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  • ‘The Trumpet of the Night’: Interwar Communists on BBC Radio
  • Ben Harker (bio)

In the summer of 1935 the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Harry Pollitt, was attending to business in Moscow when he received an unexpected invitation from Roger Wilson, Director of the BBC Talks Department. Pollitt was asked to prepare and present a thirty-minute broadcast in a series entitled The Citizen and His Government; Pollitt would be permitted to make comparisons between Britain and the Soviet Union, and would enjoy freedom to say what he wished.1 He wrote back in agreement, adding in a PS ‘Why does the BBC have a black border round its paper and envelope? Or is this a special one for me as a sign of mourning that we have been kept off the air so long?’.2 The joke was more pertinent than Pollitt realized. On hearing of the scheduled broadcast, the Foreign Office News Department lobbied the BBC to reconsider working with Pollitt, while also insisting that government intervention should not be used to justify the programme’s cancellation. The BBC complied on both counts, albeit reluctantly, and the cancellation was attributed to the delicacy of the international situation.3 Unsurprised by the withdrawal of an opportunity that always seemed too good to be true, Pollitt wrote to remind the BBC that he represented a party with ‘a definite point of view in regard to all current political and social questions’, offering his services for future broadcasts.4 He heard nothing in response; his next appearance on the BBC would be his General Election address in the very different context of 1945.5

Although in the standard history of the interwar BBC this episode is used to encapsulate the relationship between the Communist Party and the BBC in that period – one of fierce and covert if unflappably courteous censorship on one side and low expectations on the other – it is, in fact, a small detail in a larger and more complex story, an unwritten chapter in the history of both organizations.6 This article revisits that relationship, arguing that Communism was a spectre that haunted the early BBC, inhabiting the vision that shaped its formation. More particularly, it argues that Communists proved an influential if uneven presence on BBC radio in the 1930s. It is about Communists on the wireless in both senses: it recovers the Communist presence on the airwaves across BBC departments and regions; it also restores to view a body of prewar Marxist analysis of the technology [End Page 81] and cultural form of radio, of the institution of the BBC, and of the possibilities for oppositional interventions. Drawing upon a range of sources from radio listings, Communist Party publications, BBC records, and the declassified MI5 files of broadcasting Communists, it situates the work of Communists on the radio – and the ensuing patterns of BBC blacklisting and censorship – in relation to the histories of both institutions through a tumultuous period.

Communism of the Material

The vision for the early BBC articulated by its first Director General, Sir John Reith, was couched boldly in terms of revolutionary change. He saw in radio ‘the expression of a new and better relationship between man and man’ and described himself as a ‘practical idealist’ who, unlike more dangerous visionaries, would build his ‘Utopia on the foundations, and with the materials, already to hand’.7 These foundations – the technology of radio within the emerging institutional outlines of the BBC – were to enable a type of redistribution. What Reith called the ‘natural law’ of stubborn structural inequalities – the fact that ‘most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them’ – was to be offset by the immaterial democracy of the wireless, ‘a good thing’ to be ‘shared by all alike’; everyone would enjoy the uplift of the ‘best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement’.8 Implicit in his vision of compensatory cultural redistribution was the spectre of those ideologies threatening more material expropriations. (Reith didn’t need teaching the lesson, spelt out by one of his contemporaries, that ‘working class children’ deprived of a ‘share in the...

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