Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  Governments knew the power of radio to communicate and to connect with the public, and world leaders increasingly used it to talk directly to their people and to the rest of the world. The voices of political leaders heard on radio had an immediacy, a force and a personal appeal beyond that of the printed word, and created a new dynamic for leaders in shaping the events of the time. Radio was a powerful tool for persuasion and propaganda, as well as a means to inform and entertain.

  In its first year, the ABC appointed a London representative, Arthur Mason, who sourced music, cultural and entertainment programs from the BBC, arranged visits by musicians and talks by leading figures. Through the London office and the broadcast relationship with the BBC, the ABC broadcast talks by British political leaders, from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who apologised for not having the time to ‘put some polishing touches’ on his speech, to Labour leader George Lansbury, who gave an ‘ardently socialistic confession of faith’, and leading Conservative politician Lord Lloyd, who argued for longer air-time.

  Efforts were made to attract leading thinkers and literary figures such as George Bernard Shaw, not always with great success.

  Dear Sir, Mr Bernard Shaw asks me to say that as he has never visited Australia, and has not made any special study of it beyond its remarkable backwardness in dramatic culture. He does not feel qualified to undertake a broadcast, though he is much gratified by the invitation. Yours faithfully, Blanche Patch, Secretary.3

  Within a few years the ABC was rebroadcasting speeches by leaders including Adolph Hitler, Neville Chamberlain, President Roosevelt and others.

  News from Abroad

  In the beginning, the ABC broadcast a limited amount of news from the newspapers. The newspaper proprietors saw radio as a rival and, at first, the ABC was restricted to using two hundred words of news from the papers each day and to broadcasting bulletins well after the papers had hit the streets.

  The ABC appointed its first journalist in 1934 and a federal News editor, Frank Dixon, two years later. Dixon built up a small team of journalists and began to expand the sources of news, though the papers and other constraints still limited the ABC’s news role. Australia’s geography, so far from the centres of world power and sources of news, and the tensions and turbulence of the 1930s, meant that reliable news from overseas was critical to the ABC news service.

  During the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936, the ABC arranged with its London representative, Arthur Mason, for a telegram service of developments and official statements, and the following year it employed an experienced journalist, Hugo Jackson, as a news correspondent in London. Jackson began by taking news from the London newspapers but also provided some coverage of major news events, giving the ABC a limited means of independent newsgathering overseas.

  By 1937, with growing instability in Europe and Japanese aggression in Asia, the ABC engaged freelance correspondents overseas to provide news and commentaries, which were then read by ABC commentators or announcers in the studio. A correspondent in Germany, GH Morison, sent the ABC a monthly airmail letter on German financial and political issues, including Hitler’s mounting campaign against the Jews.

  Persecution of the Jews is once again in full swing in the Third Reich. Not, however, in a form likely to attract the notice of people paying a short visit to Germany whose good opinion is desired. But ruthless in character and unrelenting in rigour all the same, condemning the victims – as it is intended to do – to take flight or suffer slow extermination . . . as no publicity is ever given such matters in Germany, little stir is created in the Reich and only the faintest echoes heard in foreign countries. But the rigour of repression never relaxes. The Jews are leaving Germany as fast as they can. They have no choice. The Hitler regime has firmly resolved that none shall remain.4

  In the Asia-Pacific region, the ABC appointed a string of local correspondents and commentators, including some working on newspapers in the outposts of British imperial or commercial influence. The assistant editor of the North China Daily News in Shanghai, RT Peyton-Griffin, worked under the eye of Japanese military censors to send cables on the Sino-Japanese war.

  BREATHLESSLY AWAITING JAP STATEMENT POLICY VIS A VIS CHINA EXPECTED TODAY – DECIDING WHETHER PEACE STILL POSSIBLE – ALTERNATIVELY FURTHER EXTENSIVE WARFARE . . . STILL UNBELIEVED JAPAN ISSUE FORMAL DECLARATION WAR.5

  An Australian academic, Peter Russo, began writing commentaries for the ABC from Tokyo, where he was a professor in English at the Tokyo University of Commerce.

  Nazi Fifth Column activities in Japan have been intensified since the collapse of France . . . Nazi ‘tourists’ who have been hibernating in Shanghai are now pouring into Japan . . . and promoting whispering campaigns which are beginning to have telling effects.6

  Other correspondents provided commentary and occasional news from elsewhere in the Far East, and the author and journalist, Guenther Stein, mailed the ABC scripts for talks from Hong Kong.

  Hong Kong today is like a beleaguered fortress, at the mercy of Japan’s military. If you approach or leave the British colony by boat, it is likely that you will meet one or two, or even more, of those numerous Japanese men-of-war which are silently moving just outside the narrow limits of British territorial waters . . .7

  The journalist, publisher and radio executive in Manila, Carlos P Romulo, was engaged as the ABC’s correspondent in the Philippines from 1939 until the end of 1941. He later won a Pulitzer Prize for his war reporting and became Philippines foreign secretary and an international statesman. SA Wykes, the editor of the Sunday Times, Singapore, filed reports for the ABC on events in Malaya.

  Europe in 1938 was a continent in crisis – Germany annexed Austria, Czechoslovakia was carved up under the Munich agreement and the Nazis launched the bloody Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews. At the height of the tensions over Czechoslovakia, cables from London kept the ABC supplied with news, and ahead of the newspapers. The ABC General Manager, Charles Moses, wrote to Arthur Mason:

  . . . on a number of occasions your messages arrived many hours ahead of the publication of the same news in the daily papers, and that as a result, we were able to give listeners the latest information the whole time the stations were on air.8

  The London Bureau

  London was a clearing house for world news and news of the worrying events in Europe in the lead up to war. The ABC’s London office and its correspondent, Hugo Jackson, would be a major source of news throughout the war years. Jackson had left London after the First World War to come to Australia, where he became editor of a regional newspaper and then a writer and commentator on foreign affairs for The Age under the by-line of ‘Scrutator’. He returned to London to be closer to events in Europe and to continue his specialist writing on international affairs. When he started work for the ABC, he was on the payroll of AAP, the news agency owned by the Australian newspaper proprietors, and the arrangement was kept secret because of the difficulties between the commission and the newspapers over access to overseas news.

  In 1939 Jackson was reporting to the ABC that events in Europe were moving with such terrible speed that it was not clear where and when the next blow to European security would fall.9 That year the ABC struck a deal with a small news agency, the Exchange Telegraph news service, and obtained a news tape machine for the London office, giving the ABC an independent source of overseas news. An ABC news bureau under Jackson was then set up in cramped quarters in News Chronicle House at 72–78 Fleet Street, in premises sub-let from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

  On 1 September 1939 an urgent cable from the London office arrived at the ABC, with news heard over German radio.

  ACCORDING BERLIN WIRELESS STATION HITLER THIS MORNING ADDRESSED PROCLAMATION GERMAN ARMY – QUOTE – POLISH STATE REFUSED FRIENDLY OFFER ADDRESS THEM APPEALED FORCE ARMS INSTEAD – GERMANS POLAND BRUTALLY PERSECUTED – INTOLERABLE FRONTIER INCIDENTS – IN ORDER END THIS INTOLERABLE MADNESS I NO OTHER CHOICE THAN ANSWER FORCE WITH FORCE.10

/>   Soon afterwards further news came through that Germany had invaded Poland, and two days later on 3 September 1939 Britain and Australia were at war with Germany. With the declaration of war, Hugo Jackson and other staff in the London office were often working at night, to feed news to the ABC’s news bulletins in daytime Australia, and night-time work continued at other times throughout the war. Arthur Mason wrote of the strange world in which the ABC office now worked.

  Blacked-out from the first, London by night is the densest pall of impenetrable gloom ever known . . . Not the tiniest hint of light is allowed to peep from a building, and all of London’s sprawling immensity of mile upon mile of buildings has simply ceased to exist as such by night . . . And a silence as deep as the darkness envelops the city. The roar of London-by-night is lost to us.11

  During the Blitz, staff in the London office who could not get home slept on camp stretchers. On one occasion, the news office was damaged by a German bomb, but no one was hurt, and an emergency news operation was re-established within a few hours.

  Hugo Jackson was ‘one of the most dependable and wide-awake foreign correspondents’, according to an ABC news bulletin compiler in Sydney, and he worked with little let up for much of the war in order to provide news for the ABC’s bulletins. In 1944 the constant work took its toll – Jackson was struck down by influenza and then pneumonia. He recovered, however, and was out of hospital by the time of the Allied invasion of Europe.

  News reports from London and from elsewhere during the war were communicated over cable, using the undersea cable telegraph service; by wireless telegraph such as the Beam Wireless service carried by radio signals; by radiotelephone that transmitted voice by shortwave for connection with a telephone service; and by airmail.

  In addition to its own news from London, the ABC rebroadcast news bulletins from the BBC and took overseas news from other sources such as the British Official Wireless Service, which provided official government news. By 1940, the ABC had six news broadcasts a day, the first at 7.45 am and the last at 11.30 pm, but it also broadcast talks, features and commentary programs. These programs were already using recorded actuality – the real sounds of events and everyday life – and the voices of broadcasters recorded in the field, and the technology to make these recordings away from the studio would soon be used to bring the world of the war directly into the homes of Australians.

  Chapter 2

  THESE INGENIOUS INSTRUMENTS – MOBILE RECORDING UNITS

  The mobile technology that freed radio from the confines of the studio opened up the world to program makers and the audience. The ability to record voices and sounds in the field would revolutionise the work of radio and the reporting of war. ‘These ingenious instruments . . . are going to allow us to speak to you with our own voices’, the Captain of HMAS Perth would later marvel, as he recorded an address from his ship at war in the Mediterranean.

  The radio revolution gathered pace in the 1930s as broadcasters in Europe and North America used new mobile technology for innovative broadcasting to engage audiences, and to extend the reach of newsgathering.

  Mobile broadcast vans brought public events into the homes of millions, transmitting live from the field, and in the United States, much more so than anywhere else, news was a priority. NBC ran a fleet of mobile broadcasting cars and reporters that covered news and major events, and they promoted the speed and mobility of their coverage.

  North. East. West. South . . . N.E.W.S. . . . from all four corners of America, ‘spot news’, ‘eye-witness accounts’, ‘statements of the participants’ . . . are brought to you over NBC coast-to-coast networks with the speed of light. Covering major events at their source is possible because NBC maintains a speed fleet of Mobile Units in key cities, tuned up and ready to ‘take the air’ at a moment’s notice.1

  It was one of NBC’s Mobile Units that broadcast the famous eyewitness account of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, when the German commercial airship caught fire and crashed at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

  But broadcasters were now also using mobile recording studios to record in the field for later broadcast, as well as the broadcast units that transmitted live from the field. The new mobile recording technology, untethered from the radio studio and live broadcast schedules, opened up almost limitless opportunities to create actuality broadcasts of people, places and events, and a new, more intimate experience for the audience that made them feel as if they were there, on the spot. Listeners heard the voices, sounds and descriptions of events at home in Australia, and then, within a few years from the wider world came the actuality and stories of Australians at war.

  In 1935 the BBC launched a Mobile Recording Branch with a single mobile studio in a Morris Commercial van, which was nicknamed, ‘The Flying Squad’.2 In Germany, the RRG (Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft), the national network of broadcasters under the Nazi government, made great use of mobile recording and broadcasting vehicles and by 1938 it had 45 in operation.3 The ABC acquired its first mobile recording unit in 1939. The chrome green, three-ton studio van, based in Sydney, recorded sound onto discs, and was probably the first of its kind in Australia. ABC news coverage at the time was limited and restricted to specific bulletins, and there was no wish for live broadcasts from the field into news programs, but the recording van opened up new possibilities to record sound at the scene of important news events.

  An early test came with a news story on the night of 4 July, when a fierce fire broke out in Kilner’s warehouse in the inner-Sydney suburb of Camperdown. Two hours after the fire broke out, the mobile unit had returned with actuality recordings from the scene, which were broadcast at 11.20 pm. (Haydon Lennard, the journalist on duty who wrote the news bulletin that night, would later become one of the ABC’s war correspondents in the Pacific.) However, at times, the usefulness of the mobile unit on news stories was questionable.

  ‘There seems to be cause for concern regarding the relative immobility of the Mobile Unit,’ wrote the exasperated officer in charge, Dudley Leggett. ‘It appears to be impossible to get it moving at a moment’s notice in the event of an emergency . . . someone would have had to telephone a commentator, the driver, Mr Croot, and then a senior officer of the Postmaster-General’s department. The latter, apparently, would then have to arrange for a car to pick up the mechanics, some of whom, it appears, are not connected by telephone . . . It would be ludicrous in the event of a major catastrophe.’4 Notwithstanding this unpromising early experience of mobile recording units, Leggett would eventually go on to use portable recorders on the battlefronts as a war correspondent for the ABC.

  In practice, the first mobile recording unit was used overwhelmingly by other parts of the ABC, such as Talks, rather than News. The unit travelled around the country recording actuality, interviews and talks at factories, banks, markets and racecourses. It set up microphones on golf courses, on Aboriginal stations and at ocean terminals for the arrival of opera singers and film stars from overseas. For one major recording, the PMG (Postmaster-General’s Department) apparently ran eight miles of landlines down the main drive of a coal mine so that microphones could record the sounds of miners, drilling and explosions. The novelty of actuality broadcasts even promoted some feature coverage in newspapers, with headlines such as ‘Eavesdropping on City Life – Mobile Radio Studio Hears Wonderful Things’.5

  Actuality reporters were the reporters who gathered and recorded the sounds and voices in the field, conducted the interviews and provided commentary and reporting. Sounds were recorded in real time together with a commentary, or were edited in later. War correspondents would have to develop similar skills – writing scripts to be spoken rather than read, that engaged the audience thousands of miles distant from the events they were describing. They would develop descriptive reporting skills, as the eyes and ears of the audience on the battlefield – and they would use their own first-hand experiences to illustrate and illuminate the experiences of the soldiers and the conditions at the warfronts. />
  Within a few months of the declaration of war, the BBC had its first war correspondents and recording units in the field. Richard Dimbleby was recording on-the-spot descriptions and reports in France with a brief to ‘tour camps and billets and travel up and down the line to capture for listeners, in a way that has never been done before, graphic sound-pictures of the life of the men at the Front – sound-pictures in which the voices of the men themselves may be heard, as well as authentic sounds of their environment’.6 Dimbleby’s recordings were intended to be used in BBC news programs, but the BBC also planned more elaborate recordings for feature programs. Throughout the war, the BBC’s Radio Newsreel program gave a prominent platform to the first-hand voice reports of correspondents ‘backgrounding the news of the day and bringing a new immediacy to radio news’.7

  ABC Field Units

  ABC mobile units that operated in the field during the war became generally known as field units. The ABC made the decision to send its own field unit to accompany any Australian troops that might be sent to the battlefronts, and by early 1940, the plan was set for a recording unit with two observers. In a report to the commissioners of the ABC, TW Bearup, the ABC’s federal superintendent, noted that radio was known for being on the spot at world events and he advised the commission that it had a national responsibility to inform the people, through making war recordings for broadcast.

  The proposed ABC field unit would also help fulfil the role of the national broadcaster in publicising and explaining the war effort, and to maintain public support for the war.