The Second World War was a pivot around which Britain’s strategic interests, capabilities and resources revolved. The arrival of HMT Empire Windrush in the Thames Estuary outside London in June 1948 reflected some of these changes, signalling a historic turn in the flow of human and cultural capital in Britain.
This was allied to a recalibration of the nation’s overseas responsibilities and ambitions in the postwar world. Principle among these was Britain’s commitment to and status within the Empire and Europe. In 1948, the course of future relations with both was by no means certain, something that was reflected in the organisation and output of the ±«Óãtv’s overseas services.
Regular ±«Óãtv broadcasts designed for listeners overseas began on 19 December 1932 with the inauguration of the Empire Service. Intended for all those who thought of Britain as home, this English-language service was a dynamic manifestation of the Anglo-centric nature of the British Empire with London at the centre of a global communications network.
It was also a cost-effective means, in the diminished economic climate of the early 1930s, of keeping the imperial outreaches in touch with the metropolitan centre.
This was very much the case when in the same year King George V broadcast the first royal Christmas message, scripted by the author Rudyard Kipling, to audiences both at home and on the Empire Service:
Through one of the marvels of modern science, I am enabled, this Christmas Day, to speak to all my peoples throughout the Empire. I take it as a good omen that wireless should have reached its present perfection at a time when the Empire has been linked in closer union. For it offers us immense possibilities to make that union closer still.
It was another six years before the ±«Óãtv began broadcasting in languages other than English. In response to Italian and German radio propaganda the ±«Óãtv launched an Arabic Service in January 1938, quickly followed in March by Spanish and Portuguese for Latin America.
But it was the Munich crisis of September 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler as the continent approached the brink of war, which saw the start of the first European language services. As the ±«Óãtv’s Leonard Miall recalls, it was all rather hastily arranged:
The Second World War was the making of the ±«Óãtv World Service we recognise today. It set the template of overseas broadcasting from which modern output has subsequently evolved. It established foreign language broadcasting as part of the ±«Óãtv’s core remit alongside services in English.
At its wartime peak the ±«Óãtv was broadcasting to the world in over forty-five languages, reaching a genuinely global audience. The war also saw the creation of a distinct European Service, directing programmes to the continent, on the frontline of the war of words between Britain and the Axis powers.
The crucible of war also entrenched some foundational editorial values that have since framed the journalistic practice of the ±«Óãtv. The central importance of news, as the kernel of output, alongside a determination to accurately report British failures as well as successes was crucial to building the ±«Óãtv’s credibility with audiences as the historian Alan Bullock, who joined the European Service in 1940, explains:
Emerging from the Second World War, a transformed broadcaster at home and abroad, the ±«Óãtv was left with a critical decision about its overseas services. Should it revert to its limited pre-war organisation, or should it continue on the multilingual and expansive path it had taken during the war?
The postwar reconstruction of Europe, the coming Cold War, publicly apparent after the Soviet blockade of Berlin from June 1948, and the march of independence movements across the British Empire all supported the argument for continuing on a similar scale.
Moreover, having captured a global audience neither the ±«Óãtv, nor the British government, were willing to see the Corporation’s international reputation and diplomatic leverage lost.
The wartime expansion of broadcasting had proved the value of a multilingual strategy, but it had also left a deep impression on its English-language services. In these, it was no longer credible to transmit programmes for imperial purposes solely, although colonial output continued: the ±«Óãtv had become a global broadcaster with a global editorial agenda.
As if to signify this shift the title of the Empire Service had been dropped during the war for the all-embracing General Overseas Service. Austen Kark, a former Managing Director of the ±«Óãtv External Services reflects on this change and the challenges the new service faced in broadening its appeal and reach in a ±«Óãtv oral history interview with Frank Gillard:
In subsequent years, as Britain managed the economically crippling after-effects of fighting two world wars in the space of three decades, pressure grew on the ±«Óãtv to cut all but essential overseas services. Unlike domestic programmes, which were funded by the Licence Fee, broadcasts abroad were paid for by a government Grant-in-Aid administered by the UK Foreign Office. This led to a great deal of tension between government departments in Whitehall and Bush House, the home of what had collectively become the ±«Óãtv External Services - the precursor of today’s World Service.
Nevertheless, as the former Director-General of the ±«Óãtv Charles Curran pointed out, this prevailing sense of attrition was punctuated by effective cooperation in a number of areas. In particular, Britain’s impending withdrawal from empire led to a great deal of ±«Óãtv and government effort being put into the creation of public service broadcasting systems and networks in the soon to be independent colonial territories:
Meanwhile, in Europe, ±«Óãtv broadcasts were being redefined by the Cold War and the division of the continent between the independent countries of Western Europe and the Soviet-dominated countries of Central and Eastern Europe. As a consequence, the geopolitical Iron Curtain was reflected in ±«Óãtv output where increasing attention was paid to the effectiveness of broadcasts in Russian and to Warsaw Pact countries as part of Britain’s non-shooting war with the Soviet Union.
Within a diminishing budget, this emphasis called into question the need to broadcast to friendly continental neighbours when, so soon after the end of the Second World War, another enemy had appeared at the gates. Yet, ironically, this was also the moment at which cooperation between Western European broadcasters, led by the ±«Óãtv, was reaching new heights.
As Ian Jacob, the ±«Óãtv’s Director-General at the time explains, the creation of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) ushered in the era of Eurovision, a technical broadcasting network for the sharing of programmes and live transmission and, of course, its iconic Song Contest:
In the years after the Second World War, the overall organisation and pattern of the ±«Óãtv’s overseas services remained largely intact. Yet, in that time, Britain’s overseas responsibilities, capabilities and strategic focus was undergoing a radical transformation. This became apparent from the mid-1950s onwards when the Suez crisis - Britain’s failed military attack on Egypt, in collusion with France and Israel - demonstrated the limits of the UK’s freedom for independent action on the world stage.
Moreover, colonial independence, which reached its peak in the 1960s, permanently altered the ±«Óãtv’s broadcasting relationship with audiences in these former dependencies. As Prime Minister Harold Macmillan noted in his famous speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town in 1961, "The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact".
For the ±«Óãtv, this prompted a reorganisation of its services abroad: a significant retrenchment from broadcasting to Western Europe in favour of an expansion in language programming with new services in, for example, Swahili, Hausa, and Somali. In the English-language General Overseas Service, it also led to a fundamental rethink of audience diversity, as the ±«Óãtv’s former Managing Director of External Services Gerard Mansell remembers:
Finding an appropriate balance between Empire and Europe, English and foreign language broadcasting, and the organisation of services to reflect it was a central concern for the ±«Óãtv in this period. Its working out involved assessing the needs of audiences against the changing political, economic and cultural contexts in which the ±«Óãtv broadcast abroad. This ebb and flow punctuated the conduct of overseas broadcasting before, during and after the Second World War.
Britain’s imperial responsibilities were the genesis for the ±«Óãtv’s international services in the 1930s. World conflict changed this approach, resulting in a broadcasting operation that targeted multiple theatres of war, while retaining a distinct link with empire.
The centrality of the European Services to the war effort was then supplanted by a commitment to cold war broadcasting at the expense of Western Europe and a recalibration of global output in light of decolonisation and Britain’s international status. As with current changes in the shape and reach of the ±«Óãtv World Service, these historic shifts reflect an underlying desire by the ±«Óãtv to align its overseas services with the strategic concerns of the British nation and the needs of its many audiences.