, I’d rather lose it.’
D-DAY AND A VICTORY FOR BROADCASTING HISTORY
BY JUNE 1944, the BBC had worked out how to run a wartime news operation and present it in a compelling way.
At the end of the 9pm news on D-Day, listeners heard the following announcement: ‘War report! Night by night at this time this programme will bring you news of the war from correspondents and fighting men; it will contain live broadcasts and recordings made in the field, special broadcasts made from forward areas, and dispatches and expert comment; to give the latest and fullest picture of the war on all fronts.’
A broadcasting milestone, War Report, stayed on the air right up until VE Day – 235 editions were broadcast over 11 months of fighting, attracting audiences of up to 15million. But it was soon given a sharp reminder of just who was in charge.
A month later, Field Marshal Montgomery sent the BBC’s Chester Wilmot home and effectively closed down BBC reporting in a furious row over the broadcasting of his speech to the troops.
Nevertheless, the vividness of the reporting brought home how dramatically broadcast journalism had developed during half a decade of warfare.
War Report must surely rank as one of the greatest radio strands of all time and its correspondents wrote the rules we still use to make good radio – clear, vigorous prose, the use of sound, an eye for the telling detail, a sense of occasion and a certain intimacy of tone. © Edward Stourton, 2017
Auntie’s War: The BBC During The Second World War, by Edward Stourton, is published by Doubleday at £25. Offer price £20 (20 per cent discount) until November 5. Order at www. mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.