by Angus Calder
There was attractive female company for Robertson – Helen Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Daily News, ‘tall and beautiful’ with a ‘first class mind’, Virginia Cowles, a Bostonian who wrote for the London Sunday Times and moved in the highest London society, and tiny Hilde Marchant of the London Daily Express, ‘a sort of Spitfire attached to the ground … passionate in her belief in the common people’. One of the corps, Art Menken, a March of Time photographer, literally got dug in to the white cliffs, getting potatoes out of the ground ‘when he was not otherwise engaged’. There were two pubs handy and more, of course, down in the town – Robertson wrote of the corps listening regularly to the views of ‘the red haired woman who ran the pub in the square where David Copperfield waited for his aunt’, and suggested that they were equally impressed by Josephine, the barmaid at the Grand Hotel, a brave woman whom he saw one day when ‘all hell had been let loose … a copy of The Grapes of Wrath under one arm’, shouting to the gunners on the beach, ‘Go to it, Bofors.’20
Older hands, who perhaps did not in fact fully share Robertson’s endearing weakness for barmaids, hotel waitresses and other young women who epitomised for him British fighting spirit, nevertheless seem to have convinced themselves that they were at the last line of defence for US democracy, now that France had fallen, and that the British were really putting up a fight. Reynolds, an occasional visitor to the cliff, wrote later that the whole corps came in July to have an ‘emotional rather than a rational’ faith that Britain would survive.21 Vincent Sheean thought that the Germans were in effect winning the ‘Battle of the Channel’ – the corps saw dive bombers causing havoc among British convoys – but was convinced that the outnumbered RAF fighter planes ‘had the best of it’ in every battle against Messerschmitts which he witnessed. ‘It was at Dover, I think, that the side of England became “our side” in my eyes.’ Long distrustful of British imperialism, disgusted by appeasement, Sheean had, by his own account, come close to isolationism – Europeans seemed to deserve what they were getting. ‘At Dover the first sharp thrust of hope penetrated this gloom … The flash of the Spitfire’s wing, then, through the misty glare of the summer sky, was the first flash of a sharpened sword.’22
In August, Murrow and Fred Bate organised a joint CBS-NBC broadcast live from London town, on the ‘round up’ pattern, now well established, in which correspondents reported in turn from various points. To get atmospheric sound, they used techniques developed by the BBC to catch the noise of bat on ball during commentaries on cricket matches. Murrow was to kick off in Trafalgar Square, his colleague Larry Le Sueur was at an ARP station, the socialistic socialite Sheean was rather appropriately stationed on a balcony over Piccadilly Circus. Sevareid was mingling with 15,000 people at a dance hall in Hammersmith up-river, while Bate was poised to report from Buckingham Palace. J. B. Priestley (who else?) would end the programme in Whitehall, looking towards the Cenotaph.
Thirty million Americans were treated to a breakthrough in broadcasting. A light air raid was beginning. Murrow was on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields: there was a public shelter nearby. ‘The noise that you hear at this moment is the sound of the air-raid siren … People are walking along very quietly. We’re just at the entrance of an air-raid shelter here, and I must move the cable over just a bit, so people can walk in.’ Crouching on the pavement, Murrow captured for his listeners the calm, unhurried footsteps of Londoners, despite the noise of guns conflicting with the chugging of buses as lights changed from green to red. They heard one Londoner casually ask another for a light.23
On 7 September, Murrow, Sheean and Robertson faced a test of their own morale. They drove down to Kent to inspect the damage in the Thames estuary and look at the air war from another angle. They saw the colossal waves of German bombers head towards the East End and set it on fire. Anticipating the Luftwaffe’s return, they decided to spend the night in the open. As Murrow would tell America next day, ‘Vincent Sheean lay on one side of me and cursed in five languages; he’d talk about the war in Spain. Ben Robertson lay on the other side and kept saying over and over in that slow South Carolina drawl, “London is burning, London is burning.”’ Robertson hadn’t realised he had been doing this until Murrow told him later. He remembered the East End fires as ‘the most appalling and depressing sight any of us had ever seen’.
As they returned, half dazed, to London next day, Sheean was impressed with the ‘patient and orderly’ behaviour of frightened, homeless ‘refugees’. Robertson got back to his bed in the Waldorf Hotel in time for the next night’s repetition of Blitz. Next morning, the head waiter had lost his home, but was on duty, and ‘Ivey the cleaner’ came to work after being buried for three hours in a basement. ‘The civilians had become an army.’ They cleared up one night’s wreckage and waited for the next. ‘They knew they had to keep the streets open, the lights on, the water flowing, the food coming in.’24
The three US radio networks shared one small studio, B-4, in Broadcasting House with three censors, who sat through broadcasts with finger on switch, ready to turn the microphone off if a correspondent departed from an approved script. Murrow, Bate and Arthur Mann of Mutual went out live: though recordings were sometimes surreptitiously used by CBS and NBC correspondents, it was still believed in the US that these would be subject to doctoring and thus unreliable. R. T. Clark would be close at hand in the cubicle where he worked and slept: the BBC Home News existed in virtual symbiosis with US foreign news. Usually, though not invariably, Murrow dictated the scripts of his newscasts, so that the words would suit the rhythms of speech rather than fall into the patterns of written prose.
In his absence, Murrow had been ‘scooped’ on the 7 September raid by John MacVane of NBC. Reporting on his trip to Kent, he minimised the risk to himself, Robertson and Sheean and concentrated on the behaviour of local people, such as a ‘toothless old man of nearly seventy’ who came into a pub and asked for a pint of mild and bitter, confiding that ‘he had always, all his life, gone to bed at eight o’clock and found now that three pints of beer made him drowsy-like so he could sleep through any air raid’. This was to remain Murrow’s approach in the days which followed. His reporting was unsensational and made weighty by near impersonality. On 9 September, of the East Enders, he said flatly, ‘These people are exceedingly brave, tough and prudent. The East End, where disaster is always just round the corner, seems to take it better than the more fashionable districts in the West End … This night bombing’, he concluded, ‘is serious and sensational. It makes headlines, kills people and smashes property; but it doesn’t win wars.’ Next day, he reminded listeners that London was a huge ‘sprawling city’ and the rain of bombs wasn’t continuous. As for morale:
The politicians who called this a ‘people’s war’ were right, probably more right than they knew at the time. I’ve seen some horrible sights in this city during these days and nights, but not once have I heard man, woman or child suggest that Britain should throw in her hand … After four days and nights of this air Blitzkrieg, I think the people here are rapidly becoming veterans, even as their army was hardened in the fire of Dunkirk.
On 12 September he pitched into Dorothy Thompson’s broadcast from America to Britain that night, in which she had told the British that the poets of the world were behind them:
They don’t consider themselves to be heroes. There’s a job of work to be done and they’re doing it as best they can. They don’t know themselves how long they can stand up to it … Most of them expect little help from the poets and no effective defence by word of mouth.
He had said the rich in London had better shelters than the poor; he refused to give such significance as others did to the bombing of Buckingham Palace. It hadn’t been needed to convince people that ‘they are all in this thing together … The King and Queen have earned the respect and admiration of the nation, but so have tens of thousands of humble folk who are much less well protected.’25
On 21 September, after much hesitation
(they even auditioned him to make sure he wouldn’t give away useful information to the Germans), the BBC allowed him to report a raid in progress from a rooftop, directly to America. (Bate later shared this concession.) Murrow was drawing his public deeper and deeper into the Blitz and communicating his own view of it in the process. This view amounted to saying that class-ridden England was undergoing moral revolution.
Sheean’s pre-war mistrust of Britain has been mentioned. Quentin Reynolds was rather unusual among the American press corps when he confessed to being a lover of London before the Blitz. Sevareid, a markedly left-wing young Midwesterner, had been appalled by London on his first visit in 1937 – ‘incredibly cramped and mean’, with primitive heating and hygiene. The English depressed him – they were ‘unable to express themselves … They cannot talk to one another’. Class was a different, much worse phenomenon than social inequality in the States. The lower-class English accepted their own inferiority. He nevertheless became convinced in 1940 that Britain was ‘a bright beleaguered citadel of courage’. He himself candidly admitted to constant fear under bombing, ‘unable to tolerate the shaking room’, and saw Londoners who were also afraid. Yet overall, the British were truly ‘brave and heroic’. The upper class, whatever their faults, were ‘not very “soft” people’ – they had a ‘tradition of physical courage’. The very fact that the British ‘were still afraid of each other’, Sevareid thought, helped to prevent public panic. ‘One could panic in his heart, but two together could not show it, nor a hundred in a group.’ However, people were now losing their reserve, talking to strangers:
We would talk about this, Ed and I, Scotty Reston and others, when sleep was not to be had for the trying, and we thought that perhaps a wonderful thing was happening to the British people: some kind of moral revolution was underway, and out of it would come regeneration of a great people.
It seemed to him important that ARP men working with their hands were now admired as heroes: ‘The country realised abruptly that a broker in the city was of scant value compared with the man who could fashion an aircraft propeller.’26
Murrow’s conversion to anglophilia probably owed more to calculation: well before the war he had seen Britain’s significance as a potential fighter against fascism and Nazism. In a valedictory BBC broadcast when he left the country at last in 1946, he described his reactions on early visits before he settled in London: ‘You seemed slow, indifferent and exceedingly complacent – not important. I thought your streets narrow and mean, your tailors overadvertised, your climate unbearable, your class-consciousness offensive. You couldn’t cook. Your young men seemed without vigour or purpose.’27 But by 1940 he was a devoted admirer, perhaps rather surprisingly, of the House of Commons and its procedures. He was deeply impressed, as he told America, when in May 1940, he saw it pass in a day the Emergency Powers Act, which took away citizens’ right to private property: ‘During most of the pre-war period this country has been ruled by … an oligarchy which has believed in its right to rule … But this country is now united and it is important that a lifelong Socialist [Attlee] introduced that revolutionary bill today.’28
Enthusiasm for the idea that Britain’s ‘moral revolution’ involved the elevation of life, labour and freedom over money was shared by other members of the American press. It is not surprising that the romantic Ben Robertson was pleased: ‘People were talking more about the Empire’s ability to produce, rather than about its ability to pay in pounds and pence. After the blitz really began I one day became aware … that not once had I heard anyone say a hundred-thousand-pound building had been hit. The British seemed, at least for the time being, to have lost their sense of property.’29 Nor that the left-inclined Farson should quote a bombed-out London woman as saying with a smile, ‘When you’ve nothing left, you have nothing to worry about, have you?’ – and believe that she meant it.30 It was less predictable that Walter Graebner of Time magazine would look calmly upon the movement of the British towards a form of socialism: for them ‘Winning the war – keeping Hitler from setting his bloody feet on British shores’, was ‘infinitely more important than pounds, shillings or pence’, and post-war education would probably be more egalitarian, with the power of the old school tie broken.31
It now seems rather amazing that James B. (‘Scotty’) Reston of the New York Times, contemplating the bombing of the City of London, Britain’s financial centre, nightly from his office in Fleet Street, and admiring the unscathed dome of St Paul’s, should be moved to moralise about ‘the utter uselessness of money under certain circumstances. What was the use of it, piled row upon row in the vaults of Throgmorton Street? What was the good of it until it was finally brought out and turned into guns and tanks and airplanes for the Cockneys to use?’32
When Ralph Ingersoll of PM was in London (for only two weeks) ‘a cynic’ remarked to him that ‘the most terrible thing that could happen to England was to have the Germans stop bombing it’. Ingersoll thought there was some truth in this. As long as bombs fell, snobbery would continue to break down: ‘A nation cannot sleep wherever it finds itself at night, and with whomever happens to lie down next to it and not have things happen to its class distinctions.’33 One might add to this familiar point the less well-worn one that US journalists could not endure bombing night after night, with all the strain and risk entailed, without undergoing some personal changes in attitude. Perhaps Reston’s ideas about money represent such a genuine change of opinion.
The US press were courted by Britain’s élite of rich and powerful people. The democratic Robertson did not spurn the hospitality of the famous society hostess Sybil Colefax. (He told the world admiringly that she shared a shelter every night with her maids and several working-class people.) Even the austere Murrow mixed on occasion in upper-class circles. American broadcasters to Britain – Raymond Gram Swing, Dorothy Thompson – were received when they came like visiting royalty. David Bowes Lyon, the Queen’s brother, gave an afternoon party for the US press (favouring youngsters and leaving out such a star as Quentin Reynolds) so they could meet his sister, real royalty. Ingersoll was convinced that the friendly staff in the MoI were not trying to sell him anything, and was shown the secret Home Intelligence reports on morale, the ‘frankness’ of which ‘amazed’ him. Interviews with Churchill and Bevin were laid on for him.34
The US press stayed in comfortable hotels or well-appointed flats. But this did not mean they were exempt from Blitz. One study points out that the homes of six reporters working for news agencies (INS, UP, AP) were wrecked by bombs.35 Fred Bate was seriously injured in December 1940 while preparing a broadcast in the NBC office. The nearby CBS office was also demolished: this was one of three occasions when Murrow had to find new premises for that reason. He himself had been in Broadcasting House a few days earlier when a bomb falling on the building had killed six people. And so on. Sevareid found that he literally could not Take It and left before the end of 1940. Sheean left also. When he came back in April and met Murrow, Ben Robertson and Bill Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News in Claridge’s, he was shocked at their haggard appearance. Murrow had aged visibly. ‘The epic days were over, they told him, public morale near rock bottom.’36
John MacVane of NBC, who had, aged only twenty-eight, to take charge after Bate’s injury, recalled later:
Life seemed very tenuous indeed … London’s ordeal was an easy story to write – one could almost have written it by sitting in a basement night and day and reading the papers – but we broadcasters had so identified ourselves with the people of London that we did not feel we could shirk any of their experiences … Our country was neutral, but we ourselves, for that reason, had to prove to our British colleagues and the people with whom we lived that we were willing to share their lives completely.37
The outcome of the press corps’ experience was all that the MoI could have wished. The exactness with which US reporting by and large suited British propaganda requirements is exemplified by Life’s coverage of the
early days of Blitz. The magazine featured a classic image of St Paul’s riding the flames (by John Topham) and deftly identified the Nazi raiders as child murderers. On 9 September it featured a two-year-old baby, Margaret Curtis, with a bandaged head and ‘about to die’, whose mother was said to have been killed shielding her from a bomb with her body. (Actually, both survived, but so did the impression made by the story.) Two weeks later Life’s cover photograph was by Cecil Beaton, the brilliant English artist: it showed Eileen Dunne, a little girl in hospital, ‘AIR RAID VICTIM’, nursing a doll or teddy and staring poignantly at the camera.38
The British public were not ungrateful. They made one American pressman and broadcaster a national hero – set him alongside Priestley. This was not Murrow, frequently though he was heard on British airwaves. It was Quentin Reynolds, whose book, The Wounded Don’t Cry was very popular in 1941, from which one infers that the British thought that Reynolds had described their Blitz behaviour truthfully.
Though he mingled frequently with the rest of the press corps, seems to have been popular with it, and was certainly regarded as a leading personality, Reynolds in some respects was an odd man out. His background was not like that of the men who had grown up with radio and become polished professionals, or the experienced news reporters and foreign correspondents. One of a family of seven from long-established Irish Catholic stock, he was born, in 1900, in the Bronx, and had a voice to prove it. (In spite of his Irish blood, he despised Eire’s neutrality and seems to have found the British Empire a less bothersome entity than did most US pressmen.) The son of a high-school principal, he graduated at Brown University. But in his senior year he secretly played professional football for the New York Giants; as a sports writer, down on his luck during the depression, he was recommended to William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service by the great Damon Runyon. INS sent him to Berlin in 1933 when their feature writer was expelled by the Nazis. A particularly revolting display of Nazi anti-Semitism in the streets of Nuremberg alienated him from Germany’s new rulers, though he had a certain respect for their youth policy. His first article for Colliers Weekly Magazine – one of 384 over fifteen years – was about German youth and militarism and was called ‘Trained to Take It’: he did not doubt later that the Germans, if bombed, would Take It. Colliers soon hired him full-time – for the next six years he wrote for the magazine about almost everything except the rise of fascism. But in March 1940 it decided to send him to Europe, at which point, applying for a visa for Germany, he found that the Nazis had blacklisted him. Wearing the uniform of an ‘American War Correspondent’, Reynolds saw action on the French Front in May and then drove to Bordeaux through the hordes of refugees: thence he arrived in London.