Churchill's Wizards (37 page)

‘There is no question of propaganda,' Sir Samuel Hoare told the House of Commons in his capacity as Lord Privy Seal on 11 October 1939. ‘It will be publicity and by that I mean straight news.' To British ears, the word ‘propaganda' is unpleasant. In 1928, Arthur Ponsonby's
Falsehood in War-Time
exposed many myths of WW1, showing how in that war ‘propaganda' came to mean misrepresentation and manipulation. The connotations have remained since mostly negative; except, of course, when you truly believe in what is being propagated or put forward.

The documentary film-makers were one such band of believers. John Grierson first used the word ‘documentary' in a 1926 newspaper review he wrote of Robert Flaherty's anthropological film about Western Samoa,
Moana
, saying that it had ‘documentary value'. From 1929 ‘documentary' became the self-defining term for an important group of British film-makers associated with Grierson who were interested in ‘the creative treatment of actuality'. Grierson worked closely with a public relations man of genius, a remarkable British civil servant, Sir Stephen Tallents, who had been wounded in the trenches with the Irish Guards, and worked on social reforms with William Beveridge. In 1926, Tallents became the secretary of the Empire Marketing Board. Playing on Tallents's internationalist vision, John Grierson persuaded him that cinema could help make the British Empire ‘come alive'. Accordingly, after getting some ideas from Rudyard Kipling at Burwash, Tallents commissioned a film from Walter Creighton called
One Family
, in which a small boy falls asleep over his geography lesson and dreams a dream of the British Empire. A 1930 review found it ‘the most extraordinary picture yet made by a British firm':

What Tallents encouraged in British documentary film-makers was public service propaganda. These non-commercial films looked at the social utilities that linked everybody – electricity, gas, post, railways, shipping, telephones, wireless, and so on – and were the first that allowed ordinary people to speak to the camera. The documentary film-makers were not embarrassed by the word ‘propaganda'. John Grierson's epigraph to Paul Rotha's
Documentary Film
, published by Faber in January 1936, ‘I look upon cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist', is confirmed in his introduction to the book:

Most British journalists recoil from the word ‘propaganda' as though from a poisonous snake, yet it is really a pet which sits on their desk. All journalism is propaganda when it presents a case or seeks to persuade, because the estimation of ‘news value' and the ordering of an argument is intimately linked to a belief system. The greatest journalists understand this. ‘I was a professional recorder of events, a propagandist, not a soldier,' wrote one of WW2's finest reporters, Alan Moorehead, of himself. Purge ‘propaganda' of negative associations and see it as a branch of rhetoric, or as information directed to public service, and we may get nearer to the way the British came to see it in WW2. In 1936, Sir Stephen Tallents became controller of public relations at the BBC, where a parallel process to Grierson's ‘imaginative interpretation of everyday life' was going on among the first radio documentary feature-makers, like John Pudney and Stephen Potter.

In May 1940, the telephone rang at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. After a long pause, the Hon. Harold Nicolson, the epicene National Labour
MP for West Leicester, was told to hold on for the new Prime Minister. Nicolson had written a Penguin Special in three weeks in October 1939,
Why Britain is at War
, which sold 100,000 copies, and Churchill was inviting him to join the Ministry of Information. As parliamentary secretary to the minister, Duff Cooper, Nicolson found himself in ‘the most unpopular department in the whole British Commonwealth of Nations'. (Men from the MoI were known as ‘Cooper's Snoopers'.) But Nicolson applauded the British public's ‘healthy dislike of all forms of Government propaganda' and sympathised with the ‘unconquerable minds' of citizens and journalists frustrated by wartime limitations. Britain was not the Third Reich and nor was he himself ‘imitating the technique of Doctor Joseph Goebbels'. In the article he wrote at the end of 1940 for the
BBC
Handbook 1941
, Nicolson explained ‘the essential difference between the theory and practice of German, or totalitarian, propaganda, and British, or democratic, propaganda'. The first was a ‘smash-and-grab raid on the emotions of the uneducated' and the second an appeal to the intelligent, free mind. ‘Totalitarian propaganda is akin to revivalism; democratic propaganda is akin to education.'

Nicolson was sometimes encouraged by the British people's spirit, but sometimes was in despair:

Duff Cooper had already found one: Sefton Delmer. ‘Don't drop your reporting for the
Daily Express
,' the latest Minister of Information said to the journalist, newly escaped from the fall of France with all the other journalists, ‘but if you could fit in the occasional German broadcast on the BBC we shall all be most grateful.'

Radio was Sefton Delmer's destiny. When he came to write the first volume of his autobiography, he remembered the summer of 1914 when he was with his mother and sister in the German spa of Bad Sachsa and they watched a cinematograph of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke. A few days later troops in field-grey uniforms camped in the water meadows and a signals unit mounted a brand-
new field wireless station, erecting a huge mast, fixing the antennae and cranking the motor of their electric generator. Its roaring splutter was ‘the first echo of twentieth century war' for the ten-year-old boy.

Delmer's most celebrated broadcast on the BBC German Service was on 19 July 1940, an hour after Adolf Hitler had spoken at a specially convened session of the Reichstag, praising the German armed forces for their magnificent victories across Europe, and boasting of his strategic skill, before offering peace to England. Hitler had said:

Without time for elaborate prior consultation between the propagandists of EH and the diplomats of the Foreign Office, large Tom Delmer settled under the BBC microphone to make a momentous broadcast. In his autobiography, Delmer says it was his first ever in any language, which is not strictly true as he had already done two or three for the BBC. But as a piece of bare-faced cheek, it counts as one of the great debuts in wireless history. Delmer addressed himself directly to the Führer in smooth and deferential German: ‘Herr Hitler, you have on occasion in the past consulted me as to the mood of the British public. So permit me to render your excellency this little service once again tonight. Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal of yours to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Führer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you, right in your evil-smelling teeth …' This shocked the Germans. They could not conceive that such rudeness would be allowed without the highest possible sanction. Confirmation did come on the Monday when Lord Halifax, former appeaser though he was, spoke for the British government and formally rejected parley with Germany.

Delmer was clearly not a man who could fit into the ‘spinsterish' civil service ethos of the BBC full time, with its intolerable ‘dreariness and pious unrealism', but he continued to broadcast on occasion for
the BBC because he was both good and quick. In 1941–2, when Hugh Greene's German Service had to respond within hours to the chief domestic radio commentator of Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, Hans Fritzsche, they naturally asked Sefton Delmer to refute his broadcasts point by point. But Delmer's genius for the medium was finally fulfilled not in the ‘white' BBC but in the rougher game of ‘black' radio.

Before becoming
Meister im Rundfunk
, Delmer entered into an apprenticeship and alliance with Leonard Ingrams. They had known each other from before the war when Ingrams was ‘the flying banker' who piloted his own Puss Moth plane around Europe. Delmer figured that Ingrams (the father of Richard, founding editor of
Private Eye
magazine) was somebody in the cloak-and-dagger world, and found later that he was ‘a star operative on the British side of the Secret War'. Ingrams was, in fact, an undersecretary at the Ministry of Economic Warfare who liaised with Electra House, the Secret Intelligence Service, SOE and later PWE.

Arthur Christiansen, editor of the
Daily Express
, sent Delmer to Lisbon in November 1940 where over the next three months the reporter re-immersed himself in the world of Nazi Germany by interviewing hundreds of refugees who had escaped or bribed their way out and were either settling in Salazar's Jew-tolerating dictatorship, or preparing to sail on to the New World. In February 1941, Ingrams obtained security clearance from both SIS and MI5 for Delmer to join the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office to start work on a new kind of broadcasting, in German, to Germany.

The BBC employed fewer than 5,000 people at the start of WW2, and they were soon thrown into upheaval. On Friday 1 September 1939, Val Gielgud (brother of the famous actor John), head of the BBC's Drama and Features department, was in a rehearsal room off Marylebone High Street. He was preparing to direct his first ever play for the new medium of television,
The Circle
by W. Somerset Maugham, when the BBC entered its ‘emergency period'. There was a pre-arranged code: when the announcers said ‘This is London' instead of ‘This is the National Programme', television from Alexandra Palace closed down for the duration. All departments at Broadcasting House except News followed their evacuation procedures and made their
way to the regions to escape the imminently expected carpet-bombing of London. Because these bombers could have used British medium-wave transmitters as a navigational aid, the Regional Programmes and the National Programme were merged into one ‘Home Service'. Output was restricted to eight news bulletins a day, government edicts, and hours of Sandy Macpherson playing the BBC Theatre Organ.

Since all theatres, cinemas, dance halls and places of public entertainment were also closed by government order for fear of mass deaths from said bombing, it is little wonder that bored listeners scrolling across the radio dial for livelier fare in the blackout came upon German propaganda broadcasting to Britain from Hamburg. On 18 September 1939, Jonah Barrington, the radio critic of the
Daily
Express
, heard a voice over the airwaves that he christened ‘Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen':

It is almost certain that the particular voice he heard actually belonged to an improbable Polish-German, MG-driving playboy called Wolff Mittler, but the nickname ‘Lord Haw-Haw' became wrongly attached to another broadcaster of German propaganda, the razor-scarred Irish fascist William Joyce. Joyce had once been Oswald Mosley's deputy in the British Union of Fascists, and he sounded less a silly-ass-toff than a sarcastic schoolmaster. (BBC Monitoring called him ‘Sinister Sam'.) Most British households had a wireless licence in 1939, and the BBC audience was about twenty-eight million people. More than half of them heard Haw-Haw drawling ‘Jairmany calling … Jairmany calling …' at some time or other in the Phoney War, and the keenest BBC listeners heard him most. The government worried about him because he was saying things that you did not usually hear on the BBC, offering criticism of poverty and slums and unemployment and making sneering attacks on the rich and powerful who ignored them.

Haw-Haw's snide commentary during the Phoney War pushed the BBC towards finding new voices who spoke more freely. In early July 1940 Harold Nicolson of the Ministry of Information had a conversation with the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who, as Lord Privy Seal, was effectively
Churchill's Deputy Prime Minister. Nicolson reported that