GOING THEIR OWN WAY

Abstract

The goal of this article is to demonstrate and analyse how two public broadcasters with cultural and technical mandates to foster identity formation, the BBC in Britain and the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) in Canada, came to terms with the fact that the British and Canadian identities were different, and growing more so, in the 1930s. The focus is on how two BBC officials, Malcolm Frost and Felix Greene, assessed the public broadcasting experiment in Canada and gradually came to understand that the CRBC, while a Dominion broadcaster and potential distributor of the Empire Service, was also a North American broadcaster striving to gain legitimacy and credibility with Canadian listeners accustomed to the popular commercial programming of the large American networks. It concludes with a discussion of Greene's role in the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the appointment of Canadian-born BBC official Gladstone Murray as its first general manager.

Keywords:

• radio history
• BBC
• Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission
• CRBC
• Empire Service
• CBC

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge with thanks permission from the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham for quotations from material it holds.

Notes

1. Mansell (20–39) provides a good overview of the debates within the Empire Service about both the technical and the programming choices that had to be made in this early period.

2. These reports are particularly useful because the surviving records of the CRBC do not contain much correspondence between its staff and the BBC; it is possible that this is an artefact of archiving choices made in the 1960s but it is more likely a sign of how marginal to their task the Canadians believed the BBC to be. See Vipond ‘Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission’ 285, n.29.

3. This section is based on the three standard academic histories of early Canadian radio: Peers; Raboy; Vipond Listening In.

4. There were no national or ‘scientific’ audience surveys in Canada in this period, but all contemporary commentators as well as local surveys attested to the popularity of American radio with Canadian listeners. See Vipond ‘London Listens’.

5. C.G. Graves to Malcolm Frost, 5 Jan. 1933 [1934]. File E1/492/1, BBC Written Archives Centre [WAC], Caversham UK. For more detail on the technical issues raised by Steel, see Vipond ‘Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission’.

6. W.A. Steel to W.E.G. Murray, 1 Mar. 1934. Steel Papers, vol. 26, file 144, Library and Archives Canada [LAC], Ottawa.

7. Felix Greene to J.B. Clark, 29 Feb. 1936. File E5/9/1, WAC.

8. ‘Mr. Frost's Final Report’, n.d. [spring 1934]. File E1/528/1, WAC.

9. W.A. Steel to W.E.G. Murray, 1 Mar. 1934. Steel Papers, vol. 26, file 144, LAC.

10. Charles Carpendale, Memorandum to C.G. Graves, 19 Sept. 1934. File E1/522/1, folder 1A, WAC.

11. W.E.G. Murray to Alan Plaunt, 2 Feb. 1935. Alan Plaunt Papers, file 3-14, University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver.

12. The following account of Greene's activities in Ottawa is based on the report he sent to London in late December. Felix Greene, ‘Canada’, 27 Dec. 1935. File E1/528/1, WAC.

13. Felix Greene, cable to BBC, n.d. [late Dec. 1935]. File E1/528/1, WAC.

14. Greene to Graves, 10 Jan. 1936, confidential. File E1/528/1, WAC.

15. Greene, Memo to Controller (P), ‘Canada’, 16 Jan. 1936 (completed 22 Jan. 1936). File E1/528/1, WAC.

16. Greene to Graves, copy of cable, 20 Feb. 1936. File E1/528/1, WAC.

17. C.A. Bowman to Mackenzie King, 24 June 1936. Mackenzie King Papers, mfm C-3685, pp. 184182-3, LAC.

18. Murray to B. Trotter, 23 Jan. 1962, attachment. CBC Papers, vol. 170, Acc. 86-87/031, LAC.