After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Moreover, once the bombing began, and civilian lives were in continual danger, Haw-Haw could torment the population with punctiliously accurate predictions of what would be hit next: Fry’s factory in Surrey, Bradford Grammar School – specific towns and individual buildings would be mentioned in his lilting, perhaps psychic tones, as targets for aerial destruction. Chairmany Calling! Chairmany Calling! He moved from being joke-object to a figure who was feared; feared, because believed.

  If the National Socialists in Germany were happy to make use of William Joyce’s very considerable rhetorical and persuasive skills, the Italian Fascists were less certain that their cause would be helped by the backing of Ezra Pound. He went to Rome to ask the minister of popular culture, Alessandro Pavolini, the supremo of all propaganda activity, to allow him to broadcast to America. ‘Well the Ministro looked at me careful [sic] and said in perlite [sic] words to the effect that: Ez, or probably he said “Mio caro Signore”, if you think you can use OUR air to monkey in America’s INTERNAL politics you got another one comin’.’ Later, he would say: ‘It took me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wangling etc to GET HOLD of their microphone.’8

  What the Italians saw in the 55-year-old Pound was probably what his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania saw when they threw ‘Lily Pound’ in the Frog Pond, or what pre-First World War editors and hostesses in ‘Deah Ole Lunnon’ saw when he swanked about in his bright green trousers made from billiards-table cloth: namely a buffoon who might, or might not, be a genius. Severer critics might suggest that a movement which revered Mussolini as a revival of the Caesars would not be too fussy about an element of buffoonery entering public rhetoric, but even the Italian Fascists drew the line somewhere; and the quality of Pound’s broadcasts, when he was eventually allowed to make them, suggested that Alessandro Pavolini’s initial impulse to refuse Ole Ezra a slot on the airwaves was the right one. His attacks on ‘Jewry, all Jewry, and nothing but Jewry’, and on the president of his country as ‘Stinkie Roosenstein’ or ‘Franklin D. Frankfurter Jewsfeld’, are among the most puerile rants of anti-Semitism ever aired. For years now, he had been brooding on the evils of Usury. The broadcasts gave him the opportunity to share some of his economic ideas with the Americans as well as to praise such figures as ‘Ole Pete Pétain’. Luigi Viullari of the Institute of Overseas Cultural Relations opined, two months after Pound’s first broadcast, that he was insane.9 ‘EUROPE CALLING! EZRA POUND SPEAKING!’ he would bellow, and then he would clown about, putting on an extraordinary, exaggerated accent – ‘Mebbe in time the Amurrican cawledge boys will git roun’t’ readin’ me or Céline, or some of the livin’ authors …’ He would tell the would-be soldiers of ‘Mister Rooo-se-velt’s dee-term-in-ation to starve the French in unoccupied France’. There were routine insults to ‘clever kikes runnin’ ALL our communication system’; there was the assertion that Britain had become a ‘Jew-owned deer-park with tea-rooms’, whereas the Nazis had ‘wiped out bad manners in Germany’.

  When he was arrested and accused of treason, Pound claimed that he had never incited US troops, once America had entered the war, to mutiny or revolt. He also claimed, probably accurately, that he knew nothing of the fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe. But though he did not openly incite the troops to mutiny, it cannot have done much for an American serviceman to hear complaints ‘that any Jew in the White House should send American kids to die for the private interests of the scum of the English earth and the still lower dregs of the Levantine’ (19 February 1942), nor, a few weeks later: ‘For the United States to be making war on Italy and on Europe is just plain damn nonsense, and every native-born American of American stock knows that it is plain downright damn nonsense. And for this state of things Franklin Roosevelt is more than any other man responsible.’10

  Pound and Haw-Haw represent the political extremes; but they also serve as demonstrations of the extraordinary reversals which are occasioned by wars. Who, meeting the young Ezra Pound in the company of Yeats or Gaudier-Brzeska or Henry James in Edwardian London could ever have predicted that in a coarser and more violent time, thirty years hence, he would be spouting such vulgarities, such violence, such cruelty, down the airwaves to his fellow Americans? Then again, who, having heard the broadcasts, and witnessed his buffooneries, could have believed him capable of the extraordinary poems which came from him after his arrest? But this lies in the future.

  There was another Edwardian literary survival lured most unwisely to the radio-mike during the Second World War. In a postwar preface to Joy in the Morning, the novel he began in Le Touquet before the Germans invaded France, and completed during his internment by the Nazis, P. G. Wodehouse had some very interesting things to say about the contrast between the universe of his own sun-filled Edwardian imagination and the world into which he, and his creations, so incongruously survived. ‘I suppose one thing that makes these drones of mine seem creatures of a dead past is that with the exception of Oofy Prosser, the club millionaire, they are genial and good-tempered, friends of all the world.’ This was P. G. Wodehouse’s own sin, when he was arrested by the Germans. ‘All that happened as far as I was concerned, was that I was strolling on the lawn with my wife one morning, when she lowered her voice and said, “Don’t look now, but here comes the German army”. And there they were, a fine body of men, carrying machine guns.’11 After a year in an internment camp, the former lunatic asylum at Tost, Wodehouse was released, and taken to Berlin, where his wife Ethel and Wonder, a favourite Pekinese, were waiting for him at the Adlon, the grandest hotel. Wodehouse was not released on condition that he broadcast from a German radio station: his release came as a result of well-intentioned petitions by Americans resident in Germany before the United States was at war with that country and pointing out that he was nearly sixty years of age, when he would have been released anyway. Asked by the German authorities to deliver some broadcasts to his American fans, Wodehouse was gullible enough to accept the offer, and to give utterance to jolly paragraphs like the one just quoted about the Nazis being a fine body of men.

  Humourless people have scoured Wodehouse’s works for evidence of Nazi sympathy. It is only a little less heavy-handed to defend him by describing his ludicrous Sir Roderick Spode and the Black Shorts as a ‘satire’ on Mosley’s Blackshirts. The skilful propagandists in Berlin knew that the value of Wodehouse to them was precisely that he was not political. ‘If old P.G. can make jokes about the Third Reich, then perhaps the Allied Propagandists had been making too much of the innate evil of the Hitlerite regime?’ That was the corrupting power of Wodehouse’s broadcasts. The fact that he only did them for a week suggests that their essential good nature was as baffling to the Germans as to the Americans, British and French who allowed themselves to be worked up into paroxysms of hate against this innocent and agreeable man. Malcolm Muggeridge, the intelligence officer sent to investigate Wodehouse in Paris in 1944, wisely noted that ‘he is a man singularly ill-fitted to live in a time of ideological conflict, having no feeling of hatred about anyone, and no very strong views about anything. In the behaviour of his fellow-humans, whoever they may be, he detects nothing more pernicious than a kind of sublime idiocy.’12 At the time of the broadcasts, the minister of information in London, Duff Cooper, had considered the possibility of Wodehouse being apprehended after the war and even hanged. The Daily Mirror’s columnist ‘Cassandra’, William Connor, had broadcast a denuciation – ‘honour pawned to the Nazis … thirty pieces of silver’ – which Dorothy L. Sayers rightly said ‘was as ugly a thing as ever was made in Germany’.13 A. A. Milne, John Buchan and others all clamoured their hatred of poor Wodehouse. With patriotism was a good admixture of envy in these writers as they denounced an author whose books sold so many more than theirs.

  When Duff Cooper arrived in Paris at the end of the war to become ambassador, Muggeridge tried to make him see that there were differing levels of reality. ‘Could we be sure, for instance, that Hitler’s ravings and Churchi
ll’s rhetoric and Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms would seem more real to posterity than Blandings Castle? I rather doubted it.’14 Such talk, at such a date, suggests a mind peculiarly able to rise above the weird fever of hatred and mass hysteria into which wars drag even rational beings. The most interesting thing about the affair of the Wodehouse broadcasts is the extent to which it revealed so many of Wodehouse’s fellow Britons as peevish, vindictive, bloodthirsty (the calls for his death from such supposedly intelligent lawyers as Quintin Hogg were quite serious) and utterly humourless. All these qualities are ones which some British people like to assume are the special faults of Germans or Russians. Some people meditating upon the 1940s like to speculate about how the British would have behaved in the event of a Nazi victory: which British politicians would have collaborated with the Nazis, and so on. The Wodehouse affair shows something much less pleasant than that somehow half-comforting fantasy (half-comforting because the German victory did not take place, and buried inside the speculation is the smug belief that most British people would not have behaved as so many Belgians, Dutch, French and Austrians did when their countries were overrun). What the Wodehouse story shows is that you did not have to be a Nazi to be downright nasty.

  The war had begun, as far as almost everyone in Britain was concerned, by listening in.

  I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Number Ten Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note, stating that, unless the British Government heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany …

  Chamberlain’s words must be the flattest announcement in the history of the world of so highly dramatic an event. After the conquest of Norway by the Germans, paper shortages in Britain made newspaper production very difficult. Broadsheets were reduced to four pages, and much the best way of keeping up with world events was by listening to the news on the wireless. It was on the wireless, in the first Christmas of the war, that the king was heard quoting from a poem called ‘God Knows’ which he had found in a commonplace book: ‘I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year: “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied: “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”‘

  Because of his stammer, the king could hardly finish the lines, and they came over as ‘Anona Way’ – somehow it is all the more affecting for that. The hitherto unknown author of the poem, Minnie Louise Haskins, a retired university lecturer, suddenly found her poems being reprinted, and they sold 43,000 copies.

  Listening to the news on the wireless became a national ritual. Godfrey Talbot, a news sub-editor at the BBC who went on to become a household name as a war correspondent, recollected that ‘in public houses people didn’t order a drink, or take a drink, but huddled to the end of the bar where the loudspeaker was. In millions of homes up and down these islands, and elsewhere too, nothing happened. The records of water companies, telephone companies, gas suppliers, electricity suppliers show the demand going down, down to nothing. Nobody went to spend a penny, nobody put the kettle on, nobody did anything but listen to this man who was so confident that his confidence somehow oozed out of the loudspeakers.’15

  Churchill’s attitude to the BBC had always been hostile. The Corporation had defied Baldwin and Churchill during the General Strike of 1926 by carrying statements from the strike leaders; they had only asked Churchill to speak four times during his ‘wilderness years’ in the 1930s. The Director General, Sir John Reith, loathed him. When Churchill became Prime Minister, he sacked Reith (Old Wuthering Heights as he called him) as a Minister of Information and made him into a Minister of Works and Public Buildings. He told Reith that he saw the BBC as ‘the enemy within the gates, doing more harm than good’. This was because the BBC had refused to compromise in its principle of telling the truth on the news, whether that news was good or bad. ‘It seems to me’, said R. T. Clark, the Home Service’s news editor, ‘that the only way to strengthen the morale of the people whose morale is worth strengthening is to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.’16 Later, Churchill referred to the BBC as ‘one of the major neutrals’. In his early days as Prime Minister he had tried to abolish the Corporation’s independence by making it a branch of the Ministry of Information presided over by the figure of Duff Cooper. The M of I, model for Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984, was a national joke. Cooper had been responsible for Cassandra’s radio denunciation of P. G. Wodehouse, insisting against the wishes of the Corporation (whose lawyers considered it libellous)17 that it should go ahead; and it was after this moral fiasco that Cooper was replaced by Churchill’s PPS Brendan Bracken.

  Little as Churchill approved of the BBC, his broadcast voice was, in the memory of millions of men and women, a phenomenon of prodigious power. The speeches were all the more powerful for being only occasional. On 9 February 1941, for example, listeners heard him say: ‘Five months have passed since I spoke to the British nation and Empire in the broadcast.’ His voice, when it came, was heard after the nine o’clock news. The highly imitable distinctiveness of its half-slurred, defiant, aristocratic tones was never forgotten by the generation who heard them in those circumstances. In silenced pubs or blacked-out rooms, men and women hung on every one of Churchill’s words. In July 1940, for instance: ‘Here in this City a refuge which enshrines the title deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen – we await undismayed the impending assault … We shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley, we may show mercy – we shall ask for none.’18 Or in 1941, having visited the bombed cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff, Bristol and Swansea:

  The British nation is stirred and moved as it has never been at any time in its long eventful, famous history, and it is no hackneyed trope of speech to say that they mean to conquer or die. What a triumph the life of these battered cities is, over the worst that fire and bomb can do. What a vindication of the civilized and decent way of living we have been trying to work for and work towards in our Island. What a proof of the virtues of free institutions. What a test of the quality of our local authorities, and of institutions and customs so steadily built. This ordeal by fire has even in a certain sense exhilarated the manhood and womanhood of Britain. The sublime but also terrible and sombre experiences and emotions of the battlefield which for centuries has been reserved for the soldiers and sailors, are now shared, for good or ill, by the entire population. All are proud to be under the fire of the enemy. Old men, little children, the crippled veterans of former wars, the ordinary hard-pressed citizen or subject of the King, as he likes to call himself, the sturdy workmen who swing the hammers or load the ships; skilful craftsmen; the members of every kind of ARP service, are proud to feel that they stand in line together with our fighting men, when one of the greatest of causes is being fought out, as fought out it will be, to the end. This is indeed the grand heroic period of our history, and the light of glory shines on all.19

  The power of the spoken word was demonstrated in a different way by the Yorkshire novelist J. B. Priestley, whose voice first became familiar to people reading his novel Let the People Sing, and who subsequently broadcast talks. His description of the Dunkirk evacuation was something which stayed in many memories – ‘Yes, those Brighton Belles and Brighton Queens left that innocent foolish world of theirs to sail into the inferno, to defy bombs, shells, magnetic mines, torpedoes, machine-gun fire, to rescue our soldiers.’ Apart from the words, which many found impressive, there was novelty in the accent. Until the war, there had been a strict rule at the BBC that the only people allowed to broadcas
t with regional accents were comedians.20 The BBC had an advisory panel to guide its wireless announcers in the mysteries of English pronunciation. When consulted about the word sausage, for example, one panel-member, Rose Macaulay, was insistent that the correct pronunciation was Sorsidge. (Well, how else would one pronounce it?)

  J. B. Priestley did not merely say Soss-ij; he said Bath not Bahth and Castle not Cahstle. The government complained about the contents of his talks, which, in his Yorkshire accent, appeared to be advocating left-wing politics. After the second series of talks, entitled Postscript, Priestley, at the insistence of the Ministry of Information, was confined to the overseas service. It was at Priestley’s suggestion that the BBC hired the Yorkshire character actor Wilfred Pickles to join the team of newsreaders on 17 November 1941.21 Heard today, Priestley sounds positively patrician, and even Wilfred Pickles sounds much more BBC than he sounds Yorkshire. But a small revolution had occurred. In order to win the war, the country must unite. Churchill himself in his first broadcast as Prime Minister had said: ‘I have formed an administration of men and women of every party, and from every point of view. We have differed and quarrelled in the past, but now one bond unites us all: to wage war until victory is won and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony may be.’