Voice of hope in our darkest hour

IN BRITAIN’S darkest hours, his softly- spoken Yorkshire tones helped the nation come to terms with its fate. The wartime broadcasts of JB Priestley are mostly lost to the wind, but on the 80th anniversary of the start of the Blitz, his scripts have come once more to life.

They reveal a lost world of make- do- and mend, of tongue sandwiches, Bradford pie shops and, most significantly, a destructive power struggle with Churchill and the BBC. Austin Mitchell, the former MP and Calendar presenter, and a kindred socialist spirit of Priestley’s, said it was hard to underestimate his importance to maintaining morale as the bombs started falling on London and then Sheffield, Hull and across Britain.

“When other correspondents were writing about the bombs and battles, he was describing the people and the privations of war,” said Mr Mitchell, whose book, Britain Speaks: JB Priestley Broadcasts to the World, is published next week.

“He was an ordinary person, a man of the people. His voice was completely different to the upper class, received pronunciation of the BBC.”

A veteran from Bradford of the First World War, Priestley was already a national figure when he was invited to begin his series of

Postscript broadcasts after the withdrawal from Dunkirk.

His best- selling picaresque novel, The Good Companions, had spawned a film – and his English Journey, a polemic on the social scars left by the Great War, was already a classic. But his evocation of the “little ships” that plucked soldiers from the jaws of defeat in 1940 immortalised the conflict for generations to come.

“There were people in the studio in tears,” Mr Mitchell said.

Priestley, pictured, had not been much of a broadcaster before then, but “he came from a good, solid Yorkshire background

– his father was a socialist and so was he, and he could identify with people”, Mr Mitchell added.

“He gave propaganda a credibility it didn’t have before.”

It was the influence of a rival propagandist, the Nazi sympathiser William Joyce – Lord Haw Haw – whose huge audience in Britain prompted the BBC to mobilise Priestley for a counter attack. On September 10 1940, in his first broadcast following the start of the London Blitz, Priestley spoke of “the colossal panorama of a defiant city”. He broadcast live and few recordings exist, but the surviving scripts reveal an abiding socialist agenda. “He alienated Churchill, who wasn’t trying to balance the needs of war with society afterwards – and he was taken off national radio,” said Mr Mitchell, noting that the PM had felt “competitive” towards Priestley.

He was replaced by, amongst others, TS Eliot, who was deemed “unreliable” and by Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information, whose lecture on Joan of Arc was judged “among the most boring ever broadcast”.

Priestley continued to he heard overseas, and regaled audiences with such tales of wartime life as that of a butcher in his home city whose pies survived his windows being blown out.

His expenses claims also survive – 6s 3d for a whiskey and tongue sandwiches in Leeds – next to which the censor had scrawled “cheap”.

Priestley gave propaganda a credibility it didn’t have before. Austin Mitchell, author of ‘ Britain Speaks: JB Priestley Broadcasts to the World’.