THE EARLY DAYS OF THE BBC
The BBC was established on 18 October 1922, as the British Broadcasting Company. It became the British Broadcasting Corporation on 1 January 1927.
During World War II, Reith was appointed Minister of Information in Neville Chamberlain’s government. He was elected unopposed as Member of Parliament for Southampton in a by-election, sitting until October that year.
The Reith Lectures are a series of talks given by leading figures of the day, which are broadcast each year on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. They began in 1948, with the philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell. Speakers of note over the years include the Prince of Wales, Stephen Hawking and Grayson Perry.
The first radio service in Scotland was launched by the British Broadcasting Company on 6 March 1923, located in Bath Street in Glasgow. Other services were launched in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, but in 1927 they were all brought under the banner of the BBC Regional Programme. BBC Radio Scotland was launched in 1978. BBC broadcasts began in Scotland in 1952.
being ruthless and most determined.’ After the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, Reith wrote: ‘I really admire the way Hitler has cleaned up what looked like an incipient revolt. I really admire the drastic actions taken, which were obviously badly needed.’ After the 1939 invasion of Czechoslovakia, he lauded Hitler’s ‘magnificent efficiency.’
Reith was a man of his time and television’s gradual emergence seemed to both annoy and paralyse Reith. He was suspicious of its dumbing-down potential, and years later called the music panel show Juke Box Jury ‘evil’.
To this day, questions remain about why he left the BBC in 1938. Did he jump to sidestep television? Or was he pushed by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain?
Reith briefly became chairman of Imperial Airways and entered government during World War II, when he became Minister of Information and a cabinet colleague of Churchill. Once in power Churchill fired Reith, who later called the great statesman ‘a horrid fellow’ and wrote to him as ‘someone whom you broke and whose life you ruined’.
Reith’s animosity was such that when Churchill offered him the long-coveted post of Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, he refused it, noting in his diary: ‘Invitation from that bloody shit Churchill to be Lord High Commissioner.’ He later accepted it when offered by someone else.
Was the feeling mutual? Winston Churchill countered Reith’s outrage with more measured words of ‘regret’, saying only that Reith kept him off the air for eight years and was ‘difficult to work with’.
With his ambitions for wartime responsibilities thwarted, Reith seemed to end his life unfulfilled. ‘He regretted having left the BBC and regretted ever having anything to do with it,’ said Marista. ‘He felt overlooked despite becoming a peer in 1940, holding numerous prestigious post-war chairmanships, and, back in Scotland in the late-60s, serving in highly respected roles like Lord Rector of Glasgow University.’
Reith once reflected bitterly in his diary that ‘unspeakable remorse comes on me when I think how far I’ve failed.’ He died in Edinburgh on 16 June 1971 after a fall, his ashes buried at Rothiemurchus, near Aviemore as per his wishes.
Yet Reith’s principles of public broadcasting are followed around the world, and there’s even an adjective, Reithian: ‘an equal consideration of all viewpoints, probity, universality and a commitment to public service’.
That’s quite some legacy.