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Abstract
From 1934 to 1941, three British-governed radio stations were established in the Middle East: Egyptian State Broadcasting (ESB) in Cairo (1934), the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) in Jerusalem (1936), and the Near East Broadcasting Service (NEBS) in Jaffa (1941). These three stations were modeled on the BBC and run as colonial or imperial stations—but they were also considered national stations. As a result, they operated as hybrid entities with overlapping and sometimes conflicting mandates. Through the three case studies—a contentious hire at the ESB, the PBS' ‘Jerusalem Direct News Service’, and the NEBS' Islamic broadcasts—this article charts the evolving relationship between Great Britain and its Arab-world radio stations, examining these three stations in tandem tension between national and regional broadcasting mandates, as well as the challenge that managing each station raised for British officials in the UK and in-country. It moves away from a focus on the disembodied spheres of ideology and propaganda, and toward the messy administrative decisions that reflected British officials' on-the-ground efforts to navigate the administrative control and programming decisions in the perplexing world of semi-independent radio broadcasting stations in the Middle East. It closes by noting that while UK-based British officials saw these three stations as operating under the aegis of British governance and on the model of the BBC, the ESB and the PBS, in particular, reflected and projected not a British imperial identity but an Egyptian and a Palestinian nationalist one.
Notes
1. A radio station was also established in Iraq during this period, broadcasting from Mosul. It was a much smaller enterprise, operating on a small budget and experiencing major transmission issues resulting from Iraq's more challenging geography. Consequently, it broadcast only intermittently and never achieved the broad-based listening audience that the three stations addressed here enjoyed. The French government, which governed Lebanon and Syria as mandate territories, helped establish radio stations in Beirut and Damascus, but those fall outside the scope of this article.
2. See ref. CitationVaughan ‘The Failure of American and British Propaganda’.
3. Two important recent studies, which make similar but distinct arguments about the meaning and impact of empire on British citizens and culture, see ref. CitationPorter and also CitationThompson.
4. Boyd suggests that the Egyptian government only involved itself in radio broadcasting starting in 1931; however, the British National Archives hold copies of a concession granted to Marconi in the late 1920s to build and operate the Egyptian broadcasting service—which built upon smaller concessions that Marconi obtained for Egypt starting in 1923.
5. The European Broadcasting Convention, which included the Lucerne Plan, was signed into law at Lucerne on June 19, 1933.
6. The Foreign Office documents held in the British National Archives refer to him as ‘Mohammed Said Lutfi Bey’, but there is no one of this name among the eminent Egyptians of the period. Arabic names often suffered in transcription to English, and were transcribed inconsistently by government officials.
7. Although Guglielmo Marconi was born in Italy of an Italian father, his mother was Irish and he filed patents for his wireless telegraphy in Britain. In 1897, he established his Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, later known as the Marconi Company, in Great Britain. In 1929, Marconi's company was merged with another to form Cable and Wireless, a corporate entity with monopoly control over all telecommunications in the British Empire and a board appointed by the British government. In the mid-1930s, however, company stationery still included the Marconi name, and Campbell and others still referred to it as the Marconi Company, as well as by its formal name.
8. For a more detailed account of British and Italian contestations over Radio Bari, see ref. CitationMacDonald.
9. Government officials consistently referred to these broadcasts as a ‘special’ news broadcast, distinguishing them from regular news programming on the region's existing stations.
10. An undated memo from the same Colonial Office file, ‘Broadcasting in Foreign Languages’, stated that the Committee on Arabic Broadcasting had decided against a Cyprus station on similar grounds: ‘Perhaps, however, the most powerful argument which decided the Committee in favour of Daventry is that while it is one thing for the metropolitan country to broadcast in foreign languages it is a vastly different matter to set up a powerful broadcasting station in a small island colony for broadcasts in a language which is not spoken in that colony; no other country has at present so far done this and the Post Office were very strongly of the opinion that for us to do so would be a blatant violation of all the accepted canons of international broadcast etiquette and decency. There are, on the other hand, numerous precedents for broadcasting in foreign languages from the metropolitan territory’.
11. Warner was the under-secretary of the Foreign Office's Information Department and served from their home office in London, while Scott was in Baghdad. Their disparate locations are a reminder that these discussions encompassed the entire Arabic-speaking Middle East.
12. Reginald Leeper was a career Foreign Service official who in the mid-1930s worked in the News Department and later served as head of political intelligence. He is today perhaps best known as the founder of the British Council. Havard served as Consul General in Beirut, Lebanon, for the Colonial Office, from 1934 until 1941.
13. David Balfour, Lord Kinross, served as an information officer, while Pollock, a military officer, headed the Middle East Section of the Foreign Office's Information Department during the Second World War.
14. Boyd does not appear to read Arabic and in his research was consequently unable to identify when al-Sharq al-Adna began broadcasting. While station files were still embargoed by the National Archives as recently as 2006, the station's establishment was covered in the Arabic language Palestinian press. Daily program guides were published in Falastin and other newspapers as soon as the station began broadcasting.
15. I discuss the use of radio stations as signs of sovereignty more fully in my forthcoming This is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).
16. I discuss the use of women broadcasters and talks aimed at women listeners more fully in my forthcoming chapter ‘Broadcasting a Nationalist Modernity’, in Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation, edited by Lena Jayyusi (Interlink, 2013).