by Andrew Marr
At Savoy Hill, Reith grew his staff from four to 350 in a single year, ordering them to work twelve-hour days and demonstrating the energy and drive that was always his redeeming feature. New broadcasting stations began to open round the country. Studios were built, concerts broadcast and famous writers welcomed to the coal fire-heated, tobacco-scented offices, close to Westminster. But how close? Reith was taking over a new company with many enemies, including those who thought it should be run directly by the government. The press barons were mostly against it, even though the BBC was banned from saying anything controversial or from gathering news itself – it had to rely on news agencies to provide summaries, which would be broadcast late enough not to rival newspaper sales. The Post Office, though it was one of the sponsors of the new outfit, wanted to snaffle as much of the licence fee as possible. More generally, everyone was wrestling with two questions: what was broadcasting for, and who should control it? From the first, Reith had a clear answer to each. It was for education, culture, information and the higher arts; it was, therefore, a public service, not mere commercial entertainment.
Reith was firmly against giving people what they wanted. For one thing, they didn’t know what they wanted. For another, they certainly did not know what they needed. Get broadcasting right, though, and it would produce a ‘more intelligent and enlightened electorate’ and strengthen democracy. When it came to the second question – who should control broadcasting? – Reith’s enthusiasm for democracy faltered. That was easy: John Reith should control it. When the government decided a powerful new committee should be formed to investigate the future of broadcasting, Reith got himself onto it. He wooed and won over politicians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, newspaper owners and others. He tried and failed to get the Budget and other political speeches broadcast, but he did get election broadcasts from the party leaders in 1924 on air, and he broadcast George V’s opening speech at the Wembley British Empire Exhibition the same year – 10 million people are supposed to have heard it.
Remarkably quickly, the commercial owners of the BBC were fading into the background and Reith was seizing the stage, a national figure already. He understood early on that if broadcasting was special, he would need to oust the previous owners and get the BBC established as a new kind of body, a national corporation. The BBC would thus be completely different from the maelstrom of American broadcasters, with their adverts and cheap music, and from the government-run stations of Europe. The physical expressions of this new power were the broadcasting stations being built everywhere, to bring good reception to the main cities of Britain. The BBC broadcast more music than anything else: there was great argument about whether it should be mostly opera, classical, jazz or dance. There were talks, too. Told he was not allowed to be controversial on the airwaves and that politics and religion were banned subjects, George Bernard Shaw sensibly replied that they were the only things worth talking about. Women’s Hour and Children’s Hour were early programmes that lasted. There were gentle comic turns. Sport was mostly kept off the air to calm the newspaper owners, but there were outside broadcasts from factories, nightingale-filled woods and Covent Garden opera house.
As important as any early decision was the tone of voice. It is entirely true that early BBC announcers were obliged to wear a dinner jacket and bow tie, though this was partly because they would also be announcing concerts in which the musicians would be similarly dressed. But Reith chose public-school and university-educated men to set his tone. He set up a committee under the Poet Laureate to advise on what he firmly called ‘the correct pronunciation of the English tongue’. Though regional accents were acceptable in comedy performances, Reith wanted a single, standard English to be heard, and thus copied everywhere. About the only regular soft Scottish voice heard was his own, when he commandeered the microphone himself. Thus there spread across Britain what was first called ‘public-school English’ and later ‘received pronunciation’, or simply ‘BBC English’. A country rich in accent and dialect, now listening in its millions every night to the voices of the metropolitan elite, would quickly become blander and duller, its variety smoothed out. Everywhere people must have listened to their own voices and asked anew, ‘Am I speaking proper?’ Samuel Johnson would have been delighted.
Eckersley, always the freer spirit, suggested that broadcasting should also mean regional variation, and different radio stations, as well as very local radio, broadcasting from schools, local news and local speeches. In this he was far ahead of his time. In the 1920s, local broadcasting was virtually snuffed out, and Reith’s local stations became mere hubs for London, where another inquiry into broadcasting was set up. This time, Reith was so powerful and confident he did not even need to be on it; a British Broadcasting Corporation, with an effective monopoly, was duly recommended. The BBC received its first Royal Charter for the beginning of 1927, a year or so off, with the government keeping tight powers of control. But first it had to weather a storm big enough to sink the whole project, the General Strike of 1926. And this revealed much about the limitations, as well as the strengths, of the BBC.
The strike could hardly have come at a more sensitive time for the new institution, whose revised status had been agreed but not implemented. The government had the legal power simply to take the BBC over and order it to broadcast straightforward propaganda. Churchill, who first met Reith during the strike, wanted just that. With the newspapers silenced by the strikers and only Churchill’s British Gazette putting the government view, one can see why. Radio was in a position of influence far beyond anything imaginable a few years earlier. It was only after a tense cabinet committee meeting, to which Reith had been invited, that the idea was dropped. Luckily for Reith, he was close to Baldwin, who turned out to be an early and talented political broadcaster. Reith’s own politics, if judged through his diaries, could be wild. Like so many assertive public figures at the time he admired Mussolini and occasionally despaired of democracy. Later he expressed savage admiration for Hitler too. Yet his political behaviour during the strike was subtle. He helped Baldwin in his broadcasting, actually inserting words for the prime minister about being a man of peace – ‘I am longing and working and praying for peace, but I will not surrender the safety and security of the British Constitution.’ Yet he was no friend of the coal-mine owners. He did not allow Labour politicians and strike leaders to broadcast but managed to keep propaganda attacks on them off the air too. The BBC during the strike was pro-Parliament but never hawkish, and it reported trade union claims in its news. It soon had five daily bulletins, considered by wary newspapermen to be, by the end of the dispute, worryingly professional and generally fair. Reith succumbed to government pressure only when the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to broadcast an appeal for a compromise deal and a peace plan. Baldwin thought this was a bad idea, and Reith buckled. He kept the Archbishop away from the microphone until the strike was over – which was pretty craven.
The strike tells us a lot about Reith’s BBC, and thus ‘Reithian values’. Trade unionists and some leading Labour people were angry that it had not given them a proper voice. Nor had it. On the other hand, Reith had managed to stop a straightforward takeover by panicky or gung-ho politicians. By ensuring that the BBC sounded reassuring, and somehow part of the establishment, he stopped it becoming Churchill’s mouthpiece, which would have ruined its reputation in the twenties just as surely as being Churchill’s loud-hailer helped raise its reputation in the forties. Meanwhile, for the first time, everyone was turning to the radio to find out what was happening.
The shape of broadcasting was now clear, and would remain so until the shake-up of commercial television after the Second World War. The BBC would be wholly dominant, part of the establishment though not part of government. It would be rather dull, highly respectable, cultured but not excessively so, and intensely centralist – rather like Britain itself. Right from the start, some hated it for being too conservative, for being too snooty, for being too ‘London’
. But most took to it, willingly paying for a licence even though there was no realistic chance of being caught and prosecuted for not doing so, and following the new programmes night after night. Radio in turn began to shape the tone of the country, even its sense of itself. At the end of 1926 the Archbishop, turning the other cheek, reflected that millions of people were listening constantly to the BBC: ‘I hear of loud speakers now in constant use all over England – in hospital wards, in union workhouses, in factory dining-rooms, in clubs, in the servants’ halls of the great houses, and even among the workers in the fields.’113 The sound of the country had changed. And Eckersley, the exuberant pioneer, the boyish singer and engineer from that Essex hut? He was fired by Reith for getting divorced.
Dreaming of an Old Britain
The desire to escape into an earlier England has been a theme of the country’s literary history but it seems to have been particularly intense in the twenty years after the First World War. The great outpouring of anti-war literature did not happen until the late twenties and early thirties, when the immediate effects of the trauma were beginning to wear off. When it came, books like Sassoon’s ‘Fox-Hunting Man’ and ‘Infantry Officer’ memoirs, or Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, were not only records of the horror of the trenches, but also love letters to Olde England, ‘Olde’ in this respect meaning pre-1914 and largely rural. There were nostalgia-soaked travel writers such as E. V. Morton, who was hugely popular at this time, so that the hunt for a lost past could become the hunt for lost paths and forgotten villages – a hunt fed from the thirties by the finely illustrated Shell guides and a glorious period of richly coloured travel posters published by the railway companies and seaside councils. Across much of bestselling literature an aching rural nostalgia is visible, flavoured or sauced in different ways. So, for instance, in the country-house novels of Evelyn Waugh, the sauce was satire; in the hugely popular crime novels of Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers, the spice is human darkness, a traditional interest in evil lurking behind the clipped yew hedges; in the English novels of P. G. Wodehouse the flavouring is addictive farce; and in Barbara Cartland it was sugar. In each case, though, the default setting was a dense, leafy greenness in which the disappearing hierarchy of squires, curates and yokels remained intact. When, at the end of the thirties, war broke out again, government propagandists and BBC talk-writers would be able to turn instantly to this manufactured and well-understood notion of what ‘Britain’ – in reality, mostly England – was all about.
D. H. Lawrence was hardly alone in identifying the move from natural life to urban falseness as a central dilemma for modern mankind, and in serious literature it was a general theme in these years. Among the great novelists of the time was John Cowper Powys, whose tales of Dorset, particularly Wolf Solent of 1929 and A Glastonbury Romance of 1933, are epic in scope and brim with mysticism and nature-worship verging on animism. Scotland produced in Lewis Grassic Gibbon her finest twentieth-century novelist: his trilogy ‘A Scots Quair’ is suffused with a love of the soil and history. For the poet Edwin Muir, brought up in Orkney, the jolt from natural Eden to urban Hell was as sharp as any of the industrial contrasts in D. H. Lawrence’s life (he, of course, going in the opposite direction insofar as he could). Muir, later a savage critic of the spew and squalor and unfairness of industrialism, famously explained that he had been born before the industrial revolution: ‘and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901.’
For the first time in British history it is reasonable to link ‘high’ or literary writers with popular bestselling novelists. It was the great age of the lending libraries and the first age of the paperback. And it is through the success of this simple technology that the British common reader begins to escape rural nostalgia and plunge into the politics of the modern world. Paperbacks had been around for decades, as ‘railway novels’ and penny dreadfuls in Britain, or ‘dime novels’ in the United States, universally regarded as low, lurid and trashy – not ‘proper books’. The first, albeit brief, experiment in bringing out good books in paperback format happened in Germany in 1931 with Albatross Books. But the first successful experiment occurred in Britain thanks to a young publisher, Allen Lane, who had been working at his uncle’s old company, the staid Bodley Head. He said later that he had been visiting Agatha Christie’s country home in 1934 and, on the way back by train, found nothing worthwhile reading at the station. So he decided to print high-quality books in a uniform way, with sober covers, priced at 6d – (two and a half pence in today’s degraded currency). Whether consciously or not referring back to the dead Albatross, he called his books Penguins. A Bodley Head artist, an amateur, drew the cheerful waddling penguin picture and a publishing revolution began. The experiment was hanging in the balance until Woolworth’s placed an order for 63,000 copies, leading in 1936 to the setting up of Penguin Books.
There were many revolutionary things about Penguins: they were cheap, well printed and little larger than a cigarette packet. And Lane deliberately mingled the categories of serious and popular writing: his first authors included such noted highbrows as André Maurois and George Bernard Shaw; but also Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. A mental barrier was broken down. Without him, the notion of the high-quality fictional bestseller, celebrated today in endless literary prizes and the books pages of newspapers, might never have taken off in quite the same way. As the war approached, Penguin Specials began to warn of the rising German threat and during the war Penguins were sent across the world to wherever British soldiers were fighting. Lane’s success was followed by a spate of book clubs, including Victor Gollancz’s communist-influenced Left Book Club, which published many of the most famous political tracts of the time, such as the work of Orwell and Ellen Wilkinson. Much of the mental climate of the British before the Second World War was formed through the paperback revolution, including the high-minded leftism which would break through politically in 1945. Yet we should not forget that paperback books, and all the pamphlets of the age, were only a small part of the written-word culture: this was also a great newspaper period, when serious writers were being used as regular commentators and when the violent political disputes of the era were fought out in angry editorials. Politicians, notably Churchill himself, earned large sums for regular articles in publications ranging from the Daily Mail to the News of the World, while the Daily Mirror was undergoing the transformation into an easy-to-read left-of-centre paper which would give it such unparalleled influence during the war. In short, this was so long ago that writers still mattered to the general public.
The Great Outdoors
If in the early twenties you happened to be mingling with the crowds at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, listening to the ‘British fascisti’ or the communists, or the religious cranks, you might have noticed a tall man with a high domed head, dramatically swathed in the black-and-white habit of a Dominican friar, a pair of clumpy big boots on his feet and a very arresting Irish voice reaching through the hubbub. Father Vincent McNabb had an alarmingly direct manner. If you fed or entertained him, he would throw himself down and kiss your feet. Week after week he turned up at Speakers’ Corner, or anywhere else he could get a hearing, to explain to the crowds that they must give up their insane lives in the city and return to live simply with nature in communes and holiness. He was preaching a version of the ‘good life’, which in the twenties had its own name, organization and celebrities. ‘Distributism’ had originated with influential Catholic writers such as Hilaire Belloc, who had published The Servile State before the war, and G. K. Chesterton, the obese short-story writer, novelist and essayist to be found stamping round the watering holes of Fleet Street in a cape and flamboyantly large hat, pretending to be a latter-day Dr Johnson. In 1926 the pair founded the Distributist League.
Their creed might have been outlandish (perhaps just landish) but its earthy belief in a return to the soil, opposing the grand theories of communism, was popular for a while. The twenties are the years not only of flappers, cocktails and angry veterans, but also of ‘let’s build a new world’, a great boiling vat of optimism, dottiness and fearless rethinking.
Distributists certainly looked different. They often wore hand-woven clothes, shapeless and woolly and coloured with muddy vegetable dyes, and sported hand-made sandals. Their spiritual homes were in the new ‘garden cities’ and their caricature enthusiasm was pottery. McNabb and his followers hoped for a full-scale revival of Catholic England, a repudiation of the Reformation and the industrial age. The most famous commune-founding Distributist was Eric Gill. One of the best-known public artists of the time, he was responsible for the sculptures of Prospero and Ariel above the BBC’s new Broadcasting House in Langham Place. The BBC governors, viewing the naked Ariel from behind a tarpaulin as Gill was working, insisted he make the penis and testicles smaller. He was also the creator of the ‘Stations of the Cross’ in Westminster Cathedral, the famous Leeds University War Memorial, and typefaces still used by a huge number of organizations, from newspapers to shops. Gill wore a roughly belted smock and stockings and lived in a series of communes, at Ditchling Common in Sussex, in the Welsh mountains above Abergavenny and in the Chilterns. With his beard, spectacles, flow of drawings and writings attacking industrialism and city life, he was a well-known figure, something of a sage. He was also, however, sexually omnivorous, engaging in endless affairs, committing incest with his daughters and even assaulting a dog. If we play the Virginia Woolf game with the index to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Gill, we find listed under sexual tendencies references to his ‘bestiality, casual liaisons, droit de seigneurism, homosexuality, incest, ménage a trois, New Women (attraction to), phallic fixation, pubescent girls (attraction to), uxoriousness, voyeurism and women in uniform (attraction to)’. He was a busy fellow. Gill’s frankness about sex, his innocent wide-eyed attitude to religion, and his homeliness can all be found too in D. H. Lawrence. The novelist was, by comparison with Gill, repressed about sex, but there is in Gill’s writings, if not his scandalous life, a thorough questioning and rejecting of material bourgeois culture which parallels Lawrence. The urge to return to basic instincts, to strip away the clothing of urban civilization, can be found time and again in the Britain of the twenties. Gill continued throughout his life as an important emblem of Catholic living in Britain, accepted as a spokesman for holy simplicity by senior priests, including the original role-model for Chesterton’s Father Brown; he lived long enough to back the Republicans in Spain against Franco.