Coda: Coronation

In the years after the war, radio faced a new threat from within Britain, as television rose to become the new dominant channel for the mediation of national culture. This transition is best represented by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the first national event to draw more television viewers than radio listeners across the country. This double coronation—of monarch and medium—represents not so much the total eclipse of radio as the recalibration of the media ecology, as technologies continued to jostle for primacy in a crowded sensory landscape. For the writers who helped to write the radio war, however, it nonetheless signalled the passing of a moment of cultural primacy for those whose work encompassed the written and the spoken word.

Versions of Neutrality: Denis Johnston’s War Reports

As his job with the BBC News Division took him from the deserts of Egypt, through Italy, to the gates of Buchenwald, Irish playwright Denis Johnston struggled with a multiply determined neutrality which inhered partly in his role of war correspondent, and partly in circumstances specific to his own life. In particular, Johnston sought to balance the ideal of journalistic objectivity with the need to convey the emotional horrors of the struggle, all while serving as a politically neutral Protestant Irishman within a semi-autonomous British broadcaster. Johnston’s position as a neutral mediator was intensified by the development of newly compact recording technologies which allowed him to record actuality broadcasts, commentary, and interviews in the field—in a sense, to allow the war to speak for itself. For all these traces of immediacy, after the war Johnston would frame his experience in a heavily embellished and fantastical memoir, Nine Rivers from Jordan (1953). By weaving together Johnston’s war broadcasts, his journals, and his memoir, this chapter illustrates how journalistic objectivity and literary experiment existed in productive tension during the war; at the same time, Johnston’s postwar response to the atrocities of the holocaust reveal a journalist shaken by the moral vacuum revealed in wartime Europe.

To Build the Falling Castle: Louis MacNeice and the Drama of Form

Collectively, Louis MacNeice’s output of radio dramas and features represents one of the greatest achievements of wartime radio broadcasting in Britain. For MacNeice, already interested in poetic form, radio provided a new medium with its own technical limitations, generic possibilities, and productive constraints. From the early features in the Stones Cry Out series (1941), through his first verse epic, Alexander Nevsky (1941), to the spectacular triumph Christopher Columbus (1942), MacNeice built ever more complex soundscapes in which a listening audience might immerse themselves, if only to rediscover a sense of collective purpose. Within MacNeice’s radio dramas, human examples of effective auditory navigation—in the form of blind characters and other attentive listeners—populate sonic environments structured by distinctions of proximity and distance, the present and the past, and safety and danger. MacNeice’s broadcasts therefore achieve propagandistic goals via modernist means, creating critical listeners as a means of forging good citizens; in the process, the broadcasts demonstrate that Priestley’s demotic approach was not the only means of uniting the radio public around a common goal.

Introduction: Projecting Britain

As a central and previously untested mass medium in the context of war, radio served as a resonant chamber through which British writers articulated, on behalf of a series of newly empowered publics, the social and political changes brought on by the Second World War. In mediating the conflict for British citizens, broadcasting bound listeners together in an auditory imagined community—a radio public—that was affiliative and participatory; though cut off from “speaking back” directly via radio, this public made itself known through listener surveys (both internal and external to the BBC), letters to the editors of publications (both radio-specific and non-), and direct correspondence with broadcasters. The affective connections enabled by the medium amplified structural changes underway during the conflict, as the pressures of total war demanded that the BBC modify its top-down model of broadcasting in favour of more demotic forms of address and cultural content. Though complex, the Corporation’s wartime renegotiation of its national role traces a shift away from the paternalism of the interwar BBC, under the direction of Sir John Reith, and towards a postwar model of multiple wavelengths serving multiple audiences in multiple registers.

Calling the West Indies: Una Marson’s Wireless Black Atlantic

As a colonial subject and woman of colour, Una Marson occupies a unique place in the history of wartime broadcasting in Britain. Her weekly programCalling the West Indies began as a “message home” program for Caribbean soldiers stationed in the UK but grew, as the war progressed, into a literary and cultural forum for writers from across the Black Atlantic. Though barred from advocating openly for independence, Marson used her program to promote West Indian cultural autonomy by spotlighting emerging Caribbean literary figures and forging connections with activists and intellectuals from the U.S., Britain, Africa, and elsewhere. Beyond building such transatlantic networks, Calling the West Indies afforded listeners in the Caribbean the first opportunities to hear literature spoken in the West Indian forms of English which Edward Kamau Brathwaite would go on to call “nation language.” By focusing on Marson’s wartime work, this chapter rectifies a persistent tendency, in histories of Caribbean literature and broadcasting, to omit not only the central role played by this progressive feminist intellectual, but also the role of the war itself as catalyst to the postwar literary renaissance in the West Indies.

James Hanley and the Shape of the Wartime Features Department

Under the direction of Laurence Gilliam, the BBC Features Department produced some of the most innovative radio works of the war. The department brought together producers (including D.G. Bridson, Francis Dillon, and Brigid Maas) and established and emerging literary talent with the aim of creating broadcasts that would achieve propagandistic aims without resorting to overtly propagandistic tactics. Focusing on James Hanley, this chapter examines the complicated interplay between sound and script, and between radio authority and literary authority. Though he enjoyed a growing literary reputation, Hanley struggled to find his radio voice during the war years, despite extensive mentoring and coaching by Gilliam and others and despite the fact that he would enjoy significant success on the BBC Third Programme in the 1950s and 1960s. Together with the following chapter, on Louis MacNeice’s radio dramas and features, this chapter examines how the Features Department recruited literary talent, shaped their words into sound, and challenged writers to adapt their skills to a more fleeting medium with an attentive, if often rattled, wartime audience.

Out of the People: J. B. Priestley’s Broadbrow Radicalism

While well documented in accounts of wartime broadcasting, J.B. Priestley’s status as wartime radio celebrity is too often cut off from his broader arguments about cultural democracy dating back to the 1920s. This chapter contextualizes Priestley’s famously rabble-rousing wartime broadcasts within larger debates about the relationship between popular literary forms and cultural authority, as well as placing his broadcasts in conversation with published and unpublished wartime writings. The spirit of social levelling that animates Priestley’s broadcasts in the series Postscripts and Britain Speaks resonates with his literary output both before and during the war; in particular, his broadcasts articulate, at the political level, a commitment to cultural democracy forged by Priestley’s engagements with debates about the middlebrow—or his own term, the ‘broadbrow’—in the 1920s and 1930s. The foundation of Priestley’s success as a wartime broadcaster was his ability to translate a socially democratic literary sensibility into a socially democratic political ideal through a carefully calibrated mode of address adapted to the intimate medium of radio.