History of Global Arms Transfer, 5 (2018), pp. 49-58

Broadcasting Britishness during theSecond World War: Radio and the BritishWorld
By SIMON J. POTTER*
This essay considers the role of radio broadcasting in appealing to and reinforcing
Britannic sentiment during the Second World War, and thus mobilising a unitedimperial war effort. Radio played on the bonds of sentiment in a particularly
powerful fashion, because it addressed listeners intimately and with a sense ofauthenticity, and allowed rapid, regular, and direct communication with audiences
over long distances. Imperial broadcasting structures established during the 1920s
and 1930s were repurposed for war, under the leadership of the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), but bringing in broadcasters (and state
information and propaganda agencies) all around the British world. Manydifferent producers, writers, artists, and experts helped broadcast Britishness
during this period, appealing to Britannic sentiment in a wide variety of ways.
Often they linked Britishness with liberty, democracy, and equality, even if thisflew in the face of the realities of empire. The British connection was presented
as a living and vital force, bringing people together despite divisions of race.
Broadcasters also made a powerful appeal to ideas about a common history andset of traditions. The essay suggests that such themes offered a significant meansof harnessing Britannic sentiment to the needs of war.

I
Over the past two decades, new historical research has helped us better to understand the
manifold connections that helped create a ‘British world’. Developing and disintegratingover the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this transnational entity
comprised Britain, its settler colonies or ‘dominions’ in Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
and South Africa, and the many communities elsewhere whose members identified
themselves as British. The ties that bound the British world together were political,
economic, demographic, and military. Yet it was a sentimental idea of Britannic communitythat provided perhaps the most fundamental and lasting support for the British connection.
A world-spanning British identity drew on ideas about shared culture, history, language,and (for some) a belief in a common racial interest and destiny. This felt sense ofcommunity largely transcended differences between regions and political parties, and wassometimes also able to overcome divisions of class, religion, and race (albeit in an
extremely patchy and incomplete fashion). Britannic sentiment endured well after the otherconnecting forces that bound the British world together had effectively dissipated, and its* University of Bristol－ 49 －SIMON J. POTTER
ghost continues to haunt Britain in the era of Brexit.1
How can historians get to grips with this vast, intangible realm of sentiment? This shortessay uses archival evidence relating to radio broadcasting during the Second World War asa route into the subject, and to suggest some core themes. Historians are often ‘deaf’ to therole that radio has played in the past, and tend to neglect radio as a source for social andcultural history in favour of the more easily accessible print media.2 The essay argues thatthinking about wartime broadcasting provides a novel approach to understanding theinteraction of contemporary understandings of British identity with the pressing realities ofa united, successful, and final imperial war effort. It shows how contemporaries sought todraw on ideas about a shared history of resistance to foreign aggression, and appeal tocommon ideals of liberty, to bind the inhabitants of the British world together in the face of
Fascism. Viewed from the perspective of today, attempts to claim a positive link between
empire, resistance, and liberty might seem strange, perverse, and distasteful. However, thiswas not how contemporaries responded during the Second World War: if its pervasivenessis anything to go by, then this appeal must have resonated with audiences to a considerable
degree.
During the Second World War, radio disseminated the information and propaganda
required to win consent for a vital, complex imperial war effort. 3 Ideas about British
identity were certainly deployed on the airwaves for official and instrumental purposes. Yet
Britannic sentiment cannot be viewed simply as a tool of propaganda. Those seeking tomobilise Britishness in the cause of war had to work with, accommodate, and exploit deeprooted and long-lived ideas and assumptions about the origins and nature of that
community. Moreover, wartime propaganda was organised in a decentralised fashion in the
British world: authority was shared among different governments around the empire, andwith state propaganda agencies working in a variety of loose relationships with a range ofsemi-state and largely autonomous organisations, including broadcasters. This meant that
individual producers, writers, and artists were often able to work with some autonomy as
they interpreted the nature of British sentiment and its connection with the war effort.
There was not one simple, official propaganda line to toe.
For historians of Britannic sentiment, radio should also be of particular interest because it
possesses certain distinctive characteristics as a medium, which rendered it a particularly
powerful means of conveying ideas about British identity during a period of global conflict.
Compared with other media of mass communication, the appeal of radio was unusually
intimate, speaking to individuals or families in their own homes, and to service personnel
in camps and on the frontline around the world. Although a mass medium (with ninemillion households in Britain possessing a listener licence by 1939 and with similarly highlevels of access in most parts of the British world), radio could seem to speak to listeners
on a personal level, and thus appeal particularly effectively to sentimental connections.
Contemporaries also prized the authenticity of radio, its ability to present listeners with alive connection, and to provide the sounds of real people and of genuine events as they
happened.4 Finally, thanks to the development of long-distance short-wave transmission
1 For a brief, recent overview of the historiography of the British World see Potter, British Imperial History,
pp. 98-104. Key collections of essays on the subject include Bridge and Fedorowich (eds), The British World;
Buckner and Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World; Buckner and Francis (eds), Canada and the British
World; and Darien-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre (eds), Britishness Abroad.
2 See Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound, pp. 7-8.
3 Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War; Grey, ‘War and the British World’; Jeffery, ‘The
Second World War’.
4 Scannell, Radio, Television and Modern Life, pp. 58-74.

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Broadcasting Britishness during the Second World War
and reception technologies during the 1920s and 1930s, radio made possible instantaneouscommunication over vast distances. During the First World War, news could certainly travel
fast, but was still subject to the vagaries of the disruption of the telegraph system, and was
also limited by the carrying capacity of that system.5 In the Second World War, by contrast,
radio could bring up-to-date news to audiences around the British world, direct from theheart of the empire and from the battlefront, many times each day.

II
During the 1920s and 1930s the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) developed for
itself a significant role as a promoter of Britannic and imperial sentiment at home in
Britain, and overseas in the colonies and dominions. Through its programmes it encouraged
listeners to think of themselves as members of a world-spanning Britannic community.
Overseas, the BBC’s key tool was the Empire Service, established in 1932 and providing
the foundation for the BBC’s wartime Overseas Services and, eventually, for the BBC
World Service. During the 1930s, the BBC also began to ship programmes recorded on
disc, known as transcriptions, to other broadcasters around the empire. The inter-war periodalso saw the establishment of many different broadcasting services and stations around theBritish empire: those run as public authorities often developed close (if not always
harmonious) links with the BBC. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), theCanadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the South African Broadcasting Corporation(SABC), New Zealand’s National Broadcasting Service (NBS) and National Commercial
Broadcasting Service (NCBS), and All India Radio went on to play crucial roles inmobilising radio during the Second World War.
Broadcasters also worked closely with official information and propaganda agencies
during the conflict, such as Britain’s Ministry of Information (MoI). Direct state funding,under the supervision of the Foreign Office, allowed the BBC’s Overseas Services toexpand, serving more overseas listeners with better programmes, including material inlanguages other than English. To serve the special requirements of audiences in different
parts of the empire, the BBC drew on teams of Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, South
African, and Indian producers, commentators, and artists. These people were gathered
together by the BBC in Britain and at the seat of war to create an aural representation of theidea of a combined imperial military effort. Many of the programmes broadcast by the
BBC on short-wave were picked up by stations around the British world and ‘re-broadcast’on medium-wave frequencies that could reach a greater number of listeners. Exchanges ofpre-recorded programmes on disc also increased massively during the war, particularly
with the creation of the London Transcriptions Service, run by the BBC but subsidised andpartly directed by the British government. Public broadcasters in the dominions meanwhile
also produced their own information and propaganda programmes, for domestic andoverseas audiences. They provided programmes for other broadcasters, notably the BBC,and began to establish their own short-wave services (or to assist state-run short-wave
services), allowing them directly to reach listeners overseas.6
In presenting listeners with programmes about the British empire, public broadcasters did
not rely entirely upon the expertise of their own programme planners and producers. They
5 Potter, News and the British World, pp. 186-210.
6 For more on these issues see Potter, Broadcasting Empire and Potter, ‘The Colonisation of the BBC’. On the

BBC and the Second World War, particularly in terms of domestic British broadcasting, see Hajkowski, ‘The
BBC, the Empire, and the Second World War’ and Nicholas, ‘“Brushing Up Your Empire’.

－ 51 －SIMON J. POTTER
also employed or sought assistance from external writers, academic advisers, speakers,
artists, and critics. Many of these contributors were deeply committed to the idea of
Britannic unity. Even some who were not so convinced still allowed their sense of patriotic
duty, or their commitment to fighting Fascism, to overcome their scruples about British
imperialism. George Orwell, for example, was drawn into mediating war and empire
despite his significant doubts about the morality of British overseas rule.7
Individuals also worked to broadcast empire in other ways. The raw material for
programmes travelled around the British world in unprocessed form, with flows of written
information, publications, and scripts crossing the empire’s internal borders to provide thebasic content for broadcasts. A good example of how such material could be used for radio
were the talks prepared in New Zealand by Joan Wood, an Englishwoman married to theprofessor of history at Victoria College, Wellington. In her broadcast sessions, Wood madefrequent reference to ‘home front’ conditions and initiatives in Britain, Canada, andAustralia, and sometimes also the USA. She illustrated her talks with references topublished accounts of new policies and austerity measures overseas, providing comparisonswith New Zealand conditions and initiatives and suggestions for borrowing ideas fromabroad.8
Speakers and entertainers could also travel around the empire in person: artists as diversein their appeal as Gracie Fields and Noël Coward visited Australia and New Zealand during
the war, broadcasting to boost morale and raise funds for the war effort. Coward, a famous
British playwright, actor, and performer, undertook considerable propaganda work during
the war, including tours of America, the Middle East, South Africa, Burma, India, Australia,
and New Zealand.9 In his broadcasts in Australia and New Zealand, subsequently publishedin Britain, Coward, a fierce patriot, was keen to stress the continuing vitality of the
Britannic connection.10

III
This essay now turns to consider some of the key themes and approaches deployed by thosebroadcasting Britishness during the Second World War. Notably, in encouraging individuals
and communities to make the sacrifices necessary to win the war, in Britain and around theempire, propagandists paid great attention to the theme of a common, voluntarycommitment to a struggle for shared values of democracy and equality.11 The empire waspresented as a force for increasing economic welfare and political self-government for all
those under its rule. Unity was emphasised, even in the face of evidence of discrimination,
protest, and disintegration.12 This involved presenting listeners with what was undeniably aparticular, partial, and politically-charged account of the empire’s past, as well as of its
present and future. Yet the pervasiveness of these themes suggests that they were deemed
to have considerable appeal to Britannic sentiment.
At the outset of the war, the British MoI was keen to emphasise the theme of growing
self-determination within the empire. The aim was to defend Britain’s colonial record
against any comparison with the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany. The Ministry
7 Fleay and Sanders, ‘Looking into the Abyss’.
8 HL, MS-1122, Joan Wood, scripts of radio talks.
9 Aldgate and Richards, Britain Can Take It, p. 188.
10 Coward, Australia Visited.
11 For the broader context see Rose, Which People’s War?.
12 Webster, Englishness and Empire, pp. 6-7, 19-54.

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Broadcasting Britishness during the Second World War
sought to stress that the British empire was an ‘association of free and equal partners’,united in a common war effort against a Nazi ‘slave Empire’. To achieve this goal, officials
at the MoI argued that existing British public attitudes would have to be modified. Older
ideas about the relationship between homeland and dependencies would have to bedispelled, and propagandists would need actively to combat anti-imperial prejudices that
had arisen ‘owing to ignorance of the evolution which has transformed British
Imperialism’.13
Outside Britain, similar themes were also developed by broadcasters in the dominions,such as William Macmahon Ball, a Melbourne politics lecturer and the wartime controllerof Australia’s short-wave broadcasting services. Ball was a regular Australian contributor
to BBC programmes, and was invited at one stage to run the BBC’s Pacific Service.14 In his
Dominion Commentary talks for the BBC’s National Service, Ball explained to British
audiences that although the nature of the imperial connection between Britain and Australia
had changed during the interwar years, and aggressive, belligerent jingoism had abated, an
enduring sentimental connection remained. In the wake of the fall of France, Ball argued
for example that
[Although] Australians today do not generally get worked up about the Empire as an
Empire in the way they used to twenty years ago… it has been very striking how in theselast weeks Australians have shown the depth of their devotion to England and all Englandmeans.15
He stressed that superficial disagreements between governments in Britain and Australia
should not be allowed to distract attention from Australian loyalty: such squabbles were
‘just the sort of mutual criticism to be expected inside any family whose members have any
individuality’.16 Ball took care to emphasise that, while the bonds of empire did not act inquite the same way as in earlier decades, they still linked Britain and Australia together intoa single community.
Leonard Brockington, a Welsh-born Canadian barrister, renowned public speaker, former
CBC chairman, and special advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, madesimilar points as he toured the wartime British world and broadcast a series of talks along
his way. Appointed advisor to the British MoI in 1942, the following year Brockington
visited Australia and New Zealand on behalf of the Ministry, accompanied by Bob
Bowman, formerly of the CBC’s Overseas Unit.17 In his talks, Brockington reported on thework of Australians stationed in Britain, Canada, the US, and the Pacific Islands, but also
described wartime Britain, which he argued was becoming a more democratic and equal
society. 18 Britain and the empire, he insisted, were no longer dominated by Blimpish
13 BBC WAC, R34/953, Ministry of Information memorandum, ‘Policy Committee – Empire Publicity
Campaign – Paper for discussion on Tuesday, 1st October, 1940’.
14 On the Australian short-wave service see Vickery, ‘Telling Australia’s Story to the World’, ch. 5; Hilvert,
Blue Pencil Warriors; and, more generally, Hodge, Radio Wars. For Ball’s relationship with the BBC see NLA,
Ball papers, box 1, folder 6, R. A. Rendall to Ball, 27 Oct. 1941 and copy of Ball to C. Connor [sic], 15 Oct.
1941. See also NAA NSW, SP1558/2, box 81, file ‘Dominion Commentary’ Programme for BBC, 1939-40.
15 NLA, Ball papers, box 1, folder 6, script for ‘Dominion Commentary’, 15 July 1940.
16 NLA, Ball papers, box 1, folder 6, Script for ‘Dominion Commentary’, 4 Nov. 1940.
17 NAA ACT, ‘Visit to Australia – L. W. Brockington’, SP112/1, control symbol 353/2/63. See also NAA ACT,SP112/1, control symbol M98, ‘Brockington, L.W., visit of’.
18 NAA NSW, SP300/1, box 11, Leonard Brockington, ‘National Talk’, 20 Feb. [1943] and ‘Talk by L.W.
Brockington’, 5 Mar. [1943].

－ 53 －SIMON J. POTTER‘icicles with monocles’; similarly, the British Commonwealth was made up of ‘millions ofdecent God-fearing, home-loving, generous and just people, who have no desire todominate anyone, or to deny any man, whatever his colour or race, justice and an equalityof opportunity’.19 All this clearly harmonised with broader BBC (and MoI) wartime policies
of portraying Britain as a progressive rather than a hierarchical society, and the empire as ameans of improving the welfare of all its subjects.20 Brockington helped project ideas abouta ‘people’s war’ and a ‘people’s empire’ to the dominions. In a talk heard by radio listeners
in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Brockington stressed that all members of amulti-racial British world were fighting together for liberty and against racialism. He spokeof his own mixed English and Welsh heritage, as an example of the coming together ofdifferent peoples under the aegis of Britishness, and argued that historic cooperation
between diverse groups in Britain was mirrored in other parts of the Commonwealth.
I have stood among Canadians of Norman blood and speech patiently guarding thesouthern shores of England; I have heard General Smuts salute an Empire that once tried
to destroy him, an Empire, which for the sake of humanity, [he] helped so violently tosave, so wisely to guide. I have sat in the houses of the Maori listening to the reading ofletters from Maori soldiers, telling their mothers wistfully of the English countryside, andof their pride in equal British brotherhood.21
Brockington was ‘broadcasting to us all about us all’.22
Another broadcaster who provided the BBC with despatches aimed at explaining theAustralian war effort to British audiences, and at reassuring them of Australian loyalty, wasthe journalist Chester Wilmot.23 Wilmot had already broadcast for the BBC before the war,and subsequently worked closely with BBC colleagues while covering the work of theAustralian Imperial Force (AIF) in the Middle East: some of his reports were carried by the
BBC during this period. Returning to Australia (after having fallen out with the Australianhigh command and being sent home from New Guinea), Wilmot broadcast for the BBC on
Australian affairs.24 Here, he made good use of his knowledge of British requirements andconditions, taking care to explain the Australian war effort in ways that British audiences
could understand and empathise with. Discussing coal strikes in Australia in 1942, Wilmot
emphasised that while it might seem
strange to you people at home that with the enemy at our gates, there is still trouble withstrikers in Australia… I think it’s true that people here are not yet roused as much as youwere after Dunkirk, but you must remember that the Japanese are still as far from Sydney
19 NAA NSW, SP300/1, box 11, ‘National Talk by Mr. L. W. Brockington, K.C.’, 26 Mar. 1943.
20 Nicholas, ‘“Brushing Up Your Empire’, 215. Hajkowski, ‘The BBC and the Second World War’, 136.
21 NAA NSW, SP300/1, box 11, Leonard Brockington, ‘Calling Australia’, 20 June 1943.
22 SLNSW, ML MSS 6275/11, E. T. Fisk papers, file – ‘Brockington, Mr. L W’, Sir Ronald Cross to E. T. Fisk,

18 Feb. 1943. See also NAA NSW, SP300/1, box 11, ‘Talk by Mr. L.W. Brockington K.C., to be radio-telephoned
to BBC’, 23 March 1943 and ‘Talk for the BBC by Mr. L. W. Brockington K.C.’, 27 April [1943]. See also
Sydney Morning Herald, 12 April and 11 May 1943. Brockington’s Canadian broadcasts were also heard by, andwould have been partly aimed at, audiences in the USA.
23 For more on Wilmot see, most recently, McDonald with Brune, Valiant for Truth (Sydney, 2016).
24 NLA, Ball papers, box 4, folder 29, Chester Wilmot to Ball, 28 Feb. 1941. NLA, Chester and Edith Wilmot
papers, series 1, folder 48, Wilmot to T. W. Bearup, 4 July 1941; Lawrence Cecil to Bearup, 17 Nov. 1940, 28
Nov. 1940, and 4 May 1941; and Bearup to Wilmot, 11 Dec. 1941.

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Broadcasting Britishness during the Second World War
as Athens is from London.25
Wilmot could be quite critical, for example when discussing the failure of the British andAmericans properly to define Allied war aims, and the dangers of ignoring supply problems
as Australian troops advanced in New Guinea.26 This probably acted to balance and thus
make palatable the propagandistic elements of Wilmot’s broadcasts. He was certainly
deemed a success by the BBC, which invited him to join its team of war correspondents
covering the Normandy campaign, and later appointed him special correspondent at the
Nuremberg trials.

IV
In his broadcasts, Wilmot emphasised how the enduring sentimental connections between
Britain and Australia were rooted in a common military history. ‘Australian soldiers of two
generations have fought and died [in the Middle East] side by side with their British, New
Zealand, South African and Indian comrades.’ 27 Like other contemporaries, he did notpresent interwar and wartime changes in the constitutional and diplomatic relationshipbetween Britain and Australia as marking a revolutionary departure from past patterns.
Instead, they were interpreted as natural outgrowths of a long-term trend towards liberty
and self-government, a shared heritage. As long as this tendency was not blocked, thenincreasing autonomy could only strengthen the underlying sentimental connections uponwhich the empire’s existence depended.
Indeed, imperial history was seen by both the MoI and the Colonial Office as playing animportant role in the broader propaganda war, and many academic imperial historians weredrawn into the world of broadcasting, to advise and provide suitable programme material.28
However, it was not only academics and policy-makers who sought to put the imperial and
British past on air. Writers of popular entertainment and children’s programmes also
engaged with historical themes to strengthen appeals to Britannic sentiment. Using theproceeds from her sales of radio scripts in Australia to the ABC, the writer Nancy Phelan
left Sydney for London in September 1938, eager to get to England before the anticipatedoutbreak of hostilities. An Anglophile, she described herself as a ‘lover of London’: for her,
‘London was poetry, history, romance, mists and bare trees, lamplight on wet pavements,
daffodil buds in the square… Nothing was disappointing, nothing discouraged me, I didn’t
care that the British lived on starch and Brussels sprouts.’ However, elsewhere in her
writings she did show more of an awareness of the realities of working-class life in
Britain.29 After casual work in London and the Midlands, she married and had a child, andmoved to Devon to escape the Blitz.30 During and after the war, she wrote a number ofradio scripts for the ABC and the BBC, generally aimed at children and women. Many of
25 NAA NSW, series SP300/4, control symbol 140, ‘Commentary for BBC – by Chester Wilmot – relayed byradiophone’, 11 Apr. 1942.
26 NAA NSW, series SP300/4, control symbol 168, ‘B.B.C. News Despatch no. 14 – by Chester Wilmot –Relayed from Melbourne’, 16 July 1942. NAA NSW, series SP300/4, control symbol 187, ‘National News
Commentary – B.B.C. News Despatch – by Chester Wilmot’, 8 Oct. 1942.
27 NAA NSW, series SP300/4, control symbol 162, ‘B.B.C. News Despatch No. 12 – By Chester Wilmot’, 3
July 1942.
28 Potter, ‘What did you do in the War, Professor?’.
29 SLNSW, Nancy Phelan papers, box 2, Script of talk entitled ‘London Night’, n.d..
30 SLNSW, Phelan papers, box 32, unpublished typescript MSS of ‘Friendly natives: an English memoir’, n.d..
Phelan, Swift Foot of Time, pp. 5, 13. Phelan, Kingdom by the Sea.

－ 55 －SIMON J. POTTER
her children’s programmes were historical dramas, fictionalising episodes in the lives of
figures such as Bonnie Prince Charlie, Lady Jane Grey and Charles II. In these plays, shedrew on her knowledge of the dialect, accents, and way of life of the ‘amazingly primitive’
people of the west of England.31 A script for a radio serial, Sons of Devon, dramatizing the
exploits of Sir Francis Drake at the time of the Spanish Armada, included the following
exchange, representative of her writing:
1st Man – ‘Ast ‘eard noos Giles?
2nd Man – Ah. T’be praaperr bad. Yes my. ‘Tes said they Spaniards is coomin’… Us ‘ave
now ‘awp to fight they – us got naw arms nor naught.
3rd Man – Tes trew, but us mun never let they conquer we. Naw! Not likey. They
foreigners mun not set foot on my fields ef I dies fightin’ they.32
Such local colour provided an interesting and presumably comprehensible backdrop foradventure stories aimed at British and Australian audiences. Indeed, the Spanish Armada
proved a resonant historical event at a time when Britain once again seemed to faceinvasion. After the war, In 1947, Phelan wrote a play called Drake’s Drum for the BBC’s
Children’s Hour. Set at the time of Dunkirk, the play drew comparisons between the
Armada and Hitler’s threatened landings. In the play, a young boy goes to bed worried that
England is ‘beat’, but is assured by his father that ‘We haven’t even started yet.’ His
grandmother promises that Francis Drake will return to save England: the play then moves
into a dramatised account of Drake’s defeat of the Spanish. Returning to the present day,the boy’s father goes off to help with the evacuation of the troops from Dunkirk. His
grandmother concludes that Britain doesn’t need Drake after all: ‘We’ve got Churchill,haven’t we?… He’s our Drake.’33
Phelan’s scripts re-packaged British historical events in a way that would speak tocontemporary audiences of British and Australian children. She mediated these histories insuch a way as to justify and support Britain’s war effort and the British empire. In The
Royal Leopard, as in many of her radio plays, Phelan sought to bring history alive byjuxtaposing past and present, and by having a young child travel through time. The first
episode of the series opens in a house in Sydney, where a Professor Jones is having
breakfast with his young family, after having sat up late into the night finishing a lecture on
Edward III. His son, John, tells him that he has recently been studying Edward and theBlack Prince: ‘Our history teacher said they were no better than a lot of murderers. Worsethan the Germans.’ The Professor tells John that this is an ‘interesting inaccuracy’
perpetrated by the boy’s history teacher, Mr Snodge, a ‘weedy, anemic, spotty-faced, longhaired Conscientious Objector’. John responds to his father that ‘Everyone knows you’regood at history and all that – but the whole thing with you is that you’re an Imperialist andyou only write history in a way that butters up England and the Empire and never gives theother persons side at all’. To which the Professor replies: ‘A true historian never butters up
anyone – his own or anyone else’s country. He tells the truth.’ He argues that one has tojudge the Black Prince by the standards of his time: ‘Prince Edward’s barbarous habits
seem to have upset your Mr Snodge with his delicate sensibilities, although if we put him
beside a Nazi Storm Trooper he appears as meek and humble as a nun.’ This debate on thephilosophy of history is terminated somewhat prematurely when the Professor sends John
31 SLNSW, Phelan papers, box 27, script of talk with J. Denton, 2BL, n.d..
32 SLNSW, Phelan papers, box 26, script for ‘Sons of Devon’, episode 10, n.d..
33 SLNSW, Phelan papers, box 26, script for ‘Drake’s Drum’, n.d..

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Broadcasting Britishness during the Second World War
to his room. However, it is resumed when, in his dreams, John is visited by a succession ofhistorical characters, who relate the life of the Black Prince and predict the horrors of
future war.34

V
By drawing on voices from around the British world, wartime broadcasters created an echoof a combined imperial war effort. The diverse peoples of the empire, British and nonBritish, were presented as working together towards common goals of liberty and economic
improvement. Ideas about the composite nature of the British imperial community,
combining a wide range of different groups under the umbrella of a single entity, were used
to underpin claims about the effectiveness of imperial cooperation more generally. Attempts
to appeal to Britannic sentiment often also involved the deployment of claims about the
British and imperial past. The British world was presented as sharing a history, a usable
past which could help justify and motivate the imperial war effort.
It is of course difficult to gauge how far the images projected by wartime broadcasts
reflected wider responses to the war, or popular attitudes towards the empire. There is not
space in a short essay such as this to consider the (admittedly scant) evidence that survives
concerning audience responses. In a wider study of British identities during the Second
World War, Sonya O. Rose has presented the BBC as one of the key organisations seeking
to promote a united national response to the war in Britain. She concludes that while theachievement of a single, core British national identity proved elusive, a united war effort
was nevertheless, to a significant effect, secured. 35 Similar ambiguity surrounds thequestion of how far the BBC succeeded in generating popular knowledge or enthusiasm forthe empire in Britain during the war: historians cannot agree on an answer.36 However,when it comes to the issue of Britannic sentiment in the British world, we might be more
confident in hazarding a conclusion. Given the range and extent of broadcasting about theshared history and traditions of liberty and cooperation that, it was claimed, sustained theBritish world, it would be difficult to conclude that such ideas bore no relation to wider
popular beliefs in this period. Certainly, some contemporaries drew attention to broader
public apathy or hostility towards empire (a constant theme throughout the twentiethcentury). Yet such resistance to empire more generally did not necessarily translate into a
rejection of Britannic sentiment, of the sense of a world-spanning British community. As aresult, by emphasising the significance of Britannic sentiment, broadcasters surely did help
listeners around the British world comprehend and support the war effort as an imperial
one.
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also available as a special number of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2:31 (May2003).
Buckner, Phillip and Francis, R. Douglas (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005).
34 SLNSW, Phelan papers, box 26, script for ‘Royal Leopard’, episode 1, n.d..
35 Rose, Which People’s War?.
36 Here, contrast Hajkowski, ‘The BBC, the Empire, and the Second World War’ with Nicholas, ‘“Brushing up

your Empire”’.

－ 57 －SIMON J. POTTER
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