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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Gordon Johnston for supporting my work on this project in my post as Research Fellow at Leeds Metropolitan University. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the British Academy in supporting this research, through a Small Research Grant and an Overseas Travel Grant to attend the International Association of Media and History conference in 2007. For access to archival records, thanks must go to the BBC Written Archives Centre and the National Archives.
Notes
Notes
1 S. G. Tallents, The Projection of England (London, Faber and Faber, 1932). Such deliberate elisions between ‘English’ and ‘British’ make it almost impossible to disentangle the two. Raphael Samuel argues that ‘English, in its twentieth-century usage, is an altogether more introverted term than “British” and largely associated with images of landscape, beauty and home rather than those of national greatness … it carries a heavy freight of cultural meanings. Literature has normally been English; the Empire—it is argued—was always British’. Samuel, Island Stories: unravelling Britain. Theatres of Memory, Volume II (London and New York, Verso, 1998), 48. Yet, as Krishan Kumar points out, it has been the English who have been seen by both the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled’ to be ‘in command’ of the external and internal empires of Great Britain. After all, ‘It was the English Common Law, the English parliament, the English monarchy … that supplied the key institutions’. Tallents’ title, The Projection of England, makes sense in this context. Kumar interprets the distinction between ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’ as deliberately ambiguous in order to facilitate the processes of empire building. It would have been impossible, according to Kumar, to celebrate a ‘national’ Englishness when England was defining itself as an imperial state. Kumar, Empire and English nationalism, Nations and Nationalism, 12(1) (2006), 5, 6–7. However, with reference to BBC external broadcasting, as will become apparent later, such ambiguities are further complicated by a desire to address expatriate Britons (English, Scots, Welsh, Irish) in an overseas empire. The internal and external empires collide. In addressing this exiled audience, then, the BBC had to negotiate complex terrain between introverted ‘Englishness’, with its nostalgic associations of home for some, an ‘Englishness’ based on imperial power, and a more expansive ‘Britishness’, which could embrace all citizens of the empire.
2 Tallents, The Projection of England, 17. Philip Taylor sees this pamphlet as ‘the focal point in the campaign for increased national propaganda overseas’. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British overseas publicity and propaganda, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), 110. Tallents had once been secretary of the Empire Marketing Board and would himself become involved in the BBC from the mid 1930s. See Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting: Volume One 1922–1939. Serving the Nation (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991), 375.
3 The 1930s were a decade in which the ‘Projection of Britain’ informed a number of different official enterprises, including the Empire Marketing Board (which broadened its remit in the early 1930s to include overseas projects) and the British Council (formed in 1934). For an extensive analysis of the ‘Projection of Britain’ policy, though focusing mainly on ‘foreign’ rather than imperial targets, see Taylor, Projection of Britain.
4 Tallents, The Projection of England, 14–17.
5 BBC Written Archives Centre, Reading (hereafter WAC), E2/225, John Reith (BBC Director General) quoted in transcript of ‘One Great Family’, 23 January 1954. On Reith's early ideas for empire broadcasting, see his own work, Broadcast Over Britain (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), 221–222; also Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume 1. The Birth of Broadcasting (London, Oxford University Press, 1961), 322–324.
6 On the early history of the BBC Empire Service, see John MacKenzie, ‘Propaganda and the BBC Empire Service’, in Jeremy Hawthorne (ed.) Propaganda, Persuasion and Polemic (London, Edward Arnold, 1987), 37–53. In his extensive, highly detailed institutional history of the BBC, Asa Briggs includes several sections on the BBC External Services. Of particular relevance here, see Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume II. The Golden Age of Wireless (London, Oxford University Press, 1965), 369–410, and The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume IV. Sound and Vision (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979), 137–161. For a broader, but essentially celebratory, history of the World Service as a whole, see Andrew Walker, A Skyful of Freedom: 60 years of the BBC World Service (London, Broadside Books, 1992). On the important inter-relationships between the BBC and broadcasters in the white dominions, see the work of Simon Potter, and K. S. Inglis: Simon Potter, Webs, networks, and systems: globalization and the mass media in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 621–646; Potter, The BBC, the CBC, and the 1939 Royal Tour of Canada, Cultural and Social History, 3 (2006), 424–444; Potter, Strengthening the bonds of the Commonwealth: the Imperial Relations Trust and Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Broadcasting personnel in Britain, 1946–1952, Media History, 11(3) (2005), 193–205; K. S. Inglis, London Calling: the empire of the airwaves, Working Papers in Australian Studies, 118 (2000), 1–24.
7 Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless, 395.
8 In 1997, Michele Hilmes observed of radio that, ‘No other medium has been more thoroughly forgotten, by the public, historians, and media scholars alike’. Hilmes, Radio Voices: American broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), xiv. Although radio studies is now a vibrant area of research, it still struggles to compete with the dominance of cinema and television. Sound has recently become the subject of more sustained attention, through volumes such as Michael Bull and Les Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford, Berg, 2003).
9 Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992); Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002).
10 Mark Pegg, Broadcasting and Society, 1918–1939 (London, Croon Helm, 1983), 220. See also chapter thirteen on ‘The National Culture’ of radio in Scannell and Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting. Similarly, Hilmes comments of radio in the US, that ‘in speaking to us as a nation during a crucial period of time it helped to shape our cultural consciousness and to define us as a people in ways that were certainly not unitary but cut deeply across individual, class, racial and ethnic experience’. Hilmes, Radio Voices, xvi. Alexander Badenoch traces radio versions of the German nation and its regions in his article, Making Sunday what it actually should be: Sunday radio programming and the re-invention of tradition in Occupied Germany 1945–1949, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25(4) (October 2005), 577–598.
11 Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, 16–17; Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (eds) Britishness Abroad: transnational movements and imperial cultures (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2007), 1. As Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich explain, engagement with the concept of a ‘British World’ has been slow to come about: ‘British historians have remained too England-centric and have not properly taken up J.G.A. Pocock's 1974 challenge to integrate the rest of the peoples of the home islands and of the British overseas into their accounts’. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, Mapping the British World, in Bridge and Fedorowich (eds) The British World: diaspora, culture and identity (London, Frank Cass, 2003), 2.
12 Darian-Smith, Grimshaw and Macintyre (eds) Britishness Abroad, 6.
13 Susan Smulyan, Live from Waikiki: colonialism, race, and radio in Hawaii, 1934–1963, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 27(1) (March 2007), 63. For an analysis of the implications and management of international communication systems before 1930, see Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: media, markets and globalization (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2007).
14 Pegg sets out how the BBC attempted to appeal to its ‘captive audience’ of women listeners in programming before six o’clock in the evening. Pegg, Broadcasting and Society, 198.
15 The current AHRC project on the World Service and ‘diasporic contact zones’ is therefore an important and timely development. The Caribbean Service has perhaps received the most attention to date, with articles highlighting the importance of radio in mediating Caribbean and British identities for listeners and broadcasters both in Britain and in the Caribbean islands. See, for example, Laurence A. Breiner, Caribbean voices on the air: radio, poetry, and nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean’, in Susan Merrill Squier (ed.) Communities of the Air: radio century, radio culture (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003), 93–108; Glynne Griffith, This is London Calling the West Indies: the BBC's Caribbean Voices, in Bill Schwarz (ed.) West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003), 196–208; G. Griffith, Deconstructing nationalisms: Henry Swanzy, Caribbean Voices and the development of West Indian literature, Small Axe, 10 (September 2001), 1–20; and Darrell Newton, Calling the West Indies: the BBC World Service and Caribbean Voices, unpublished conference paper, International broadcasting, diplomacy and cultural exchange: an international conference to celebrate and evaluate 75 years of the BBC World Service (London, 2007). However, such research focuses largely on the post-war period. This article tends to address broadcasting directed towards, and listened to by, white diasporic populations across the empire.
16 MacKenzie, Propaganda and the BBC Empire Service, 38, 42–43.
17 Walker, Skyful of Freedom, 32–33.
18 In using the term ‘nostalgia’, I want to stress both its spatial and temporal associations: as a longing for ‘home’, and as an attachment to the past. Like Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, I interpret nostalgia as being able to contain both utopian and distopian urges. Pickering and Keightley, The modalities of nostalgia, Current Sociology, 54(6) (November 2006), 919–941. Within the British empire, ‘expatriates’ could draw on the past and on their attachment to the homeland to reaffirm their imperial mission.
19 WAC, World Radio, 21 October 1932, 870.
20 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (revised edition) (London and New York, Verso, 1991). With reference to the US context, Hilmes points out how radio, even more so than the press in the United States, could offer individuals a tangible sense of being part of a national community, through ‘the unifying power of simultaneous experience’. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 11.
21 WAC, World Radio, 25 November 1932, 1179.
22 WAC, World Radio, 4 November 1932, 1029.
23 Jo Tacchi re-evaluates nostalgia as a ‘positive social practice’. Tacchi, Nostalgia and radio sound, in Bull and Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, 282, 293.
24 Pegg provides evidence of the impact of Big Ben on early radio listeners in England in the 1920s, taking the following quote from the Derby Daily Telegraph: ‘The boom of Big Ben, which is rung in London and heard by us in Derby … is one of the wireless stunts which creates an impression’. Pegg interprets this as ‘a locality responding to the sense of national community which radio created’. Broadcasting and Society, 147. Whilst these Derby listeners had become complacent about the sounds of London by 1924, for dominion listeners from the 1930s they had a more lasting appeal. Big Ben was heard at the opening of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. According to Inglis, this was both ‘an act of homage to the BBC, and a testimony to the power of empire over Australian imaginations’. For ‘empire’, I would perhaps substitute ‘imperial metropole’. Although ABC came to adopt typically ‘Australian’ sounds such as the kookaburra, Inglis notes that sounds of Britain still emanated from this dominion station. Inglis, London Calling, 3, 14. Badenoch observes similar sentimental connections to the sound of bells for German listeners. However, the church bells used on German radio evoked more ‘local’, regional communities, even as they made this available to a much broader radio community not necessarily defined by physical, geographical borders. Badenoch, Sunday radio programming, 587.
25 WAC, World Radio, 17 February 1933, 222.
26 Reith had noted the national and imperial associations of broadcasting time signals from Greenwich and Big Ben at an early stage. In conceiving of radio as a ‘national service’, the ‘dissemination of standard time’ was of ‘considerable importance’. The ‘sentimental’ responses from rural listeners to the chimes from Big Ben were explained as explicitly imperial: ‘the clock which beats the time over the Houses of Parliament, in the centre of the Empire, is heard echoing in the loneliest cottage in the land’. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 219–220.
27 WAC, Empire Programme Pamphlet, November 1937.
28 WAC, E2/225, Transcript for ‘One Great Family’, 23 January 1954.
29 On the familial tone of Elizabeth II in her radio broadcasts, see Adrienne Munich, In the radio way: Elizabeth II, the female voice-over, and radio's imperial effects, in Susan Merrill Squier (ed.) Communities of the Air: radio century, radio culture (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003), 217–236.
30 WAC, World Radio, 27 January 1933, 112.
31 WAC, E3/20, Audience Research O/S, Coronation: Reaction, Overseas, 1953.
32 On ideas of the Commonwealth in England, see Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire, 1939–1965 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005).
33 WAC, E4/7, Empire Service Policy, Confidential Report, Empire Service, April 1934, 12.
34 WAC, E4/7, Empire Service Policy, Notes on Imperial Relations for Parliamentary Report, November 1934.
35 The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), CO323/1198/2, BBC booklet of Empire Recorded Programmes, 1932.
36 Regional identity has often been neglected in studying British emigrants. With reference to a much earlier period, Katie Wales has examined how songs helped sustain diasporic northern communities from Newcastle in Australia and America. See Wales, ‘Come all ye bold Northerners’: the gold-rush songs and Northern ‘exiles’ in North America and Australia, Unpublished paper given at Sheffield Hallam University, November 2007.
37 WAC, E4/70, Empire Service Publicity 1933–1938, A Talk by the Empire Programme Director, October 1936.
38 Bridge and Fedorowich suggest how ‘imperial Britishness’ could exist concurrently with colonial national identities: ‘Just as in Britain one could be a Liverpudlian, Lancastrian, Englishman and Briton, so in New Zealand one might be an Aucklander, North Islander, New Zealander and Briton’. Mapping the British World, 6.
39 On organisational changes during the war, see Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume III. The War of Words (London, Oxford University Press, 1970), 487–527.
40 WAC, BBC Yearbook, 1945, 88–89.
41 WAC, E2/496/2, Foreign General, Programmes Overseas General File 2, 1943–1953, Cecil Madden, Policy Directive for Variety Material Broadcast Overseas, no date.
42 Anne McKay has outlined some of the contemporary debates around women's voices on radio, highlighting the disjuncture between assertions that women's voices were too quiet for radio, with the possibilities of radio technology to amplify the voice. McKay, Speaking up: voice amplification and women's struggle for public expression, in Caroline Mitchell (ed.) Women and Radio: airing differences (London, Routledge, 2000), 15–28.
43 WAC, E2/496/2, Foreign General, Programmes Overseas General File 2, 1943–1953, Cecil Madden, Policy Directive for Variety Material Broadcast Overseas, no date; WAC, E2/496/2, Foreign General, Programmes Overseas General File 2, 1943–1953, The Overseas Service, undated cutting from Radio Times.
44 The Commonwealth as an ideal was problematic both at home and ‘abroad’.
45 WAC, R34/213/3, Policy, Anniversaries, Empire Day File 3, 1944–1954, Memo from Assistant Director of Features re. Empire Day Programme, 8 March 1945.
46 WAC, R34/213/3, Policy, Anniversaries, Empire Day File 3, 1944–1954, Suggestions for Empire, no date.
47 WAC, BBC Yearbook, 1945, 86.
48 WAC, E2/468/2, Foreign Gen, Overseas Services: Survey of, File 1b, 1948–1951, Report on The General Overseas Service. The Pacific Programme. The South African Programme (In English), June 1948, 2.
49 TNA, CO1027/224, BBC Overseas Services in English 1957–1959, Memo from O. H. Morris to Charles Carstairs, 14 September 1959.
50 TNA, CO1027/224, BBC Overseas Services in English 1957–1959, The General Overseas Service of the BBC. Future Planning Policy, 1959.