22 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONSLONDON CALLING
The power—and the vulnerability—of the BBC.BYSAMKNIGHTO
n the first weekend of May, 1926,
the Trades Union Congress, which
represented more than three million
workers in Britain, voted for a general
strike. Factories came to a stop. Trains
stayed in their sidings. Cities fell quiet.
Volatile crowds gathered, ready to block
roads and head off strikebreakers. Vir-
ginia Woolf, who was writing “To the
Lighthouse,” saw a column of armored
cars roll down Oxford Street. In the
House of Commons, the Prime Min-
ister, Stanley Baldwin, accused the
unions of “going nearer to proclaiming
civil war than we have been for centu-
ries past.” But it was hard for Baldwin’s
words—anyone’s words—to travel far.
National newspapers had ceased to print.Unions and strike councils put out
their own pamphlets, under the threat
of police raids. The government was
producing the British Gazette, under the
editorship of Winston Churchill, the
hawkish Chancellor of the Exchequer,
but everyone could see that it was pro-
paganda. “One believes nothing,” Woolf
wrote in her diary. “So we go on, turn-
ing in our cage.”
The task of reporting the strike fell
to the British Broadcasting Company,
an experimental private monopoly of
the nation’s airwaves, which had no jour-
nalists. The company had been formed
three and a half years earlier, after the
government, the Post Office, and the
nation’s radio manufacturers agreed toavoid the “American experience” of a
wireless free-for-all. By June, 1922, the
U.S. had three hundred and eighteen
radio stations; starting at 6 P.M. that
November 14th, when the BBC began
broadcasting—“Hullo, hullo, 2LO call-
ing. 2LO calling. This is the British
Broadcasting Company”—Britain had
one. The new company was funded by
royalties from the sale of radios and a
ten-shilling “licence fee,” paid annually
to the state.
The earliest days of the broadcaster,
captured vividly in “The BBC: A Cen-
tury on Air,” by David Hendy, a media
historian at the University of Sussex,
were scrappy and utopian. Its first head-
quarters was a warren of offices and stu-
dios not far from the River Thames. “If
you sneeze or rustle papers, you will
DEAFEN THOUSANDS,” a framed no-
tice next to the microphone read. Shows
went out live and unrehearsed: dance
music, stories for children, George Ber-
nard Shaw reading his new play. The
BBC’s original staff included a dispro-
portionate number of pilots from the
First World War, who believed that the
air held limitless possibilities for soci-
ety. The news was an afterthought. “I
wasn’t wild about what was happening
in the world.... I didn’t really care what
was happening in Abyssinia,” Cecil
Lewis, a former fighter ace, poet, and
founding employee, recalled. “We were
hooked on the idea of entertainment.”
BBC bulletins, which were rehashed
from news-agency copy, were forbidden
before 7 P.M., to avoid competing with
the newspapers.
The general strike changed all that.
John Reith, the BBC’s first general man-
ager, broke the news that the strike
was imminent, broadcasting from his
apartment, around the corner from the
Houses of Parliament. With Fleet Street
out of action, a team of ten improvised
the BBC’s first newsroom, to handle
the gush of telegrams, letters, messages,
and speeches sent in by unions, strike
councils, and government departments.
The Post Office lifted the BBC’s re-
porting restrictions: news bulletins went
out five times a day. “The sensation of
a general strike centres around the head-
phones of the wireless set,” Beatrice
Webb, the sociologist and a co-founder
of the London School of Economics,
For a hundred years, the BBC has been in the complex embrace of the British state. wrote in her diary. GETTY