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CENSORSHIP

All good newspaper men are psychopathic about censorship. It is inevitable therefore that a Ministry of Information, if responsible for censorship, should find that its general relations with the Press and, through them, with the public are determined in large measure by the acceptability of its censorship procedure. What I say below is directed to Press Censorship only. It is true that about April 1940 the Ministry of Information took over from the War Office responsibility for Press and Telegraph censorship of private communications, but this considerable administrative undertaking had no real connection with the Ministry's work at all and was always conducted quite separately as a branch of the Security Services working on its own.

Censorship of the home Press, periodicals, books and films began and continued on a voluntary basis throughout the war. It is of the first importance to realise what that meant, since a vague belief that the Government could order newspapers to print or refrain from printing whatever it decided was widespread in the country and seemed to be particularly prevalent at times in the War Cabinet. In fact no Defence Regulation was ever operative which gave the Government power to prohibit the publication of any piece of news, nor had it even the right to require that what was going to be published should be submitted for the Censor's inspection before publication. The whole system under which newspapers sent in items of copy to be passed, excised or stopped by the Censor and observed the Censor's requirements when made known to them depended on voluntary agreement without power of enforcement. It was no offence for a newspaper to decide to ignore the Censor's requirements in a particular case: but, of course, any such action that became at all common would have made the system of voluntary censorship altogether unworkable and some form of compulsory censorship would have had to be adopted in its place. In fact, once the censorship settled down after the early months, a deliberate defiance of a censorship requirement, even by a protesting editor, was practically unknown. The sole legal sanction to back up the work of the Censors resided in the Government's power to initiate a prosecution under Defence Regulation 3 of any 33 - 32 -newspaper which, without prior official sanction, had published information which was likely to be of substantial use to the enemy. The Censor's stamp authorising a piece of news for publication afforded full protection to a newspaper from prosecution under this Regulation. It is obvious, too, that a properly co-ordinated Censorship could secure for newspapers and equality in their handling of security information that they could never have achieved by working independently on their individual interpretations of general rules. Not more than half a dozen prosecutions of newspapers for censorship offences were launched during the whole course of the war.

The Censorship of Press material leaving the country for intended publication abroad was not voluntary, since the system adopted of scrutinising all outgoing cables at the Cable Offices and of picking out postal material and sending it to our central bureau ensured that all outgoing material was scrutinised, whether the dispatcher wished it to be or not. Undoubtedly this raised a sense of grievance in overseas correspondents, particularly correspondents of the Dominion Press and American correspondents after America entered the war and set up its own censorship. They felt that the distinction between themselves and the home Press placed them on a lower level of regard and that they suffered, also, from the fact that they had no chance of exercising a common sense discretion whether to submit material or not. The basis of the distinction lay partly in the different nature of the procedure that was involved in censoring outgoing material and partly in the belief that it was, at any rate theoretically, possible to prevent a home newspaper which had published something contrary to security from being exported and therefore coming to the eyes of enemy agents abroad. This belief proved more a theory than a fact, as it nearly always turned out that the offending newspaper had already left the country or was undiscoverable in bulk at the docks before the error of publication had been detected by the Censors during the course of the night. We soon came to recognise this and for a long time the Censors observed a working convention with overseas correspondents that, once something had appeared in the British Press and thus become publicly distributed, it could be sent abroad by overseas correspondents, even though technically a breach of security 34 - 33 -rules. Although I think that it was to be regretted that overseas correspondents were given this grievance of feeling that they were put on a lower level than the home Press, I do not see how a Government machine, concerned primarily with preventing breaches of security, could have voluntarily abstained from scrutinising cables passing through its hands merely because they were not marked as submitted for censorship by the despatching agency. The stakes were too high.

Another form of censorship about which all correspondents, home and overseas, were particularly sensitive was the censorship of the B.B.C. Owing to the ready audibility of B.B.C. broadcasts, even home service broadcasts, in listening areas abroad, censorship of the B.B.C. should really have been regarded from the first as overseas, not home, censorship. In point of fact, it was treated more like voluntary censorship at home and the B.B.C. was given the right to censor its own output by its own officials working, of course, on the Censorship code of instructions issued by the Ministry. Although this system became progressively regulated and improved in course of time, and it is fair to the B.B.C. to say that they became extraordinarily careful and efficient in observing the censorship of their voluminous output, I think that it was a mistake in tactics on our part not to put them under the same regime as overseas correspondents and to install and maintain in the B.B.C. a central group of Censors not members of the Corporation but appointed from outside by ourselves.

Although the Government began the war with an agreement between itself and the Press that there should be a voluntary censorship, there seems to have been little common understanding at the start as to the range and purposes of the censorship thus established. A book was prepared, not in agreement with the Press, which contained a voluminous list of subjects about which editors were asked not to publish information without prior submission to Censorship. The list was extremely comprehensive and covered most activities known to man. By what tests were the Censors to decide, when items were duly submitted for their inspection, to what extent they would agree or refuse to agree to publication? Before the end of 1939 we had taken two steps which 35 - 34 -were to determine the course of censorship throughout the war. We had revised the whole range of notices, known as Defence Notices, at a series of meetings attended by representatives of the Government Departments concerned and of the newspaper and periodical Press and we had got out a revised book of general Notices which at least carried the agreement of all parties concerned. We had also decided that the only maintainable form of censorship in a country that still supported a free Press was one which confined the prohibitions of the Censors to information which, if published and therefore made available to the intelligence of the enemy, would aid him to further his military effort. In a total war, which extends to all activities of the combatant people, even a range such as this can be very extensive and the kind of information which the Censors were authorised to suppress was in no sense confined to military information of the orthodox sort. But we decided early on that, as the only relevant offence created by the Defence Regulations was the publication of information that would aid the enemy, it was the function of the voluntary censorship to elucidate and give decisions that would implement the working of this Regulation and it was not its function to act as a general Government adviser to the newspapers as to what was or was not desirable in the Government's view for them to publish.

In carrying out this policy we were strict to interpret information as applying to facts and not as covering comments, opinions or speculations. Also we refused to allow the Censors to be guided by any psychological speculations as to whether facts which our papers published might assist the enemy to sustain or encourage his own people or to make propaganda against us in this country or to the outside world. Logically, of course, the enemy's propaganda was part of his war effort and what was published in our papers might, and indeed did, feed and assist it: but, logically again, if such considerations by themselves had been accepted as a ground of censorship in this country we should have arrived at a situation in which the people of this country and overseas would have been permitted to read nothing except what was immediately encouraging to themselves and discouraging to the enemy. Such a picture of the war would have been false and fraudulent and would soon have defeated its own purposes.

In sum therefore the British censorship was exercised for the purpose of protecting military security. It did not try to stop publication of matter merely because it was “undesirable” (which generally meant inconvenient to the Government) or because it might encourage the enemy or depress or alarm our own people. Nor was it concerned to sift the truth or falsity of what was submitted to it. These limitations were of the first importance, since if they were not observed we were launched into an endless sea in which the Censor would have been left as the final authority to determine by his own discretion what was or was not good for the public to read. No task was more arduous than that of maintaining the Censorship within these restricted aims in the face of incessant pressure from other Ministers and other Government Departments that we should widen its ambit.

Only once, and in the end disastrously, was the Censorship forced to abandon this position. About February-March, 1942 there were several overseas correspondents, principally Australian, who sent out despatches to their papers containing most inaccurate and most opprobrious descriptions of events in this country. They were not censorable by any tests that the Censorship rules permitted us to apply but they provoked an uproar when read at the other end and reported back. Circumstances, military and political, were critical in those days and it was pointed out by the Dominions Office and the Foreign Office that misrepresentations of this kind might have really disastrous political effects. One or two of the messages, I remember, portrayed people in this country as quite indifferent to the peril which Australia then stood in owing to the Japanese advances. I suspect that if we could have foreseen the future the right course for us to have taken would have been to preserve our rules intact but to have stopped the particularly obnoxious messages on our own responsibility and, when challenged, to have referred to their contents as sufficient authority for our arbitrary action. But the British Government had so often professed in public its aversion from using Censorship for political purposes that I myself felt that if we were to take action to stop messages of this disastrous nature we should openly avow our intention to do so. I think that there is great evil in 37 - 36 -Governments professing one policy merely in the hope that they will not be detected in carrying out another. At any rate, we gave way to the strong pressure to extend the range of Censorship that came from the other Departments, and produced and announced in parliament a formula to the effect that the Censors were authorised for the future to stop messages that were likely to cause grave disharmony between us and our Allies or other friendly countries.

This was, of course, political censorship. It never applied, or could have been applied, to the home Press and it was one more discrimination against the freedom of the overseas correspondents and was resented by them as such. So far as the Censorship went it was our intention only to apply this special power in outrageous cases where the correspondent would have had to admit that he really had no moral grievance. Left to the discretion of the Chief Press Censor, the power would probably have done no harm and would certainly have been only rarely invoked. Unfortunately powers, like fires, are easier to start than to control. The Foreign Office, quite correctly from their point of view, pointed out that, just as on matters of military security the determining voice must be that of the Service Department concerned, so in matters affecting relations with other countries the Foreign Office should have the responsible voice in determining what outgoing Press messages might or might not be obnoxious under this rule. Now hitherto the Foreign Office had hovered rather uneasily on the edge of the Censorship. It had been accepted from the earliest days that there were a few matters relating to foreign affairs which, on any interpretation of security, the Foreign Office could claim to be censorable, and we had enjoyed the assistance of an Adviser or Advisers appointed by the Foreign Office to the Censorship. There was not much for them to do but we were as grateful to them for what they did not do as for what they did. When Mr. Bracken came to the Ministry he thought that these Advisers were unnecessary and their appointments were terminated late in 1941 on the understanding that the Foreign Office advice on Censorship should be conveyed for the future through the officials of their News Division.

It is probably enough to say that the Censorship and the Foreign Office never succeeded in arriving at any common understanding as to how this new political power of Censorship was to be interpreted or applied. It seemed to us and, a fortiori to the correspondents concerned, that the Foreign Office representatives not only sought to invoke the rule in cases of trivial detail but that they wished to ban to overseas correspondents whole subjects of crucial political importance (such as discussion of the Darlan regime in North Africa or the proceedings of the European Advisory Commission). It seemed to American correspondents that their Government at home had only to object to the tone of some despatch from this country for the Censorship here to be required to suppress any such despatches for the future.

I am afraid that the Foreign Office regarded the Censorship as poor collaborators in all this work. Nor was our work rendered intrinsically more easy by the fact that the Foreign Secretary generally mentioned his complaints against the Censorship to the War Cabinet before we had heard about them ourselves.

Towards the end of 1943 we tried to make a new start after a series of incidents by arranging that the task of representing the Foreign Office for this censorship purpose should be transferred from the members of its News Division to two ex-Ambassadors specially appointed for the purpose. This really was a revival of the old system of the Foreign Office Advisers who had disappeared in 1941. But I am afraid that the situation was inherently too difficult and, incidentally, these representatives enjoyed too little authority for any progress to be made. They themselves became dissatisfied at the refusal of the Censorship to treat their advice in this field as binding, and finally in April 1944, after one more explosive incident, the Minister, on the recommendation of all his leading officials concerned with this branch of the Ministry's work, notified the Foreign Secretary that we found this special power which we had taken in March 1942 impossible to apply with satisfaction to any party and that we proposed to abandon its use altogether for the future. The Foreign Office never formally accepted 39 - 38 -this denouncement, nor was any explicit public announcement made that I can recall: but, in practice, we have never invoked or applied it since that date and it was generally understood by the overseas correspondents that we had reverted to the pre-1942 state of affairs. Whatever may be thought of the rights and wrongs of the particular incidents that marked this two year period and of the personalities who contributed to the particular vigour of feeling that was aroused, I am satisfied that this essay in political censorship was a mistake on the part of the British Government: that it did more harm by alienating the sympathy of the correspondents and creating suspicion outside this country than it did good by preventing indiscretions or misrepresentations: and that no person exists who is sufficiently wise or sufficiently skilled to exercise a vague discretionary power of that sort in a way that will preserve genuine freedom of information and comment and at the same time prevent the occasional unfortunate consequences that do inevitably arise from the exercise of that sort of freedom.

So much for the range of censorship. But was our system of administering security censorship itself a good one? On the whole I think that it was and that it did provide without over much mystery-making a fairly enlightened picture of the course of the war without portraying to the enemy any range of important information that was not otherwise available to him. But I do not think that the Government machine as a whole understood sufficiently the difference between the Intelligence Officer's security requirements and the practical results that can in common sense be expected from the high speed and voluminous publicity of this country or America. To the Intelligence Officer, studying, quite properly, his own point of view, every minute item of fact that has any significance at all is potentially as dangerous as some important secret, since he knows that the Intelligence Service on the other side will be straining every nerve to build up a connected picture out of a mass of apparently small and unrelated facts. To the Intelligence Officer, therefore, the ideal of censoring is to stop everything. If reluctantly forced to concede that no people can be expected to conduct an arduous and agonising war in complete ignorance as to what is happening and that the art of censoring lies not so much in suppression as in finding innocuous ways of revealing facts, his requirements become 40 - 39 -multifarious and his rules complicated and not always practical. Much that he thinks important, therefore, has little meaning to the newspaper editor or reporter concerned with the immediate output of his own paper, and the task of the Censors in harmonising these different points of view was not an easy one. On all matters that could fairly be regarded as matters of security the last word on the issue lay with the Service Department concerned and not with the Censor. True, the Censorship had attached to it special Advisers representing each of the Service Departments, and the location of these Advisers in the Ministry and their progressive familiarisation of themselves with the methods and point of view of the Press helped greatly in the formulation of a reasonable Censorship practice. But these representatives were themselves more or less at the mercy of the Intelligence Departments of their own organisations and while they may have been ambassadors they were certainly not plenipotentiaries. I do not think that it would have been right, any more than it would have been practical politics, to have bestowed upon the Censorship the power of over-ruling the requirements of the Service Departments on security matters. This matter was much debated inside and outside the Ministry in the summer of 1941 and the War Cabinet finally decided against such a contention. They could not have done otherwise, but the elaborate machinery that was then fixed up for ensuring a right of appeal for the Minister of Information to his Service colleagues where important questions of release were involved, was not really a workable method of resolving those short, sharp but complicated questions which form the agitations of the Censorship world. The best remedial action that could have been taken, which was indeed envisaged by the Prime Minister's War Cabinet Paper of June 1941, was the appointment of really authoritative representatives of the Departments to head their Censorship detachments and the vesting in those representatives of full power to scrutinise and, if necessary, to over-rule the requirements of the “security” people at their back. Obviously, such decisions would still, in practice, have been weighted in favour of “security”. I do not think that we ever got very far on this road. The publicity of this war remained up to its close bedevilled by the invisible presence of the Intelligence Officer and his often tortuous arguments. No doubt it was partly our own 41 - 40 -weakness, but we never evolved a satisfactory system for getting the Government machine as a whole to weigh the arguments for publicity in one scale against the arguments for secrecy in the other. An ounce of security appeared to out- weigh a ton of general public advantage. The easy generalisation “Well, if publishing that helps the enemy that closes the matter” appeared to be the reigning formula, even in the years when success came flooding back to our Armies. As if a modern war was fought only against the enemy!

The Censorship, on the other hand, was a success and, broadly speaking, it was not an institution that was resented in any active sense either by the Press or by the public. There were several reasons for this piece of good fortune: but the two main ones, I think, were that at an early date the Censorship secured the confidence of the Press, who trusted its intention to be fair and sensible, and that the Censorship progressively achieved a speed and skill in the conduct of its technical arrangements which were well suited to Press requirements. In a sense, popularity of a Censorship with the Press is not a good sign. It has no business to enlist on the side of the Press against other Government Departments. It must fight the battles of the Press against those Departments where it thinks that the Press are in the right, but it has no business to fight those battles through the columns of the Press or to stultify its own position by adopting the character of the willing but impotent friend. Of course in our early and most troubled days we sometimes fell into both these errors. But I think that we had the good sense, after a time, to see that they could lead to no good. It is all very well for the Censor to say to a newspaper man “I think that you are perfectly right but you know what the Admiralty are” but his business as a branch of the Government is either to agitate until the Admiralty point of view is corrected or to sit down under it and make the best of it to the outside world. What he may say inside is another matter.

There are two things that are inherent in the whole Press system and which a Censorship must study if it aims to succeed. Decisions must be promptly obtainable, clearly communicated and impartially applied to all competitors. Secondly, speed and deftness must be introduced into every aspect of the Censorship machine, even though this may involve a luxury of communication equipment and an apparent over-provision of personnel. Refined or complicated 42 - 41 -decisions, however much based on equity, are not needed, since the Press man, working under the pressure that he does, is much less concerned with obtaining the final distillation of his rights than with obtaining a clear and firm decision as to what he can do that he can rely upon to be applied to his rivals as well as to himself.

The personnel of the Censorship Department at the beginning of the war were wrongly recruited. It was thought that by assembling equal detachments of retired Naval, Military and Air Force officers, diluted by a fourth detachment of civilians, but omitting practically all practising journalists, a body of Censors would be created. This was a mistake. There was ample talent among the Censors, but they lacked clear instructions as to what they were to do and what the limit of their functions was, and they were insufficiently alive to the nature and conditions of Press work. There are no natural Censors, but I admit to a preference for the trained lawyer in this field. He is naturally accurate and careful and he knows that decisions cannot be worse than wrong. Journalists do not, on the whole, make good Censors. They are disposed to be careless and they have a tendency to depart from the rules in order to give effect to the inspiration of the moment. All the same, a sprinkling of journalists is essential to a Censorship, at any rate in its early days, in order to afford the necessary contact with the technical background of their work.