GETTY^IMAGES/BBCcompeting with each other, that Britain’s
General Post Office granted a broadcasting
monopoly to a single national entity: the
BBC. As a result, in late 1922, the initiative
lay firmly with the tiny handful of men and
women on the new company’s payroll.
Its dour and formidable general manager,
John Reith, did not arrive until December.
So, at first, the two people best placed to
shape what early broadcasting might become
were Arthur Burrows, a former newspaper
journalist and Marconi Company manager,
and his deputy, Cecil Lewis, a dashing young
First World War flying ace. Burrows had been
horrified by the use of wireless in spreading
misinformation during that conflict. Mean-
while, Lewis had returned from the front
determined to add to “the wisdom and
beauty of the world” rather than destroy it.
Both men wanted to turn what had been an
obscure and private medium into a cultural
resource from which everyone might benefit.Hooked on entertainment
It was by no means clear exactly how this
would be done. As Reith pointed out, “there
were no sealed orders to open”. The date of
the BBC’s opening night had been carefully
chosen to be sure everything would be up
and running in time to broadcast the results
of the following day’s general election. Yet
Lewis, who was responsible for creating
a detailed schedule of programmes for the
months to come, believed that news should
only ever play the smallest part, having had
his fill of “current affairs” during the war.
“I didn’t really care what was happening in
Abyssinia,” he later confessed. What he
wanted was drama, music, big shows. “We
were hooked on the idea of entertainment,”
he explained.
Resources, though, were scarce. Nor were
many performers convinced that the new-
fangled medium of radio was worth their
effort. As a result, the BBC had a distinctly
ad hoc feel about it. When it first took to theThe BBC begins
A century ago, a group of idealistic radio pioneers launched
one of Britain’s most famous institutions: the BBC. In the first
instalment of our new 13-part series charting how the corporation
shaped the nation, DAVID HENDY looks back at its earliest days
For the hardy few
who tuned in, the
first thing they
heard through the
hiss and crackle was
a news bulletin and
a weather forecast
A
t six o’clock in the evening on
Tuesday 14 November 1922,
the BBC took to the airwaves
for the first time. Nearly a
century later, we might think
of this as a defining moment in cultural
history but, at the time, it made almost no
impact on the world. Newspaper coverage of
the launch was virtually non-existent. Only
The Times mentioned it briefly on one of its
inside pages; the fact that inverted commas
were placed around the word “ broadcasting”
was ample proof of just how unknown the
term was judged to be.
Nor was the broadcast itself especially
exciting. For the hardy few who tuned in, the
first thing they heard through the hiss and
crackle of the ether was a short news bulletin
and a weather forecast. The BBC’s announcer
read them both twice: first at normal speed,
then more slowly so that listeners could take
notes. Soon afterwards, the transmitter fell
silent for the night.
The BBC – at that point the British
Broadcasting Company, not yet a corpora-
tion – had been established a month earlier
to exploit “wireless” technology that had
been around for nearly three decades. Back
in 1894, the British physicist Oliver Lodge
had been the first to demonstrate radio
transmission publicly when he sent a Morse
code signal 60 metres and captured it with a
specially built receiver. Since then, the young
Italian entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi had
laboured to turn Lodge’s laboratory device
into a lucrative private communication tool,
with the potential to make telegraph cables
redundant. In the years either side of the
First World War, thousands of wireless
“amateurs” had tinkered with home-made
kits, eavesdropped on messages, and even set
up their own small-scale transmitters.
It was partly to provide these enthusiasts
with an incentive to buy receivers, and partly
to avoid the American experience of “chaos
in the ether” with too many stationsat 100
PART 1
Broadcast views
The BBC’s telephone exchange (top) and studio
(bottom, in 1928) in Savoy Hill, the company’s
London headquarters from 1923. The
equipment used was rudimentary, including a
large microphone in a box on a wheeled stand