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RELATIONS WITH THE B.B.C.

The constitutional position of the B.B.C. remains now what it was in 1939 before the outbreak of war. It is an independent Corporation created by Charter for a fixed period of years and administered by a Board consisting of a Chairman, Vice-Chairman and a number of Governors, with a chief executive appointed by them under the title of Director General. Under its Charter and Wireless Broadcasting Licence, certain defined responsibilities and powers of control are accorded to the Postmaster General, of which it is sufficient to say that they do not include responsibility for the policy or content of its output. Some major lines of its policy in respect of home broadcasting are defined in the 1935 Report of the Ullswater Committee, the bulk of the recommendations of which the Government of the day announced that it proposed to adopt.

This was the organisation with which the Ministry of Information entered into relations in 1939 with no further official confirmation of the Ministry's status than the transfer to it for wartime purposes of certain of the pre-existing rights and responsibilities of the Postmaster General. The original intentions of the Ministry with regard to the B.B.C. were evidently based on that assumption upon which so many Government plans were founded at the beginning of the war, namely, that early and heavy bombing attacks would disrupt ordinary communications, and it was anticipated that broadcasting would probably be the only national organ of communication available to the Government in the expected days of extreme crisis. It was felt that the existence of an independent Board of several Governors would be inconsistent with the needs of the day and, accordingly, it was agreed that the headship of the B.B.C. should be vested in the Chairman and Director General alone and that the services of the Vice-Chairman and the remaining Governors should at once be dispensed with. Action was taken accordingly, either by removal of the Governors by an Order in Council or by procuring their resignations, and Sir Allan Powell and Mr. Frederick Ogilvie were left in sole control of the whole broadcasting machine., much to the indignation of the displaced 20 - 19 -Governors. Apart from this somewhat high-handed step the B.B.C. have pursued its course much as before while the Ministry proceeded to get ahead with the organisation of a Broadcasting Division in the Ministry, whose functions were conceived to include those of giving advice to other Divisions of the Ministry as to the best methods of radio publicity and of acting as go-between between the Ministry and the B.B.C. for the purpose of securing the publicity desired. When Sir John Reith assumed the post of Minister at the beginning of 1940 a high official of the B.B.C. Programme Department, Mr. Lindsey Wellington, was brought over to the Ministry to act as head of the Broadcasting Division. At this time the B.B.C.'s foreign services were still in embryonic condition and the relationship between the Broadcasting Division and the B.B.C. was, I think, envisaged as one of friendly negotiation.

With the collapse of resistance in France in 1940 and the institution of the National Government there was a natural tendency to bring the conduct of the B.B.C. more directly under Ministry control. This was consonant with the general sense of crisis that prevailed at the time and the sweeping Parliamentary enactment of May 1940 which placed all persons and property at the disposal of the Government. The new Minister of Information, Mr. Duff Cooper, certainly conceived himself at that time as exercising direct Government responsibility for all the operations of the B.B.C. and it was some time during the course of this year that the Chairman of the B.B.C. addressed to the Minister a letter in which he undertook that the B.B.C. would accept the Minister's directions on behalf of the Government in all matters relating to the war effort. This undertaking has never been revoked or withdrawn and there is no doubt that Mr. Duff Cooper, during his tenure of office, did exercise the power of direction thus conceded to him from time to time. The most extreme instance that I can recall is an occasion when he forced a particular broadcaster upon the B.B.C. even though the individual was personally unacceptable to them and his script was, in their view, not unlikely to be libellous.

It was also part of the atmosphere of those summer months of 1940 21 - 20 -that the Minister of Information should himself deliver broadcasts on the Home Service. He gave several talks in a decreasing order of frequency and popularity. The idea of a Minister of Information giving to the public over the radio a general appreciation either of the progress of war affairs in general or of some particular and important phase that had developed seems to me an excellent one and such a talk would be a natural function of a Minister of Information in a National Government. Did we ever have any speakers at our meetings more popular during the greater part of the war period than the deliverers of “War Commentaries”? It was, however, abandoned by Mr. Duff Cooper and the idea never appealed to his successor, Mr. Bracken, who rigidly abstained as a matter of policy from projecting himself on the air as Minister of Information.

The B.B.C., of course, enjoyed much closer access to the Ministry as a result of its direct connection with the Government. Representatives of the B.B.C. attended the meetings in Duty Room, which in those days took place twice daily, and at which current news problems were discussed and action agreed. Apart from the B.B.C., only Ministry officials and officials of other Government Departments attended these meetings. The Director General of the B.B.C. and some of his officials also attended the big weekly meetings of heads of the Ministry that Mr. Duff Cooper used to hold in the Chancellor's Hall. Nevertheless, the opinion still prevailed in the War Cabinet that the B.B.C. and its services were insufficiently harnessed to the furtherance of the war effort and sometime at the end of the year 1940, as a result of an ad hoc enquiry by a Cabinet Committee under Sir Kingsley Wood, two Ministry advisers were appointed to the B.B.C. who were supposed to represent the wishes and policy of the Government, as expressed through the Ministry, to all Divisions of the B.B.C.

One of these Advisers, Mr. Kirkpatrick, was a member of the Foreign Office and the other, Mr. Ryan, was a B.B.C. official who had been working for some time on liaison work with the Ministry. Kirkpatrick was regarded as Adviser for the purposes of foreign affairs and Ryan 22 - 21 -for home affairs. I am bound to say that, looking back, I do not think that these appointments meant much advance towards this objective of bringing the B.B.C. output under the direct control of a Government Department, but the Advisers did useful work in keeping the B.B.C. well posted about the background to news and Government policy (so far as such information was available in the Ministry itself) and in familiarising the members of the Ministry with the limitations and possibilities of radio publicity.

About April-May of 1941 Mr. Duff Cooper took the very important step of recreating the Board of Governors of the B.B.C. The purpose that underlay this step is not clear to me but my impression is that it arose from continuing Parliamentary criticisms of various aspects of the B.B.C's output and the belief that what it needed was more high-level direction by persons of affairs outside the organisation. I do not believe that it was appreciated at the time that the result of reconstituting a full Board of Governors was not so much to improve the higher direction of the B.B.C's output as to change its position in relation to the Government and the Ministry and to confirm, contrary to the then prevailing trend of policy, its substantial independence of Government control. For if the Governors thus reappointed were not to be responsible for the major policies of the B.B.C., for what purpose were they given their positions and £1,000 a year each?

Scarcely had the new Board been created when the troubles, which had been agitating the Ministry internally for some months, came to a head. These troubles related to the general status and responsibilities of the Ministry among other Government Departments and they were the inevitable outcome of the rather cloudy conceptions with which it had been launched in 1939 and the failure of the Government as a whole to entertain any firm idea as to what the Ministry of Information was for. The outcome of a good deal of discussion inside and outside the War Cabinet was a Cabinet Paper composed by the Prime Minister (W.P. (41)149) and intended to provide 23 - 22 -a working definition of the functions and responsibilities of the Ministry. In that Paper it will be found that the Ministry is expected to make itself responsible, without qualification, for the editing and output of the B.B.C. news bulletins. It is necessary to say at once that the Ministry never came near shouldering this burden, nor is it easy to see how it could ever have been feasible for it to do so. The dilemma is this. The composition of news bulletins for a large organisation such as the B.B.C. involves the immediate services of a very large staff of editors and sub-editors who work continuously immersed in the flood of news, and sidelights on news, that make up their material. The Ministry had no staff engaged in any comparable activity, since it was concerned with no such demand for continuous output of edited news. Therefore to equip ourselves even to follow the B.B.C's doings, much more to direct them with the necessary authority, we should have had in effect to duplicate for ourselves the whole B.B.C. organisation in this field, and all this to do over again - and probably no better – what the B.B.C. were already doing for themselves. This was not feasible. It may be thought that the handling of news services can be effectively controlled by the writing of general or special directives. Perhaps it can when news is used avowedly for purely propaganda purposes. But “directives”, at best, are only editing at a distance and I do not think that any useful result is achieved by them when the purpose of the news bulletin is, as it always should be, to give as fair and objective an account as possible of the important events that are actually current on the day.

The appointment of Mr. Bracken to the Ministry in July 1941 introduced two lines of policy which affected the whole field of Government relations with the B.B.C. He was the promoter of the Political Warfare Executive - a secret body; in its inception responsible to three Ministers, the Foreign Secretary, the Minister of Economic Warfare (in his capacity as chief of S.O.E.) and himself; and entrusted with the conduct of political warfare against Germany.

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To implement this form of warfare the secret body was given direct control of B.B.C. broadcasts which were made to Germany and territories in the occupation of the Germans, as well as the control of the “black” broadcasting (stations in this country not avowed by the Government), which had been going on since the beginning of the war. The effect of this was to seal off the Ministry of Information itself from any further connection with this part of the B.B.C's output. To be frank, it had never had anything but a very uncertain connection with it, since a rival responsibility was claimed by the secret organisation which Sir Campbell Stuart had launched at the beginning of the war from “The Country House” and further divergent claims for the B.B.C's services were made by the S.O.E. organisation operating under the Minister of Economic Warfare as an off-shoot from “The Country House” foundation. The formation of P.W.E, at least, concentrated these scattered jurisdictions into one organisation under Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart as Director-General. And the B.B.C. Governors, who were not unrelieved to find all responsibility for these broadcasts being removed from them, readily acquiesced in a special arrangement under which P.W.E. were given absolute control of the policy and content of all output to the territories concerned. Not long afterwards Mr. Kirkpatrick passed from being Adviser on Foreign Affairs to the B.B.C., representing the Ministry of Information, to being the actual Controller in the B.B.C. of its European services, on the understanding that as Controller he was the nominee of P.W.E. and their agent for conducting the B.B.C. services according to their directions. Administration, engineering, etc. continued to be the responsibility of the B.B.C.

Mr. Bracken, no doubt much influenced by the fact that he was now dealing with a B.B.C. equipped with a full Board of Governors, took a very different line from Mr. Duff Cooper in his conception of the Ministry's responsibility for the rest of their output. In effect he accepted, without reservation, the principle that in respect of its Home Service the B.B.C. should be left to conduct it without any more Government interference than might be provided by the occasional admonitions of the Minister himself. 25 - 24 -As he always maintained excellent personal relations with the head officials of the B.B.C. this provided no difficulty. As regards the other overseas broadcasts which were not directed by Political Warfare, he left the regional sections of the Ministry, who were concerned with the conduct of overseas publicity in those areas, to maintain such contact with and influence over the broadcasts as they could obtain by personal exchange. But I do not think that he would ever have consented to describe those services as in any sense under the Ministry's control.

From 1942 onwards, therefore, the history of the Ministry's relations with the B.B.C. runs according to this formula. Ryan, the B.B.C. Adviser on Home Affairs, returned, logically, to his appointment with the B.B.C. and became Controller. Contacts between the B.B.C. officials and the Ministry were frequent and, on the whole, cordial, and Ryan and Kirkpatrick, or representatives of them, attended the daily meetings of the Executive Board and Duty Room of the Ministry. B.B.C. representatives attended meetings of our Overseas Planning Committee and took part in framing the analyses of the local situation and statements of propaganda objectives that resulted from these committee meetings. The B.B.C. would not have agreed, however, I think, that the Government's propaganda objectives in an overseas country could have any special significance for itself in respect of their service to that country, since, avowedly or not, they regarded it as their primary mission to emancipate themselves from the idea that they were merely an instrument of the British Government, and they would have defined the limit of their aims as being to provide a good and objective service of news to the area, coupled with such projection of British life and thought as the circumstances of the service would allow for.

In 1944-45 we were faced with a new problem constituted by the liberation of successive European countries from German occupation and, as a by-product, from the ministrations of Political Warfare. As soon as it became inappropriate for the British Government to consider themselves as directing political warfare into a country which had 26 - 25 -resumed its status as a friendly ally, the P.W.E. claim to direct control of the B.B.C. service to that area ceased to operate. So far as P.W.E. were concerned they made no difficulty about this and readily terminated their special directives. But the difficult question lay between the B.B.C. and ourselves to decide on some formula which would express the Ministry of Information's interest in these overseas services in terms appropriate to 1944 and the approaching end of the European war. It was plainly out of line with the whole conduct of the Minister's policy for us to claim anything like direct control or responsibility: nor could we be unaware that, while our discussions were proceeding, the Cabinet Committee that was sitting under Lord Woolton to investigate the Government's future relations with broadcasting in this country was tending more and more to disavow the notion that in post-war broadcasting the Government should be given any sort of direct control over the B.B.C's overseas services. Accordingly, I arrived at an agreement with Mr. Haley under which, when P.W.E. gave up its direct responsibility for the B.B.C's services to a particular country, the B.B.C. formally acknowledged in its place that the Ministry of Information enjoyed a “special interest” in those services, and until another change of relationship is negotiated we are entitled to rely upon this acknowledgement of special interest as the occasion for discussions with the B.B.C. on points of policy arising out of its broadcasts and any major questions affecting the maintenance or reduction of the service. It may be that we should have put our claim higher and that we conceded too much to the B.B.C's urgent desire to obtain as much freedom as possible. But I do not think that, however the formula had been expressed, the practical difference would have been great, and I find it very difficult to see what more positive claim to control could have been formulated in the light of Mr. Bracken's general attitude about the B.B.C's full responsibility for all its services that were not specifically P.W.E. ones.

The recognition of our special interest in foreign language services is itself a recognition of war-time conditions and of the Ministry of 27 - 26 -Information's own position. It can hardly be taken as a definition of relationships that will govern in peace time: nor should it be, since at some stage even the report of the Cabinet Committee on Broadcasting, which has been sitting for about a year and a half, is bound to appear and the future status and responsibilities of the B.B.C's Overseas services are matters which will be dealt with in the report and will be the subject of some of its recommendations.

2. Before the war the B.B.C. derived its funds from sums annually granted by Parliament from a Broadcasting Vote. These sums were in practice calculated as a percentage of the total receipts in the country from wireless listening licences which were collected by the Post Office and turned in to the Exchequer, subject to a deduction for the costs of collection. The B.B.C. was granted an agreed percentage of the residue, the percentage being increased in the years immediately preceding the war to cover the additional costs of the embryo overseas service and television.

This system might have continued throughout the war but for the important fact that from 1939 onwards the B.B.C. was being urged by the Government through the Ministry to undertake very large expansions of its foreign service. This involved not merely big increases of all forms of staff but also the provision of expensive plant, such as transmitters and valves. The cost of operating these increasing services (known as the Triple Expansion Scheme) soon began to exceed anything that could be expected to be financed out of the licence receipts from the home listener. Accordingly, under an agreement made between the Treasury, the Ministry and the B.B.C. in the early months of 1940, the B.B.C, was in future to be financed by a system of grant-in-aid from the Treasury upon the recommendation of the Ministry of Information. We thus became the sponsors of the sums granted to the B.B.C., though the responsibility for providing them was the Treasury's. The Director General of the Ministry of Information became Accounting Officer in respect of this grant-in-aid, by which the B.B.C. services were maintained and financed throughout the war.

The obligations of an Accounting Officer in respect of monies paid to the recipient of a grant-in-aid are in theory simple. He has merely to show that he has properly paid the sums in question to the intended recipient. But considering the large sums, amounting before the end of the European War to between £8,000,000 and £9,000,000 per annum, that were being found from public monies for this purpose against gross receipts from wireless licences of between £4,000,000 to £5,000,000, it was not surprising that at an early stage the Public Accounts Committee showed that they expected to know something more of the manner in which these sums were applied by the B.B.C. than could be conveyed by the Accounting Officer's bare statement that they had been paid over. It seems to have been held at an early date that as the Ministry of Information Director General was the Accounting Officer it would not be proper for a B.B.C. representative to attend and give evidence before the Committee: and the arrangement that subsisted throughout the war was that the B.B.C's annual accounts should be made available for the Committee's inspection when the Broadcasting Appropriation Account was before the Committee and that the Ministry of Information witness should give the Committee what information he could about the B.B.C's administration and activities. I cannot say that I ever felt that this was a satisfactory solution or one that enabled the Committee to get a fair impression of what really became of the monies granted to the B.B.C. The annual accounts were naturally in such summary form that they revealed little or nothing that was significant: and, although the Ministry Director General and our Finance Branch were sufficiently in touch with the B.B.C. to know generally what they were doing and to know in detail what certain of their new projects amounted to, it was hardly to be expected that we could answer, at sight, questions ranging over the whole extent of the Corporation's administration and activities or that we should be anxious, in those circumstances, to profess much knowledge on such insecure foundations.

The matter became more pointed when it turned out that, during the bad bombing period of 1940-41 and the emergency dispersal which the B.B.C. undertook, it had very considerably exceeded its authorised finance for the year without obtaining any prior approval of its schemes from us 29 - 28 -and the Treasury. After long negotiation a document entitled “Principles of Control” was agreed between the Treasury, the B.B.C. and ourselves, the general purpose of which was to ensure that the B.B.C's financial obligations were clearly defined and that new developments which it wished to launch, if involving any considerable sum of money, should be first reported to and scrutinised by ourselves and the Treasury before commitments were made. There was added to this a not illiberal power of delegation to the B.B.C. for the undertaking of small new schemes on its own responsibility, subject to later report. Once the 1940-41 troubles had been ironed out the system of modified financial control thus introduced worked quite satisfactorily and there is little doubt that in the years that followed the B.B.C. succeeded in overhauling and improving its internal control and administration. This was much contributed to by the institution of Mr. Foot as Financial Adviser (later appointed Director General) to the Corporation, an innovation that was made in 1942 at the instance of the Minister.

The control thus established was strictly a financial one: it did not, and could not, enable us to act as a critic of anything more than the general purposes for which particular schemes were designed or of the scale or nature of the staff provision which the B.B.C. required to make them effective. Whether or not the B.B.C. laid its plans on a more lavish scale in the deployment of personnel than a Government Department would have thought appropriate, it is difficult to see how any effective criticism could have been sustained by the Ministry or the Treasury without recourse to the advice of persons who were themselves experienced in the radio field. It is one of the drawbacks of monopoly that expert criticism must come from inside the monopoly itself.

3. If an analysis were made of the Parliamentary Questions directed to the Minister of Information throughout the period of the war, the great proportion would turn out to be concerned with the affairs of the B.B.C. Many related to quite trivial points about the content of B.B.C. broadcasts or news bulletins; some related to questions of personnel; others to more important matters of principle. Few of them received answers that could have given much satisfaction to the questioner. From the time that 30 - 29 -Mr. Bracken assumed his Ministerial post he pursued the policy of replying to questions about political warfare broadcasts, that they were directed by a secret body whose decisions it was not in the public interest to discuss: and to questions about the rest of the B.B.C's output, that matters of principle were for the Board of Governors to decide, whose attention he would direct to the matter, and that criticisms of news bulletins etc. were beside the point, since the responsibility lay with the B.B.C. itself and the working out of it must be left to the editor's discretion. In effect, therefore, several million pounds of public money were voted each year for the servicing of an organisation the conduct of whose affairs could not be effectively brought under, at any rate, current review by the House of Commons. No doubt a debate could arise on the Broadcasting Vote. Whether any middle course could have been found between the obvious impossibility of allowing every detail of the B.B.C's doings and sayings to be brought under immediate Parliamentary review and the alternative of the Minister responsible to Parliament for broadcasting saying, in effect, that he could not normally answer for it to Parliament, I do not know: but the general question is an interesting one as affecting the status of other Corporations maintained out of public funds. The B.B.C. Governors themselves are not, of course, responsible to Parliament, being appointed and removed by Order in Council, Moreover, Members of Parliament could not, in the absence of special war-time enabling legislation, hold a seat in the House of Commons at the same time as a B.B.C. Governorship.

4. The foregoing review ought to make plain that for the greater part of the Ministry's existence it had little responsibility for or control over the B.B.C. It had the privilege of finding money for it and of championing its interests with other Government Departments. It did much to further the interests of the overseas services by assisting it in listener intelligence, monitoring, recruiting and local advertising of the services. It retained close contacts with the B.B.C. (as, for that matter, did many other Government Departments) and it was the central Government agent for linking Departmental campaigns with radio publicity. But despite the belief of a large part of 31 - 30 -the outside public and, curiously enough, of other Ministers and Government Departments, it had little exercisable authority over the Corporation.

It was not uncommon for Ministers during the war to assume that broadcasting facilities were available for them personally merely on notification of their wish to broadcast. This was not appreciated by the B.B.C. who regarded themselves, rightly, as the masters of their own time and Ministerial broadcasting as dependent on their own invitation. By a convention authorised by the Prime Minister, Ministers were not to be invited by the B.B.C., or to propose themselves as broadcasters to the B.B.C., without a prior report by the Minister of Information to him on the desirability or undesirability of such a broadcast. To enable the Minister of Information to make a recommendation it was necessary that he should be informed of the general purpose and proposed content of the broadcast. War Cabinet Ministers were exempt from this obligation of obtaining the Prime Minister's prior approval but, in fact, the arrangement grew up that they should, at any rate, notify the Minister of Information of their intention of broadcasting before the broadcast was delivered.