Notes
Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 3.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 41.
What Ernest Benn referred to as “the biggest job ever since the days of the creation” (ibid., p. 259).
Ibid., p. 83.
Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. I The Birth of Broadcasting (London, Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 4, 135.
Numerous difficulties persisted, of course: the problem of financing the BBC led directly to the setting-up of the Sykes Committee in April 1923 ; or the question of protection of the British wireless trade – Reith carrying on “a tough fight on this issue to the last,” (Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. I The Birth of Broadcasting [London, Oxford University Press, 1961]) p. 195.
Briggs summarises (ibid., p. 104): “In retrospect it is extraordinary how many of the basic issues of broadcasting were discerned, however dimly, months before Reith left engineering for broadcasting, months even before the BBC was founded”.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), pp. 65-68.
For example, “I could not reconcile myself to staying on in the BBC – simply because I did not feel I should be busy enough” (Into the Wind, [London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949]), p. 305.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), p. 128. A little further on (p. 129), Reith adds, “I am trying to keep in close touch with Christ in all I do and I pray he may keep close to me. I have a great work to do.”
Ibid., p. 52. Cf. Lord Clarendon – chairman of the governors – accusing Reith in September 1929 of “being a Mussolini” (ibid., p. 149).
Asa Briggs’ description of Reith as exercising “forceful personal leadership” seems euphemistic in the context (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. I The Birth of Broadcasting [London, Oxford University Press, 1961]) p. 207.
HC, Hansard, 6 July 1936, col. 975.
Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 253.
HC, Hansard, 6 July 1936, col. 911.
The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), pp. 55-57.
Ibid., p. 84.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 272.
Ibid., p. 15. Reith was fearless, even reckless. Badly wounded by a German sniper in October 1915 while inspecting trenches, Reith enthused on his return to the front, “Fine to be back in it all again” (ibid, p. 54) and “to hear again, as the voice of a friend after absence, the flight and fall of shell” (ibid., p. 72);
Ibid., p. 49.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), p. 73.
John Vincent, ed., The Crawford Papers: The Journals of David Lindsay, Twenty-seventh Earl of Crawford and Tenth Earl of Balcarres 1871-1940 during the Years 1892-1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 505.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), p. 73.
Ibid., p. 142.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 290
Ibid., p. 95.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), pp. 142-3.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 253.
Catherine Murphy, “’On an Equal Footing with Men?’ Women and Work at the BBC, 1923-1939” (PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2011), p. 56.
Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. I The Birth of Broadcasting (London, Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 97, and cf. p. 130.
Jamie Medhurst, “Mea maxima culpa : John Reith and the Advent of Television,” Media History (October 2018: DOI: 10.1080/13688804.2018.1530976), p. 2.
J.C.W. Reith, Broadcast over Britain (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), pp. 17, 147.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 116.
Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 48.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 133 (emphasis in original).
Ibid., p. 299.
Briggs notes that it was in 1927, “the ‘dramatic control panel’ was brought into regular use, and radio drama began to develop rapidly in its own right” (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. I The Birth of Broadcasting (London, Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 201. C.S.L. Pepler – “Discovering the art of wireless: a critical history of radio drama at the BBC, 1922-1928” (PhD thesis, Bristol University, 1988) –, devotes a chapter to the panel and all its advantages (pp. 233-66).
Charlotte Higgins, This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (London, Guardian Books/Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 25.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 8.
Peter Eckersley – the first Chief Engineer at the BBC – had already been forced out of the Corporation in 1929 following an affair with the wife of another BBC employee and divorce from his own wife, although Eckersley’s son, in a letter to The Independent, asserts that there were other reasons for his father’s departure (“My father's BBC sacking was pragmatic not moral,” from Myles Eckersley, Sunday 14 March 1993 https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/letter-my-fathers-bbc-sacking-was-pragmatic-not-moral-1497575.html). Briggs, diplomatically, simply says that Eckersley left “for domestic reasons” (The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. II The Golden Age of Wireless [London, Oxford University Press, 1965]), p. 142.
Charlotte Higgins, This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (London, Guardian Books/Faber & Faber, 2015), p. 32: Murphy places this entry at 4 March.
Catherine Murphy, Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). These incidents are not mentioned in Charles Stuart’s selections from the diaries: Matheson, in fact, does not figure at all.
In Andrew Boyle’s kind euphemism, Reith had a “consistently lively faith in himself” (Only the Wind Will Listen: Reith of the BBC [London, Hutchinson and Co., 1972], p. 110).
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 69.
Ibid., p. 123. Cf. Reith’s note in his diary in April 1939: “I have lost caste and gone down in the world” (Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries [London, Collins, 1975]), p. 227; or, “I have been trying lately to forget, as it were, that ever I had a place of influence and dignity” (ibid., p. 229).
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p.225.
Ibid., p. 53.
E.g. in November 1941, “I absolutely hate him” (ibid., p. 59).
Ibid., pp. 110, 170, 216, 230.
Ibid., p. 101.
Ibid., p.225.
Ibid., p. 330.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), pp. 284-5.
Ibid., p.286.
Ibid., p. 303. Reith’s breviary during the passage from England to the Caribbean was “Froude’s ‘West Indies’” – i.e. J.A. Froude’s, The English in The West Indies of 1888. Needless to say, in view of Reith’s imperialist credentials, there is no mention of J.J. Thomas’s riposte – Froudacity – published the following year.
Reith, shortly after the outbreak of war, returns to the idea in his diary (16 October 1939) and repeats his criticism: “Diplomacy has been at a discount for years past” (Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries [London, Collins, 1975], p. 231).
Ibid., p. 220. Cf. “If I had been Foreign Secretary, I could have got Musso to stay his hand in Abyssinia” (ibid., p. 57)!
Ibid., p. 71.
Ibid., p. 330. There were technical problems holding the BBC back, but finance was the main difficulty, the Treasury refusing to have the British taxpayer finance Empire broadcasting: understandably, perhaps, in view of Britain’s financial situation at the time? In fact, unfinanced experimental short wave broadcasts began at the end of 1927 (see Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. II The Golden Age of Wireless [London, Oxford University Press, 1965], pp. 372-78) and the BBC agreed to finance an Empire scheme itself at the end of 1931.
Ibid., p. 335.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), p. 336: though precisely what could or should be broadcast from London was still to be decided.
Ibid., p. 335.
Ibid., p. 336.
Ibid., p. 331.
J.C.W. Reith, Into the Wind (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 278.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 290.
Simon J. Potter, “Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth‐ and
Twentieth‐Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies, 46. 3 (July 2007), pp. 621-646 (p. 640).
Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. II The Golden Age of Wireless (London, Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 377-78. Cf. “For all the talk of colonial subventions in 1930, only Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast had set aside minute sums (£15) from their budgets as contributions to the Empire Service » (ibid., p. 390).
His former Director of Talks, Hilda Matheson, in her role at the African Survey, clearly still believed in 1935, that broadcasting could be “an important Imperial asset” (“Broadcasting in Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society, 34. 137 [October 1935], pp. 387-390 (p. 388).
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), p. 224.
HC, Hansard, 6 July 1936, col. 975.
The expression is taken from David Cannadine, Ornamentalism : How the British Saw their Empire (London, Penguin, 2002), p. 191.
J.C.W. Reith, Broadcast over Britain (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), p. 34.
Charles Stuart, ed., The Reith Diaries (London, Collins, 1975), p. 81.
Top of page