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Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It, I'm Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you are listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you are here. On today's show, heading into Labor Day weekend, we are revisiting two All Of It special projects with a focus on history. In the next hour, we'll explore the Public Song Project, a listener-generated songbook based on work in the public domain that we launched earlier this year.

First, you'll hear our program, 100 Years of the BBC. Next year, WNYC will mark its 100th anniversary on the air, but last year, we on AOI, marked the milestone of another broadcaster that has been a companion to radio listeners for a century, the BBC. Our special aired on more than 100 public radio stations across the country, right around the anniversary of the organization's first broadcast. Here's 100 Years of the BBC.

Arthur Burrows: 2LO, Marconi House, London calling. 2LO, Marconi House, London calling.

Alison Stewart: The British Broadcasting Company first went on the air, November 14th, 1922. It was the aftermath of World War I, and even though the Allies won the war, Britain was still dealing with devastating losses. The war was an important part of the BBC's origin story. Joining me, as we delve into the past, present, and future of the BBC, is Professor David Hendy, author of the book, The BBC: A Century on Air. Hi, David. It's Alison Stewart in New York City. How are you?

David Hendy: Hi, Alison. I'm fine. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm great. Thank you for making the time today, I know it's late there. Let's start by learning about what those early years were like for the BBC and Britain when it was founded by three men, Arthur Burrows, Cecil Lewis, and John Reith.

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Alison Stewart: David, around the time of 1922, when the BBC was founded, Britain was still recovering from a devastating World War. More than 800,000 British soldiers were killed. Where was the nation culturally and psychologically at this time?

David Hendy: Well, four years of war was still very much casting a long shadow on British society. That, I think is a really, really important thing to remember when we contemplate the story of broadcasting beginning with the BBC. In 1922, people are still feeling the effects of war. I think that the predominant note is this feeling that the war, and the destructiveness of war had shown that civilization was fragile.

This mattered because in 1918, when the war was over, in Britain, the number of people who could vote had expanded hugely from something just under 8 million to over 21 million. Newspapers had had a pretty bad war. They'd been hysterical, they were partisan, they were very divided by class. The universities could educate people but only a very, very few. The church seemed to be losing its power. What was it that was going to help hold society together? That's the climate in which the BBC is born.

Alison Stewart: How does one go from that idea, that we need this unifying force, we need this educating force, to it actually becoming a real thing? What were the first steps from the idea of this, of a BBC, to it becoming something real?

David Hendy: We have to think of the people who are involved, and in a way, it's almost the coming together of the DNA embodied by the very small creative nucleus of the men, mostly. It was mostly men at the time, who were involved. If we think about say, three of these men, Cecil Lewis who became Deputy Director of Programmes in this new organization, the BBC. He was just 24 years old at the time. As a teenager, he'd been a fighter pilot during the First World War.

He'd been exhilarated by the experience of flying, of looking down and what was happening below, of mastering this new technology, this machinery of flight, of a single-minded mission. He'd also looked down on what was happening below, and despaired of humanity, and was after the war, looking for that way of healing humanity, of redeeming humanity, of increasing mutual understanding. For him, it was art, and it was music, and it was poetry.

How that was going to work, he didn't know. Alongside him, his boss was Arthur Burrows. Slightly older, he was 40 years old in 1922. He, in the war, had worked for the Marconi company, eavesdropping on enemy radio propaganda. He'd become obsessed with the idea that if propaganda could be spread so easily through this new thing, radio, then why could not good information be spread? Then, the third person who's there in this small group who get things going in 1922, is John Reith.

Alison Stewart: I'd like to follow up a little bit about John Reith, who would be the most influential in the early history of the BBC, serving as director general. He was dubbed the Napoleon of Savoy Hill, which was the building the BBC occupied at the time. Let's listen to an interview of an older John Reith talking about why he got involved with the BBC. This is from a series of interviews he gave for BBC1 back in 1967. Let's take a listen, then we can talk about it on the other side.

John Reith: An advertisement in The Morning Post one day, "British Broadcasting Company (in formation). Applications are invited for the following officers: General Manager, Secretary, Director of Programmes, Chief Engineer," so I wrote an application."

Alison Stewart: I want to ask you about the voice. In a series of interviews, someone was asking him about the BBC accent, and questioning him about the creation of the BBC accent. First of all, was that a thing, David?

David Hendy: It was in 1926, Reith established a committee for standards of English. That was about trying to establish how should words be pronounced, what kind of accent should there be on air, and the class-based assumptions of the time triumphed. It was basically decided that what was called a Southern English educated accent, a kind of modified version of the Queen's English, was the acceptable way for BBC's announcers to speak on air.

BBC Announcer: Here's John Snagge to introduce tonight's War Report.

David Hendy: Now, what's interesting about that is actually Reith conceived of this as an undemocratic means of achieving a democratic end.

John Reith: What I've tried to get was a style or quality of English that would not be laughed at in any part of the country. I was just vehemently opposed to what variously has been called the Oxford accent or the Southeastern accent such as the theater, the far side. With more FEHs, you see, they are disappearing.

David Hendy: He believed that the British population, the British public would be held back, for instance, they wouldn't be able to get employment if they weren't able to speak properly. He believed that the BBC again was setting standards. It was all about establishing what was the best, and making that available to all.

His approach to language, even though it seems deeply undemocratic to us, and indeed was riddled with all sorts of class assumptions, and indeed had the effect of removing from the airwaves many regional accents, it did make more uniform the sound of the BBC. Reith conceived of that as a kind of equalizing force in terms of language. It's a complicated thing that's going on with that.

Alison Stewart: The BBC first hit the airwaves on Tuesday, November 14th, 1922. Arthur Burrows said this into the mic.

Arthur Burrows: 2LO, Marconi House, London calling. 2LO, Marconi House, London calling.

Alison Stewart: Now, that was a recreation of the first broadcast provided by the BBC. How did the British public respond to this new service, David?

David Hendy: Before the year was out, you had something like 2,000 letters arriving every day from listeners around the country. A lot of it is about reception. They're complaining that they can't quite hear, and people are listening on headphones, on crystal radio sets, homemade kits, and so on. Not everyone can afford a fancy valve set that can have very good reception. Reception itself, the technology dominates the early complaints from listeners.

Alison Stewart: I want to talk about funding, what were the crucial steps that led to the BBC becoming a service funded by the British government?

David Hendy: The best way to think about it is that it isn't funded by the British government. It's funded by the British people, but it's the government that organizes the collection of the money from the British people. Right at the beginning, in 1922, there's concern in government circles about a commercial monopoly, and there is also a concern about the free-for-all that they think is happening across the Atlantic in America.

It's pointed out that in June 1922, when negotiations are ongoing about the creation of the BBC, that there are 318 radio stations in the United States of America. They talk about chaos in the ether. They look across to America and say, "We don't want that. We need to have some kind of coordinated unitary response." The BBC, in a fundamental sense, it's neither commercial nor is it state. It is not funded by the government, it's not funded out of taxes. It is paid for by the people. It belongs to the British public.

Alison Stewart: One of the earliest tests for the BBC happened during the General Strike in May of 1926, in which millions of workers around Britain collectively stopped working to demand better conditions, wages, job opportunities, and support of the country's coal miners. Could you walk us through how the BBC mobilized to offer coverage of this conflict and why it became so important to the early history of the organization?

David Hendy: One of the ways in which the BBC seized the moment was that amongst those parts of industry, which were shut down by the strikes were the newspapers, they just ceased production. Now, the BBC up until this point had been heavily restricted so it didn't challenge the newspaper's monopoly. Now, of course, the newspapers were not being printed. The restrictions were lifted. Suddenly, at the start of the strike, the BBC goes from just two news bulletins a day to five news bulletins a day.

Now, the real problem the BBC had was that there were plenty of people in Stanley Baldwin's government, including most forcefully one Winston Churchill, who wanted to take over the BBC completely and turn it into a straightforward mouthpiece of government policy and crush the strike. It meant, in fact, that government views dominated. When, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury wanted to come on air and try and offer terms of peace and suggestions for reconciliation, the government just behind the scenes said, "Well, no, you can't let him go on air, but you're going to have to tell him, not us."

It was a major moment for the BBC because so many people were listening to radio throughout the dispute. It had entered the national consciousness in a way that it hadn't for the first few years of its existence.

Norman Long: This is just a little skit on the very strict censorship with which radio entertainers had to contend. [sings] Now, the BBC once wrote to me and said, "Dear Norman Long, we thought you'd like to face the mic with your piano, smile, and song."

Alison Stewart: Next, we'll discuss how the BBC earned a role as an essential part of life in the average British home, its coverage of the Second World War. We'll hear archival recordings of some wartime broadcasts. You are listening to 100 years of the BBC from WNYC's All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart.

Norman Long: [sings] "Just think of the bald-headed men you'll upset. We can't let you broadcast that."

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Alison Stewart: From WNYC's All Of It, I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our in-depth conversation with the author of the book, The BBC: A Century on Air Professor David Hendy. David, we are now moving onto the years before, during, and after World War II. Here's what was happening.

BBC Broadcaster: It's impossible to tell which are our machines and which are the Germans'. There's one definitely down in this battle, and there's a fight going on. You can hear the little rattles of machine gun bullets. That was a bomb as you may imagine.

Alison Stewart: In the late 1930s, Hitler was rising to power and Europe was wary of a wider conflict so the BBC began to make preparations. They sent producers all around Britain and away from London to avoid Nazi bombers. In total, the BBC was scattered around 250 different places across the country. Then, in 1939, Germany invaded Poland, which led to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declaring war.

Neville Chamberlain: This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them, by eleven o'clock, a state of war would exist between us.

Alison Stewart: Soon after BBC producers were embedded within British units and years later on D-Day in 1944, after the US joined the war, BBC reporters like John McAdam and Howard Marshall crossed the channel in boats and aboard planes alongside Allied Forces sending reports back home.

My guest is Professor David Hendy, author of the book The BBC: A Century on Air. David, you say World War II was a defining moment for the organization. Tell us why.

David Hendy: Well, as you said, when there was a real fear that when war was declared there would be an overwhelming and imminent attack on the Capitol. It wasn't just about dispersing staff deep into the countryside, into different cities, and so on. It was about reorganizing the whole transmitter network. Television which had started in 1936 had to shut down. The BBC in one sense became both more centralized because there was a single radio service, the home service, as it was called, but also split up into lots of almost semi-independent establishments as they were called.

By the end of the war, the BBC existed in something like 250 different places. Right at the beginning, the BBC had a very shaky start because it had prepared for an overwhelming attack as soon as war was declared. In fact, nothing very much happened. Theaters had closed down, sporting events had been canceled, and so on. People only had the BBC to listen to on the radio. Because the BBC has a vital function in war, it's not just about providing up-to-date news for the British listener, it's about sustaining morale. It's about distracting people with comedy and entertainment. It's about making people feel as if they're part of the war effort. The BBC is a vital ingredient to sustaining public morale. Fairly quickly in the war, it learns. Its program makers learn and become increasingly agile about tapping into the popular mood.

Alison Stewart: Yes. You discussed in the book about how all kinds of people liked a popular program called It's That Man Again.

ITMA Intro: [singing] It's that man again. It's that man again.

Alison Stewart: Would you describe It's That Man Again?

David Hendy: Yes. It's abbreviated to ITMA by many of the listeners. Really, it's a comedy series with a set of very stereotype stock characters, Mrs. Mopp, the cleaning lady, and so on.

Mrs. Mopp: Can I do you now, sir?

ITMA Actor 1: Here she's Mrs. Mopp, the private enterprise.

[laughter]

David Hendy: It was a series that actually started just before the war. It started in the summer of 1939 and wasn't very popular, but it actually becomes hugely successful. By the end of the war, nearly half the population are tuning into ITMA every week.

Mrs. Mopp: Oh, I love them, sir. Whether they're [unintelligible 00:18:36] old sweat.

[laughter]

David Hendy: Its appeal really was that it was poking fun at the inconveniences and the petty regulations of war. It was kind of punching upwards. It was representing, in a humorous way, popular irritations with government rules and so on.

Mrs. Mopp: I [unintelligible 00:18:57] invasion exercises.

ITMA Actor 1: Oh, what did you do? Take off your gas mask?

Mrs. Mopp: I've got another follower now, sir. He's a gunner. He says I'm a wicked little barrage.

[laughter]

David Hendy: The stock characters and these catchphrases gave the British population a common reference point. They would share punchlines in the street. They would revel in the collective joy of pricking pomposity. This is a BBC that is really representing the people rather more than representing the government.

Alison Stewart: The German blitz began in the fall of 1940. Britain was heavily bombed by Nazi planes.

BBC Broadcaster: Now, the Germans are dive-bombing a convoy out at sea. There are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 German dive bombers, Junkers 87s. There's one coming down in flames. Somebody's hit a German and he's coming down. Oh, a man's bailed out by parachute. The pilot’s bailed out by parachute and he is going slap into the sea. There he goes. Smash.

Alison Stewart: Those who worked for the BBC were not just caught up in the blitz, they were under direct attack. On October 15th, 1940, after getting closer and closer, bombers finally landed a direct hit on the BBC HQ in London. What was the damage that day? How many people were inside the building at the time?

David Hendy: There would have been hundreds and hundreds of people inside the building. Even though a lot of the staff had been dispersed around the country, there were still lots of program makers in Broadcasting House. On that particular Tuesday night, it seemed to be the case that the BBC Broadcasting House was being targeted. Lots and lots of bombs had landed nearby. It was just after eight o'clock that people noticed the building shakes, there's a deafening roar.

What's happened is that a 500-pound bomb has come crashing through a seventh-floor window and comes to rest on the fifth floor in the studio and the music library on the fifth floor. At that point, everyone thinks the worst is over. What they don't realize that, in fact, the bomb has not yet gone off. It's actually a delayed action bomb. This is realized very, very late in the day, and it's when a group of firefighters and some staff are attempting to move the bomb and try and get it out of the window at 1 minute, 50 seconds past 9:00, that the bomb goes off. Listeners around the country actually can hear in the news bulletin because there's the nine o'clock news being broadcast from a basement studio. Bruce Belfrage, the news reader, is there and he hesitates slightly when there's this muffled bang in the background.

Bruce Belfrage: Tonight's talk after this bulletin will be by Lord Lloyd, the colonial secretary. [noise] The story of recent naval successes in the Mediterranean is told in an Admiral to communicate--

David Hendy: Then he carries on. Now, by morning time, the damage is found. 6 people were killed; 3 men, 3 women, 23 people injured, a 7th person dies a few days later. That is not the only hit on the building. Broadcasting House is made of gleaming white Portland stone. It's not very well camouflaged. They were planning to camouflage it, actually, on the day it was hit.

Then on the 8th of December, it's hit again. A landmine blows up just outside the front entrance and is described by onlookers as a scene from Dante's Inferno. It's not just the HQ. The BBC buildings in Swansea, in Wales, in Birmingham, in the Midlands, these were hit as well. People were killed in these places. The BBC was a target and the people who worked for it were putting their bodies on the line. Actually, this is an important moment in the BBC's history because the people who work for the BBC are having a shared experience with the civilian population.

Alison Stewart: June 6th, 1944, the invasion part of D-Day. Let's listen to a clip of the BBC's John Snagge announcing the invasion.

John Snagge: This is London, and this is John Snagge speaking. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force have just issued communicate number one, and in a few seconds, I will read it to you. Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied Naval Forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

Alison Stewart: David, how much did those within the BBC know about the plans leading up to D-Day? Then, how did the BBC actually cover it?

David Hendy: The plans for D-Day were highly secret because there was a whole deception plan as part of it to send the German defending forces in the wrong direction on the day. The BBC was going to have to report on D-Day. It was going to have to provide not just listeners at home, but Allied soldiers from all nations and European listeners who are listening in a clandestine way, hoping for liberation. The BBC had to provide accurate and up-to-date information and that meant reporting from the front.

BBC Broadcaster: Eight machines have gone, a 9th or 10th, 11th or 12th, and up to something like a score are coming round the aeroplane one after the other.

David Hendy: Obviously that meant that a very small handful of people right at the top of the BBC needed to know about the invasion plans in order to deploy the BBC's own staff in the right way. Lots of the staff who were deployed didn't necessarily know exactly what was happening. They were sent to various places along the south coast. Before it was even announced, they were being flown over the English channel.

There was another hidden secret element to the BBC's activities in the run-up to D-Day, which was that those parts of the BBC that were broadcasting to Europe were including secret coded messages in their programs, strange phrases that gave information to underground resistance groups or to saboteurs. Of course, behind the scenes, there's a lot of administration as well. Jon Snagge, who we heard, has to prepare instructions that go all around the BBC that have to be taken out of locked safes at the critical moment, telling people how to switch transmitters and switch studios and so on for this important announcement that's going to come at 9:32 AM. There have to be speeches recorded from various members of royal families and from General Eisenhower himself.

BBC Broadcaster: People of Western Europe, a landing was made this morning on the coast of France by troops of the Allied Expeditionary Force. This landing is part of the concerted United Nations Plan for the liberation of Europe, made in conjunction with our great Russian allies. I have this message for all of you. Although the initial assault may not have been made in your own country, the hour of your liberation is approaching.

David Hendy: Then by the time it's all happening on D-Day itself, you've then got this agonizing wait. Listeners all around the country, all across Europe, all across the world, in fact, now know that D-Day is happening, but what is actually happening on the ground? That takes a few hours before the first eyewitness accounts come back. We have the first one comes from someone who is onboard an American bomber flying over the English channel.

BBC Broadcaster: He hasn't let them off. I hear him telling the pilot to go straight and steady; straight and steady. Oh, there they go. My God, what a lift. We feel much lighter now. There's a colossal splash on the left. It's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen. Anyway, we've dropped some stuff and I think we're going to make a break for it.

David Hendy: That goes on air at lunchtime. By the evening, you've actually got Howard Marshall.

Howard Marshall: I've just come back from the beaches.

David Hendy: Who's the senior war correspondent who landed on one of the beaches, made some recordings, hitched a ride straight back on the English Channel, landed on the south coast of England.

Howard Marshall: Because I've been in the sea twice, I'm sitting in my soaked-through clothes with no notes at all. I'm just going to try to tell you very briefly the story.

David Hendy: He sat dripping wet in a tiny makeshift studio, sending up the line to London and broadcasting this vivid, extraordinary description.

Howard Marshall: I was in a barge and we were going in with the first assault wave. We circled round with the various types of vessels, opening fire on the beach, which we could see quite plainly in the dim morning light. Suddenly, as we tried to get between two of these tripod defense systems of the Germans, our craft swung. We touched a mine. There was a very loud explosion, a shutter in the whole craft, and water began pouring in.

David Hendy: You had an insatiable appetite among listeners at home who wanted to know what was happening. The final ingredient in this machinery of news broadcasting for D-Day and after was this evening program called War Report.

BBC Broadcaster: War Report number one, the story of D-Day.

David Hendy: Its first ever outing was on D-Day itself, and it was on almost every night then continuously until VE Day, Victory in Europe Day in May 1945.

BBC Broadcaster: Throughout the day, the British Broadcasting Corporation has been telling the world that Allied forces have crossed the channel into France.

David Hendy: It was an extraordinary program that mixed news techniques of up-to-date information with feature making and documentary making.

BBC Broadcaster: On a British airfield, paratroops are literally putting on their war paint. Robert Barr recorded this description on the spot.

Robert Barr: They are paratroops of a US airborne unit, and when I arrived, they were getting ready for the night's work. Their faces were darkened with cocoa. Sheath knives were strapped to their ankles. Tommy guns strapped to their waists.

David Hendy: This was very much establishing the BBC as a large-scale news organization. It was something that was being listened to, not just by British people, but this was news reporting that was going around the world and being listened to avidly, especially by listeners in Europe who are awaiting liberation.

BBC Broadcaster: At this moment, how wonderful, Mr. Churchill has come out onto the Ministry of Health's balcony. He stands now in the floodlight and he's giving the victory sign. Now, listen, the band is playing Land of Hope and Glory, and the crowd is singing. This suddenly has become a very moving moment, for Mr. Churchill too is singing and he is conducting the singing of this song. Will you listen, please?

[MUSIC - Land of Hope and Glory]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to 100 years of the BBC from WNYC's All Of It. After the break, we'll look at the BBC in post-war Britain, including the drama surrounding Queen Elizabeth's televised coronation, the growing fandom of this new genre called pop music, and Margaret Thatcher's often thorny, relationship with the BBC.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to 100 years of the BBC from WNYC's All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. We've arrived at the BBC post-war and the rising popularity of television. TV had been disbanded during the war, but now, the BBC was free to experiment with a medium that was now more accessible and affordable. The new medium also made people like David Attenborough famous. Before his iconic Life on Earth series, he first took to the airwaves in 1952 when he was a young producer.

David Attenborough: A month ago, Charles Lagus and I returned from spending four months in search of a dragon, or to put it another way, in search of the largest lizard in the world.

Alison Stewart: However, it wasn't until Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953 that television went fully mainstream when everyone wanted to see that spectacle for themselves. What followed were shows with lasting popularity like Doctor Who, the Hit science fiction show designed for family Saturday afternoon viewing. Later in the 20th century, the BBC had to deal with UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who didn't exactly hold positive views of the organization, more than once, trying to strip the broadcaster of its funding, which has always been a bit contentious.

Now, Britain finds itself in a tense moment. The Queen has passed. There has been a high turnover rate of prime ministers. Listeners need good reporting more than ever. Yet, as David Hendy writes, "The BBC's difficulties really do seem to have intensified in recent years, especially since 2010." What does this all mean for the role of the BBC in the world today? Let's try to answer that question with the rest of my conversation with David Hendy, author of The BBC: A Century on Air.

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Alison Stewart: How did television change pop culture and entertainment in Britain? What were some of the series around this time that cemented the BBC as a staple for television making?

David Hendy: Television got going very quickly, really, after the war, and there were some hugely popular programs that emerged almost by accident. One of the things that happened is that when the BBC relaunched its television service, a lot of theaters and entertainment businesses did not want to cooperate. Again, they saw television as a rival to cinema and a rival to theater.

What the BBC did was they popped over to France and brought back cabaret artists and performers from the continent. They created a program called Café Continental. The programs for children are really interesting as well. One of the things that was very distinctive about the BBC at this time was something called the Toddlers' Truce, which meant that television shut down for an hour or so in the early evening so that parents could put their children to bed.

One of the editors of the afternoon women's programs made an extraordinary comment. She said that her aim was to have a constantly diminishing audience. Can you imagine anyone who runs television saying that now? Her reasoning was, "We will succeed if we have encouraged through our programs, people to get off the sofa, turn off the TV, and to do something with their lives."

Alison Stewart: One of the revolutionary moments in television was Queen Elizabeth's coronation on June 2nd, 1953. Let's listen to some of the coronation broadcast, narrated by the BBC's Richard Dimbleby.

BBC Broadcaster: She may be filled by thine abundant grace with all princely virtues, through the king eternal Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Richard Dimbleby: The moment of the queen's crowning is coming.

Crowd: God Save the Queen. God Save the Queen. God Save the Queen.

Alison Stewart: Why was televising the coronation a controversial decision?

David Hendy: It's difficult to think of it as controversial, isn't it, if you listen to Richard Dimbleby doing his commentary. He's so extraordinarily reverential. He gradually got the nickname, Gold Microphone in Waiting. It's almost as if there he is, crouched in a small box somewhere up near the roof of Westminster Abbey, conducting the ceremony himself alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1953, you've got a royal family, and Winston Churchill's cabinet, unsure if television should be filming and broadcasting the most sacred elements of the ceremony. This was something that the BBC actually had to struggle to persuade the royal family, and the government, and the Westminster Abbey officials that it should do. It engaged in a little bit of subterfuge, actually, because what the BBC did, rather cleverly, was in the rehearsal, they used a wide-angle lens on the main camera, and that showed the queen at a respectable distance.

Then on the day itself, they swapped the lens for a much more powerful zoom and had a really good closeup of the queen, which of course, made for much better television, a television event in which something like 20 million people watched. This was a seminal moment. People are watching on television more than they're listening on the radio. That was very, very symbolic.

Alison Stewart: By the early 1960s, 300,000 immigrants have arrived in Britain from the West Indies, all of whom are entitled to British passports, as well as immigrants from India and Pakistan. How did this wave of immigration of people shake up British culture, and in turn, change how the BBC thought about the public it was serving? To what extent did the BBC fall short around this time?

David Hendy: I think it would be fair to say that the BBC has, at best, a mixed record with dealing with a Britain that is becoming more multicultural from the late 1940s onwards. One of the things that I do in the book is I begin this story about how the BBC deal with multiculturalism with the story of one person, Una Marson. She's important, I think because she embodies the complexity of the BBC's approach.

She'd worked for the BBC for 7 years from 1939. She'd come from Jamaica to London in 1932. She joined the BBC just before the war when she was already an established poet, an editor, an activist. In the war, she works on two very influential programs.

Una Marson: This is Una Marson, introducing West Indians in Britain.

David Hendy: One is called Calling the West Indies.

Una Marson: First of all, here is Learie Constantine, the world-famous cricketer. Learie used to be just a summer visitor, but when the war began, he became a welfare officer to the Ministry of Labour.

Learie Constantine: Hello, everybody. This is Learie Constantine.

David Hendy: It was a program that connected servicemen and women in Britain with their friends and family back home in the Caribbean.

Una Marson: You left London a tap dancer and returned a band conductor?

BBC Guest: Well, Una, I first had to convince London that I could conduct as well as I could dance.

Una Marson: How did you set about it?

BBC Guest: Well, when I got over here, I got a band together, nearly all Jamaicans. We were billed as the Jamaican Emperors of Jazz.

David Hendy: She had powerful support from people within the BBC, senior managers within the BBC, but she also had to endure quite a bit of everyday racism in her workplace. In 1945, she has something of a breakdown. The doctors describe her having delusions of persecution. It's difficult to think of them as delusions when you hear some of the accounts of the racism that she experienced.

Absolutely, tragically, in 1946, things have got so bad that she is bundled back to Jamaica for good and never works for the BBC again. She later said, "A dream had turned into a nightmare." In many ways, she embodied that story for the BBC more broadly. This is still an overwhelmingly white middle-class organization. They think of immigration essentially as a problem, a problem to be solved, a problem for the host community, and so on. At the same time, you also have a BBC that is broadcasting programs, like The Black and White Minstrel Show with performers blacking up. That's launched in 1958. It runs until 1978. It takes the BBC an embarrassingly long time to realize that this is a program that was offensive. It's only really in the 1960s that you get a sense of gathering progress. There's a seminal series that is broadcast in 1964 that is co-edited by Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes: We are the American Heartbreak, the rock on which freedom stubbed its toe. The great mistake that Jamestown made long ago. That is one of my poems about the problems of the Negro people in relation to American democracy.

David Hendy: An extraordinary moment here is the Great Harlem poet, but even at the end of the 20th century, it's got a director general who says that as a corporation it is hideously white. His words.

Alison Stewart: It takes a long time to reverse the white gaze. My guest is Professor David Hendy, author of the book The BBC: A Century on Air. It is the 100th anniversary of the BBC this year. The '60s, the tumult of the '60s, the radically different cultural morays of the '60s. How did it affect the BBC internally in terms of its mission, its innovations, its broadcasts?

David Hendy: I think one of the ways in which the BBC managed to capture the ferment of the 1960s was because in 1960, at the very start of the decade, it had a new director general, Hugh Carleton Greene. He talked about the need to open the windows of Broadcasting House and to blow away the cobwebs and the stuffiness. He believed that in order for society to grow in a healthy way, people had to be confronted with uncomfortable things every now and then. You get an effort to capture youth culture in music. Early on in the 1960s you've got the explosion of pop music and actually, Britain is there at the center of this.

BBC Broadcaster: It's the Beatles.

[MUSIC - The Beatles - From Me To You]

David Hendy: It's not until 1967 when it reorganizes its radio networks and it launches Radio 1, the pop music station, that it really captures some of this youthful music energy. It's really in the nick of time because, since 1964, pirate radio stations have been broadcasting illegally from ships circling Britain. A lot of younger people have been listening to the pirates and finding that there's nothing on the BBC that captures their interest in music. Radio 1 gets launched, they steal many of the pirate DJs, they add a few of their own, some cult broadcasters like the hippieish John Peel.

John Peel: I neither know nor care into which musical category you can stuff that but there you are. It exists and I think it's rather good. It's by a band called Trespass. It's One of These Days and it's on Trial Records.

David Hendy: They create their own version of what was the pirate sound. Within a few years, it is the most listened-to radio station in the whole of Europe.

[MUSIC - Trepass - One of These Days]

Alison Stewart: I'd like to ask you about Margaret Thatcher's years as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.

Margaret Thatcher: Let us never forget this fundamental truth. The state has no source of money other than the money people earn themselves.

Alison Stewart: What were her views on the role of the BBC?

David Hendy: Well, she didn't actually listen to very much BBC or watch the BBC very much. Most of what she thought about what the BBC was up to was reported to her by her husband, Denis, who would mutter about what he called the British Bastard Corporation. After the Falklands War in 1982,--

Margaret Thatcher: Mr. Speaker Sir, we are here because for the first time for many years, British sovereign territory has been invaded by a foreign power.

David Hendy: When she felt that the BBC had not stood up for the British troops, something sulfurous really entered her relationship with the BBC. Now, the BBC had reported the Falklands War in its usual way. BBC neutrality meant that it would refer to British troops in the South Atlantic. It wouldn't say "our troops" as the popular newspapers would. For Mrs. Thatcher, this was treacherous not to refer to them as our troops.

After her reelection in 1983 with an increased majority, she felt she was in a much stronger position to go on the attack. Her ministers constantly attack editorial standards at the BBC and Mrs. Thatcher appoints increasingly conservative loyalists to influential positions on the Board of Governors. They'd start to interfere in programs and try to block programs and try to view programs before they've been broadcast, which broke a golden rule of the BBC, that no governor could view a program before broadcast. You get constant war of attrition.

Alison Stewart: When you think about this being the 100th anniversary of the BBC and you think about this being the year that the Queen has died, when you think about this year being the year that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had to resign after a lot of controversy, what do you think the role of the BBC is today, given the specific moment in British culture?

David Hendy: One of the things that I do right at the end of the book is I refer back to a character who appears in the wartime. That's someone called Muriel Greenway. She's a woman who lives in Sussex on the south coast of England. She kept a diary. In the early weeks of the war, she's complaining about the BBC output. "It's boring," she wants to switch it off, she's not happy with it. Then her radio set breaks down and she's lost, she's completely lost. She says, "A friend has gone from the house." She couldn't stop herself from complaining about the BBC, but she also couldn't live without it.

It's one of those cases where we've taken the BBC for granted for so long that we've forgotten how much we still use it and we still need it. Well over 90% of us in Britain, every week will be using one BBC service or another. It's also, even though its funding has been cut and cut and cut, especially by the government since 2015, it's still, despite that, big enough when there's a war in Ukraine-

BBC Broadcaster: After months of preparations, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has launched a major military operation against Ukraine.

David Hendy: -to cover that war in the same way that it covered D-Day in 1944 but there are mortal dangers. You mentioned Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson: It is clearly now the will of the parliamentary Conservative Party, that there should be a new leader of that party and therefore a new prime minister.

David Hendy: We had a prime minister that everyone agreed did not tell the truth. This was a real challenge for the BBC because if some viewpoints are no longer being articulated in good faith, what does the BBC do? How does it deal with this new world of hyper-partisanship and people expressing opinions not in good faith?

Alison Stewart: If you search the BBC on Twitter, you can get people who will describe it as propaganda. You will get people who will extoll its virtues of excellent journalism. What is a criticism of the BBC, which you think, knowing the history, is truly valid and what is something that it does extraordinarily well?

David Hendy: Let me just answer the last question first. What does it do extraordinarily well? We've had the broadcasting of the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, very much the kind of thing that the BBC has always done well, a tone of commentary that somehow matches the seriousness and the solemnity of the occasion.

On the other hand, I do think that one of the things that the BBC has to be very, very wary of is that the cumulative effect of a conservative government being in power now for 12 years, that is essentially not in favor of public broadcasting and suspicious of the BBC. I suppose I would say that if there is a fault with the BBC at present it is that, by and large, its news coverage does veer slightly more towards the right than the left. What I would say is that, by and large, if you think about the totality of its output, it has broadcast in excess of something like 11 million programs and its 100-year history. It's broadcasting hundreds of hours a day, in lots and lots of different languages. There is still within that, a range of opinion, a range of voices, a range of styles. Therefore, in some sense, I think it's holding on, just about, to that enduring value that was planted, that ethos that was there right from the beginning, which is to try and bring the best that has been thought and said and done to as many people as possible.

Alison Stewart: I have been speaking to Professor David Hendy, author of the book The BBC: A Century on Air. This has been 100 Years of the BBC, a special program presented by WNYC's All Of It in New York City. Professor Hendy, thank you so much for all the time.

David Hendy: You're very welcome.

[MUSIC - Ming Tea - BBC]

Alison Stewart: 100 Years of the BBC was produced and edited by Luke Green and Kate Hinds. Engineering and mixing by Jen Munson and Jason Isaac. BBC broadcast, news in this special were provided by the BBC Archives. 100 Years of the BBC is distributed by American Public Media. There is more All Of It on the way. In the next hour, we will revisit another All Of It special program, The Public Song Project, stay with us.

 

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