Abstract
Alban Webb’s London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War won the 2015 Longman-History Today Book Prize. That honor might attract your attention to the book. However, understanding how the leaders of the BBC External Service (renamed the World Service in 1965) fought to maintain a Western standard of journalistic objectivity amid internal and external pressures because of the commencement of the Cold War will keep you engaged in it.
As World War II took its first steps into history, the British government left no doubt that it wanted the BBC to retain its international presence established during the conflict. As such, in 1946,
the BBC was charged with the task of ensuring that the voice of Britain remained a force overseas at a time of intense economic uncertainty at home and high anxiety abroad, as post war reconstruction gave way to a recrudescence of deep international schisms, which posed a grave threat to the recently achieved peace.
The plan that called for the BBC to focus on English-language services with additional Latin American and Arabic services gave way to the aforementioned economic realities and the burgeoning Cold War. BBC leaders feared that their budgets could be substantially cut; in fact, as the Cold War was birthed, they were defending the necessity for services to Latin America and the Middle East and multiple foreign-language broadcasts throughout Europe. It is not farfetched to say that if the BBC had not been an essential part of the war effort, then it would not have been able to withstand the austerity programs that enveloped Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
But larger intrigue was found in the friction between the BBC’s stated goal of objectivity and the British Foreign Office’s desire to see the Corporation more effectively challenge Soviet propaganda and be a booster of government policy elsewhere. The Foreign Office delighted when BBC broadcasts were “really getting under the skin of the Soviet authorities,” but it too often found the BBC delivering “dry and dull” programs that failed to provoke. BBC officials responded that the “art to broadcasting” was finding how to maintain the “friendly interest” of the listener. Loyal to Britain but independent of its politics was a conundrum the BBC never seemed to calibrate to a level satisfactory to itself and the government.
Webb details how the tension came to a head in 1956. The BBC’s coverage of the events in Hungary, where a near 3-week uprising against the puppet government and the Soviet Union ended in the Soviet military restoring order, demonstrated that the Corporation could and would serve as a beacon for democratic thought and expression. The Foreign Office’s appreciation was evident. But the Suez crisis of the same year told a different story. When Egypt’s Abdel Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the British government began an anti-Nasser international effort. It expected the BBC to “acquiesce” and endorse the government’s position. However, BBC officials argued they had a responsibility to “reflect the conflicting views about British policy which had begun to be voiced” in the House of Commons. The government suggested that if the BBC failed to get in line, then a liaison would be assigned to supervise what the Corporation was doing. The BBC insisted that failing to acknowledge and report on the arguments within government about how to respond to Nasser was tantamount to self-censorship. If the country were to speak with one voice—as it did in World War II—then the BBC would, as well.
The Suez crisis soon ended with the British and their French and Israeli allies admitting defeat. With that admission, historians have suggested that Britain was no longer and never would again be a world military power. Perhaps. But there also was little debate that the BBC’s position as an information power was strong and would continue to grow.