Antecedentes

Many Prime Ministers have attempted to control newspapers and the history of this fraught affiliation was examined by Margach, a political correspondent for almost 50 years, in The Abuse of Power: the War Between Downing Street and the Media.¹⁴¹ The title of the book indicated this was a

139 Fussell, Wartime, p. 154.

140 Ibid.

141 Margach, Abuse of Power.

narrow study, and the word ‘war’ suggested the subject was approached from a preconceived position that denied more complicated relationships, yet in it Margach detailed the ‘battles between the two empires’ from David Lloyd George in 1916 to James Callaghan 60 years later. He was

particularly harsh on Chamberlain, describing him as ‘the most

authoritarian, intolerant and arrogant’ of Prime Ministers’, but made no concession to the pressure the international situation was bringing to bear on his subject, naturally a shy man who was nearing 70 when he was flying between London and Munich in 1938.¹⁴² Also, Margach’s book was written before the publication of government papers that has led to a revision of the verdict prevalent on Chamberlain in the last 25 years. Margach was more kind to Churchill even though the war leader shared Chamberlain’s distaste for the press despite having been a journalist in his younger years. Margach explained:

The reason for this was perfectly simple: during his astonishingly long career at Westminster he never had any direct personal contact with the press in general or with political correspondents in particular. He was a journalist who loved journalism but who never mixed with journalists and who had no understanding or sympathy with the job they were doing.¹⁴³

Churchill first made his name as a war correspondent at the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a member of what William Howard Russell, a founder member of the breed, described as a luckless tribe.¹⁴⁴ Fortune was the least of the shortcomings in those reporting the conflict from 1939 to 1945 according to Knightley, whose The First Casualty gave a generally damning verdict. His book examined war reporting from the

142 Ibid, pp. 1, 51.

143 Ibid, p. 66.

144 Cited in Knightley, First Casualty, p. 1.

Crimea to the Balkans in the 1990s and, in his view, reporters in the Second World War became pedlars of propaganda. This, and a failure to

acknowledge it, had implications: ‘If sufficient correspondents had undertaken a critical look at their performance, some improvement in the whole standard of war reporting might have followed,’ he wrote.¹⁴⁵

The reasons behind newspapers’ lack of interrogation in the build-up to the Second World War were examined by Koss, who provided an

extensively researched account of the press barons in The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. He argued that this was a legacy of 1914 when newspapers believed they had helped propel Britain into the First World War and as a consequence editors were too circumspect 25 years later.¹⁴⁶ Editors, he wrote, did not need prompts from Downing Street:

Rightly, or wrongly, inflammatory journalism was considered to have been one of the principal causes of the previous war. That harrowing experience cast as long a shadow in Fleet Street as in Downing Street, and no one wanted to repeat it.¹⁴⁷

Gannon’s The British Press and Germany 1936-9 suggested this stance had financial as well as moral imperatives. Newspapers, he argued, emerged from the Depression with good economic reasons to encourage recovery by creating a good psychological atmosphere.¹⁴⁸ For this purpose they tended to emphasise contentment at home and security abroad. Both financially and intellectually it was unwise or impossible for the British press to adopt a strongly critical line towards Nazi Germany. Gannon stated:

‘The readers did not want to read it, and the intellectuals did not want to

145 Ibid, p. 364.

146 Koss, Rise and Fall, p. 543.

147 Ibid.

148 Gannon, British Press, pp. 87-88.

write it.’¹⁴⁹ This interpretation was open to criticism on at least two

grounds: Firstly, on what basis were the readers’ opinions judged? Second, who and where were these intellectuals refusing to write for newspapers?

Equally contentious was Gannon’s assessment of the standing of the foreign correspondent, which he described as the ‘veritable ideological James Bonds of their time’. He added that the foreign correspondent ‘became a knowledgeable, romantic and ultimately reassuring figure’, which was too strong given the doubts about the press sown in the public’s minds by the reporting of the First World War.¹⁵⁰

The hand of the government was evident in the headlines and copy between 1914 and 1918 and Stanley Harrison detected the influence of Downing Street in the build-up to the Second World War, claiming in Poor Men’s Guardians that the ‘There will be no war’ optimism in the Daily Express throughout 1938 and 1939 was ‘carefully orchestrated’ by Sir Samuel Hoare.¹⁵¹ Harrison wrongly described Hoare as the Foreign Secretary (he had resigned from that post in December 1935 and had become Home Secretary in May 1937) but cited the former editor of the Daily Herald Francis Williams in describing the gentle pressures applied at confidential meetings arranged by Hoare with newspaper proprietors.¹⁵² As a consequence, Harrison wrote: ‘Many British newspapers established close relations with the Nazis and played Hitler’s game.’¹⁵³

149 Ibid, p. 2.

150 Ibid, p. 7.

151 Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians: A Survey of the Struggle for a Democratic Newspaper Press 1763-1973 (Southampton: Camelot, 1974), p. 203.

152 Francis Williams, Press, Parliament and People (London: Heinemann, 1946), cited in Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians, p. 203.

153 Ibid.

There are many biographies about these press magnates and the men they employed as editors of national newspapers. J. Lee Thompson’s

Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics and Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth’s Northcliffe charted the narrow line between genius and megalomania that were characteristics of the founder of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Beaverbrook, which was an official biography by the subject’s friend Taylor and was lacking in proper critical analysis, provided insights into the mind of another great newspaper proprietor.¹⁵⁴ There are also histories of national newspapers, but, perhaps because paper rationing curtailed the number of memos, David Ayerst’s The Manchester Guardian (22 pages out of 700), the internally produced The History of The Times, and Lord Burnham’s The Story of the Daily Telegraph failed to devote the pages to the war period that might be anticipated.¹⁵⁵ Surprisingly, Ayerst, whose scrupulous searching of The Guardian Archive provided much of his material and covered important information about the running of the

newspaper in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, did not mention the numerous important stories that the editor, William Percival Crozier and the Guardian chose not to print during the war. These will be examined later in the

thesis.¹⁵⁶

The history of British journalism is far more trodden ground, with Engel’s Tickle the Public, and Conboy’s Journalism: A Critical History typical in providing assiduous background on the rise of the press barons in

154 J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics 1865-1922 (London: Murray, 2000); Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe; A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook (London: Simon and Schuster, 1972).

155 Times staff, History of The Times, Part 2. 1921-1948 (London: Times, 1952); Lord Burnham., Peterborough Court: The Story of the Daily Telegraph (London: Cassell, 1955).

156 Fifty Great Years: Through The Eyes of the Evening Chronicle, 1897-1947, ed. by Henry J. Bradley, (Manchester: Kemsley, 1997).

the twenties and thirties.¹⁵⁷ Engel’s idiosyncratic account described the alliance of Beaverbrook and Rothermere that led to the formation of a political party as ‘barely credible’, adding ‘the two press lords really did seem to think they could take over the country’.¹⁵⁸ Conboy argued that this had important implications because the effect of the two lords’ political interventions was to persuade the government to set up the BBC as a public service ‘without a hectoring proprietor or the commercial demands of advertisers’.¹⁵⁹ He reported that the war was pivotal for the media as the public looked to the BBC for news:

The Second World War was the defining moment in the prestige of the BBC both nationally and internationally and, more importantly, of radio journalism as a medium which could deliver a quality and speed of information which were to become admired as a model of democratic discourse to counter the flow of broadcast totalitarianism.¹⁶⁰

The BBC has divided historians. None doubted that the corporation emerged from the Second World War with an enhanced reputation, but the verdict on its output is less clear-cut. Curran and Seaton credited the BBC with inventing propaganda ‘in its British form’ and stated that the

corporation was ‘almost certainly the most important instrument of domestic propaganda during the war’, adding it ‘seldom lied if it could avoid doing so’.¹⁶¹ Nicholas Pronay was more fulsome, arguing that the British news media, with the BBC to the fore, ‘managed to maintain the trust of the British public at home and gained a reputation for Britain abroad

157 Engel Tickle the Public; Conboy, Critical History.

158 Engel, Tickle the Public, p. 116.

159 Conboy, Critical History, p. 177.

160 Ibid, p. 194.

161 Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, pp. 111, 120, 139.

for having even in wartime an honest, free and truthful media’.¹⁶² This, Sian Nicholas found remarkable: ‘British people were only told what their war leaders wanted them to know, were told much that was deliberately false, and were denied knowledge of much more that they may have wished to know.’¹⁶³ Perhaps Richard Crossman summed it up best when he wrote:

‘You must hate propaganda to do it well.’¹⁶⁴ Kevin Williams was largely complimentary about the UK’s national broadcaster, stating that the conflict was a war of words ‘with the BBC at its heart’, but also noted that

government pressure meant that programmes on post-war reconstruction were shelved or broadcast in a diluted form.¹⁶⁵ Most damningly, the Beveridge Report, which led to the formation of the National Health Service, was ignored thanks to the overtures of the government after initial enthusiastic coverage.¹⁶⁶ Williams also noted a watershed for newspapers, writing that Churchill’s attempt to suspend the Daily Mirror in 1942 proved to be a turning point as the Prime Minister had to back down in the face of pressure in Parliament and the wider country. Williams wrote: ‘This was the last attempt to use Regulation 2D to prevent the publication of material in the press that the government did not like.’¹⁶⁷

162 N. Pronay, ‘The News Media at War’, in Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918-45, ed.

by N. Pronay and D. W. Spring (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp.173-208 (p. 174).

163 S. Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and Wartime BBC (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 220.

164 Cited in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, p. 139

165 Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day: A History of Media and Communication in Britain, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 136, 140.

166 Ibid, p. 140.

167 Ibid, p. 136.