Auntie’s War: The BBC During The Second World War

Edward Stourton

Doubleday, £20

Review by Brian Morton

THIS comes rather hot on the heels of Tom Mills’s sharply critical The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service, which portrayed the corporation as being, far from balanced and impartial, a virtual mouthpiece of the British Establishment and business community. If ever there were a time when impartiality was at a justifiable discount, it was during the Second World War, where every branch of the media (as they weren’t yet styled) was mobilised on behalf of the Allied war effort. That doesn’t mean that Stourton’s affectionate insider’s view is uncritical but it tends to accept the BBC’s complicity with those in power as a given rather than a dereliction.

The Second World War was waged against a regime that since 1933 had demonstrated a virtuosic grasp of the power of broadcast propaganda, and even when the war began the BBC struggled to hold an audience against the strangely beguiling wheedle of Lord Haw-Haw. Stourton devotes some space to the man born William Joyce, whose “Jairmany calling” call-sign became “the defining sound of the Phoney War”. Once the war heated up, emphasis switched to as-live despatches by Charles Gardner and others from hill-tops in Kent and Sussex as the Battle of Britain played out overhead. Listeners were divided as to whether they wanted to hear the combat equivalent of a football commentary, and as Stourton shows, some of these broadcasts were as wanting in accuracy as they were in good taste. One rousing description of a German fighter coming down turned out to be the death-dive of a British plane and its pilot.

Two weeks ago they put up a statue to George Orwell outside the building he described as a cross between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum. In Stourton’s version, Auntie more often resembles the former, with a curiously virginal approach to the medium. It took someone like Richard Dimbleby to persuade the powers that be that radio might be a rather effective news vehicle, but then the history of technology is littered with instances of the blindingly obvious being ignored. The pioneers of sound recording had no notion of using it for music, and by the same token radio in its early days hesitated to compete with the powerful newspaper sector.

Dimbleby wasn’t alone in seeing new opportunities in the new medium. The voice that above all defines the wartime BBC isn’t the obvious one at all. Churchill was a rather poor and mannered broadcaster, whose parliamentary rhetoric broke just about every one of the rules and hints laid down for announcers and presenters. Those rules borrowed very heavily from a note written by the popular novelist JB Priestley, whose unvarnished northern accent and ordinary-bloke delivery endeared him to millions and made him, in some quarters at least, considerably more popular than the rascally toff who had become prime minister. Priestley’s Postscript broadcasts contain some of the best writing ever created for radio, delivered without what he himself decried as “platform effects and please-give-me-your-applause tricks”. Postscript was still being cited in the 1980s by a later prime minister given to Churchillian platform effects as proof that the BBC was red to its very core, but Priestley’s socialism was couthy rather than dialectical and he had the gift of avoiding bathos by a whisker, as when he proposed that the war was being fought on behalf of “a better Margate in a better England, in a nobler world”. No onion needed to be taken out; the sentiment was genuine.

There are moments when one wonders whether Stourton, who started his BBC career sub-editing broadcast copy, has read the list of “hints” he quotes, with its strictures on indirect constructions, intransitive verbs, long sentences and foreign terms; but for the most part he tells a brisk and fascinating story. Reading it so soon after Mills’s highly politicised account of approximately the same period leaves Auntie’s War sounding more celebratory than genuinely balanced, and routinely nostalgic about a “golden age” of British comedy. Tommy Handley’s ITMA routine as Mr Handtorch, Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries, is hardly cutting-edge satire – “Heil folks, it’s Mein Kampf again. Sorry, I should say ‘Hello folks, it’s that man again’. That was the Goebbled version, a bit doctored. I usually go all goosey when I can’t follow my proper-gander . . .” – and Stourton somehow manages to make it sound even more laboured than usual.

For polemic, it’s still best to head for Mills; for wartime entertainment, to Tom Hickman’s What Did You Do In The War, Auntie?; and for a general narrative, to Asa Briggs’ official history; but if you have a relative who still asks “Can I do you now, sir” or “I don’t mind if I do”, here’s the ideal Christmas book.