Auntie at war
JOHN GRIGG
The War of Words (The History of Broad- casting in the- United Kingdom, Vol In) Asa Briggs (ouP £6 10s) Professor Asa Briggs is a Stakhanovite among scholars. For sheer industry and pro- ductivity he must be hard to beat. While shouldering a heavy burden of academic ad- ministration (as vice-chancellor and head of the history department at Sussex) he also manages to maintain a steady output of very" substantial books. How he finds the time, to say nothing of the energy, to do it all is a mystery.
His latest work brings his massive history of British broadcasting up to 1945 and describes the activities of the BBC during World War rt. The account is long (well over 700 pages) and complicated, but there is plenty of good material in it for students who go to work with anything like the author's own stamina.
The opening words strike a suitably cau- tionary note: 'Words do not win wars'. Professor Briggs has no illusions about what the BBC could, or did, achieve in war-time; he does not for a moment suggest that the microphone is mightier than the sword. On the contrary, he shows very clearly that the nac's influence abroad was dependent upon the course of military operations. During the 'phoney war' period, and for most of 1940, the Bac was on the whole less trusted than the German radio in neutral countries. It was the Battle of Britain which established British, and impaired German, credibility.
After 1940 the artc had another advantage. Since a large part of Western Europe was under German occupation, the BBC was naturally turned to as the most powerful medium through which governments and broadcasters in exile could communicate with their own people. Professor Briggs gives a special accolade to the team of young Frenchmen who, with some British help and support, produced the programme Les Fran- cais parlent aux Francais, which he describes as 'not only an effective programme for France in the hour of her greatest need but a feast of radio at its most original and best'. Between June and September 1940 an broadcasts seem to have made very little im- pact in France, but thereafter the audience grew rapidly and everything transmitted in French from England was 'thought to be carrying a "Gaullist" message'.
It was a foreign broadcaster, the Belgian Victor de Lavelaye, who invented the 'V' symbol as a propaganda device. Speaking to his own compatriots on 14 January 1941, he suggested that V was the ideal rallying emblem, because it was the initial letter of the French word for victory and the Flemish word for freedom. The response was im- mediate and dramatic: Vs blossomed everywhere and the movement quickly spread to neighbouring countries. Those in charge of the aac's European Service were eager to embark upon a forward policy and saw the V campaign as an answer to prayer. But their enthusiasm was a little premature and the campaign might have led to serious disillusionment had it not been overtaken by the German invasion of Russia, which forced it 'into the margin of history'. All the same, it gave Churchill his favourite gim- mick and worried the Germans enough to provoke them into adopting the V symbol for themselves. (In Paris they placed a huge V sign on the Eiffel Tower.)
How important was the BBC internally? On 22 May 1940, the Ministry of Informa- tion (then under Duff Cooper) appointed a Home Morale Emergency Committee to combat 'five menaces to public calm—fear, confusion, suspicion, class feeling and defeatism'. In July, the Ministry was work- ing on an 'anger campaign', designed `to focus all war anger as directly as possible against the Germans and in such a way that it appears to come quite spontaneously from the people themselves'. Professor Briggs rightly comments that there is little reason to suppose the British people needed to be roused. Their instinctive xenophobia, which at that moment in their history became a cardinal virtue, required no artificial stimulus.
At the same time they were undoubtedly much fortified by Churchill's broadcasts, partly because the tone was eloquent of resolution and conveyed a feeling that the state was, at last, in capable hands; partly because the language, however high- flown—or rather, precisely because it was high-flown—seemed appropriate to a great historic occasion. The British like things to be done in style, and Churchill spoke as they would have wished their Prime Minister to speak at a moment of destiny.
Nearer to their hearts, however, were the famous 'Postscripts' which Mr J. B. Priestley delivered between June and October 1940. He spoke more often than Churchill, in a vein of romantic patriotism no less deep than his, but with an intimacy and folksiness to which he could never aspire. It was a people's war and, as Professor Briggs says, Priestley sounded 'a man of the people'.
In spite of the genuine national solidarity which existed at that time, Parliament was nevertheless still dominated by the Conservative party, and the BBC by people with upper-middle-class reflexes and pre- judices. Inevitably they became uneasy at the prospect of Britain's conversion to 'socialism', if Priestley's freedom to exercise his talents on the nationalised air were to go unchecked. So in March 1941 he was—in a thoroughly British way—silenced: that is to say, he was used again, especially for broad- casting to America, but was never again given the latitude he enjoyed in 1940.
The Priestley phenomenon was sympto- matic of the BBC'S emergence, under the stress of war, from its bourgeois bottle. Professor Briggs might, perhaps, have documented the controversy surrounding Priestley's broad- casts more fully. Altogether he gives less detailed attention than it deserves to the
sac's evolution, as a social organism, during the war. (He remarks, correctly, that 'it was a point of genuine interest in social history when Wilfred Pickles, a 'Yorkshire character actor, was brought down from Manchester to become a regular news reader'. But he neglects to give the date.)
Another criticism must be that he is too sparing of personal analysis and description. The wartime sac was above all a menagerie of individuals, some brilliant, many ec. centric; and for most of the war the Minister of Information was one of the strangest figures in modern British politics--Brendan Bracken. Professor Briggs allows us an oc- casional glimpse of the human forces at work behind the minutes and memoranda, but his approach to the subject is, tin. fortunately, far from Trollopian. As a result, while he .tells us much and writes with impeccable fair-mindedness, the spirit of a unique institution somehow eludes him.
Previous page
