Nine Days in May

When the Trades Union Congress called for a General Strike in support of Britain’s coal miners on Saturday 1st May 1926, few thought of the infant BBC as a news organisation. But over the next nine days, that was about to change.

The public wanted up-to-date information on a rapidly changing crisis, and with newspaper printing at a standstill the BBC was in a unique position to fill the void. Yet, the BBC’s role in the Strike was to prove highly contentious, and proved to be the first major flashpoint between broadcasters and the Government over questions of impartiality and independence.

A State of Emergency

When the BBC was created in 1922, Britain’s powerful newspaper lobby had insisted the broadcaster was restricted to just two bulletins a day. Listeners at home could enjoy hours of music, talks, drama, or variety shows, but they had to wait until 7pm for their first taste of ‘wireless news’. Even then, bulletins featured just recycled copy supplied by outside agencies like Reuters. The BBC had no working journalists of its own.

Yet when the Strike was called that first weekend in May, the BBC reacted remarkably quickly.

Its Managing Director, John Reith, had seen an editorial due to be printed overnight in the Daily Mail which claimed that in calling for a General Strike, the TUC had transformed an ordinary industrial dispute into a revolutionary attempt to subvert ‘the rights and liberties of the people’. When workers at the Mail’s London presses saw the text, they walked out. Reith called 10 Downing Street to get the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin’s response. And it was then that he learned the Government had withdrawn from last-ditch negotiations with the trades unions. The Strike would begin in a matter of hours. And Reith used a phone-line installed in his own flat to broadcast the sensational news to the country.

The Managing Director’s next task was to prepare the BBC itself for the coming State of Emergency.

Non-essential staff at its London headquarters, Savoy Hill, were given a week’s wages and sent home. For those who remained in the building, rotas were re-arranged, hot suppers and cooked breakfasts supplied for anyone staying overnight, spare candle lamps brought in in case of power-cuts, and special police constables asked to guard the premises.

The sense of being under siege, and at the centre of an unfolding crisis, comes across vividly in this interview from the BBC’s Oral History Collection with Olive Bottle, the woman then in charge of the Savoy Hill switchboard:

Ominous News from Downing Street

A team of five men and five woman was hastily assembled to work in shifts around the clock, gathering, re-writing, compiling, and typing-up news items. They garnered stories from four different news agencies, as well as hundreds of telegrams streaming in from local strike organisers, regional government officers, and listeners. Three BBC staff were also installed at the Admiralty, where the Deputy Chief Civil Commissioner, John Davidson, would supply news from the Government side.

From Monday, the first full day of the Strike, the old restrictions were suspended and the BBC was able to broadcast five news bulletins a day, instead of just two, the first going out at 10am. Within a day or two, there was so much news to report – about transport difficulties, factory closures, problems with food supplies – and so many official announcements to pass on, that the BBC’s bulletins sometimes lasted nearly three-quarters of an hour.

Many Britons who’d previously resisted investing in a radio now hurriedly bought their own or clustered around receivers installed in high-street shops. ‘The sensation of a general strike’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary, ‘centres around the headphones of the wireless set.’

It all seemed to be going so well for the BBC. But then, on the evening of Wednesday 5th May, the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, arrived at Savoy Hill to broadcast an appeal for volunteer special constables, and took the opportunity to share privately with Reith some ominous news: the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, was looking to commandeer the BBC outright.

In 1926 the BBC was a private company in the process of transforming itself into a public corporation. The last thing Reith wanted was for it to be directly controlled by the Government and become its mouthpiece. Yet the terms of the BBC licence allowed for it to be taken over outright in a national emergency. If enough members of the Cabinet agreed with Churchill, his threat could be made real.

This perilous moment was recalled many years later when Reith was interviewed by Malcolm Muggeridge for a television programme. The BBC’s archive holds several hours of unedited footage from the film, and in this extract Reith describes going straight to Downing Street the following morning to plead for the BBC to remain independent:

A 'State of Suspense'

The ‘short note’ that Reith mentioned in that interview actually survives in the BBC’s Written Archives. It was headed ‘The BBC and the Emergency’ and is shown below. The note sets out Reith’s heartfelt, and somewhat panicky appeal for the BBC to be left alone:

Reith’s words are striking. He argues that listeners had learned to trust the BBC, that its ability to report freely would help avoid ‘the panic of ignorance’, and that since its reputation for independence would support an ‘atmosphere of understanding’ between the two sides it should also be ‘trusted by the Government’.

But Reith goes one step further. ‘Assuming the BBC is for the people, and that the Government is for the people’, he reassures the Cabinet, ‘it follows that the BBC must be for the Government in this crisis too.’

Reith received no response. And behind-the-scenes, the BBC could only describe itself as in a ‘state of suspense’. Soon, a pervasive self-censorship started to creep into its coverage.

By Friday 7th May, the BBC’s local stations were all being phoned-up from Savoy Hill and advised about what they could – and could not – report. A note of these telephone conversations has also been preserved in the BBC’s Written Archives:

The threat from Churchill was clearly limiting the BBC’s willingness to feature trades union voices. It was true that news bulletins could still report strike activity. They could even quote pro-strike sources. But from this moment onwards, the only people allowed to speak directly on air were those making announcements of an anti-strike nature.

‘The Prime Minister Would Rather You Didn’t’

On Saturday 8th May, it was the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin’s turn to take to the BBC microphone.

Speaking not from Downing Street but from Reith’s own home, Baldwin told listeners that he wanted a fair settlement to the coal miners’ dispute but that the General Strike was an attempt to ‘starve us into submission’. It needed to be called off ‘absolutely and without reserve’.

The full text of his short speech can be seen below:

Reith had been standing behind Baldwin while he spoke and later admitted that he’d helped the Prime Minister finalise his script. When Baldwin closed his speech by saying ‘I am a man of peace … but I will not surrender the safety and security of the British constitution’, he was using words supplied by Reith himself.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, had wanted to appear on air, too, so he could call for a ‘spirit of fellowship’ between both sides and their agreement to suspend hostilities ‘simultaneously and concurrently’. Reith thought the Archbishop’s words ‘unexceptional’, and wanted to allow him to speak. But the Managing Director received a message from Downing Street that simply said ‘the Prime Minister would rather you didn’t’. Reith was told that the ‘final decision’ rested with him. But having received this advice he felt he could hardly go ahead without risking Churchill’s fury. So the Archbishop was denied his chance.

As was the Labour Party leader, Ramsay MacDonald, who requested a right of reply to Baldwin’s speech. On Monday 10th May MacDonald phoned Reith and forwarded the text of what he proposed to say to the nation if given the chance:

As with the Archbishop, Reith thought MacDonald’s script was perfectly acceptable. But again Downing Street said it was ‘quite against’ it being broadcast. And, once again, Downing Street left it to Reith to break the news to MacDonald.

The Fallout

By now, the Strike was starting to falter. On Tuesday 11th May, a series of enormous convoys broke through the picket lines to deliver several hundred tons of meat which had been unloaded at the Royal Albert Dock to London’s Smithfield Market. The TUC’s national leaders were increasingly despondent about their chances of winning against the Government’s propaganda onslaught and its ability to co-ordinate so many police officers and volunteer strike breakers.

On Wednesday 12th May Reith was in Savoy Hill reading the lunchtime bulletin when news came through that the TUC had declared the General Strike was over. The Managing Director asked for the news to be ‘confirmed by 10 Downing Street’, and once this was done, he took to the microphone to let the country know what had happened. Later that afternoon, he broadcast a more detailed account of the final hours. ‘As for the BBC,’ he told listeners, ‘We have laboured under certain difficulties, the full story of which may be told one day.’

In many ways the BBC had had a ‘good’ Strike.

It now had the machinery for its own newsgathering. And it had seen off the threat of being commandeered by the Government and turned into a state broadcaster.

One of the BBC’s own announcers, John Snagge, had been working in Savoy Hill throughout the Strike. Many years later he recorded an interview for the BBC Oral History Collection. In it, he described how he sensed a new relationship emerging between the broadcaster and Britain’s political class during those nine extraordinary days:

But the BBC‘s achievements had come at significant cost.

Reith calculated that almost any price had been worth paying to prevent the BBC from being taken over. He’d also believed that even if its news coverage had been incomplete it had remained factually accurate. Yet once the Strike was over he was forced to admit that the BBC had been ‘interfered with’.

It was a tacit acknowledgement that the mere threat of a take-over had been enough to unbalance coverage. And nothing in the days since the Strike had altered the Government’s ability to repeat what the Deputy Chief Civil Commissioner, John Davidson, called ‘unofficial control’ should another crisis ever arise.

Listeners, too, felt aggrieved at the service they’d received during the course of the Strike.

Some of the many hundreds of letters of complaint received from the public have been preserved in the BBC’s Written Archives – including these two, from London and Lancashire:

The General Strike today

Why should we care about these events, a hundred years on?

Just two years ago, the BBC’s role in the General Strike was brought to public attention once more when the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London staged a new play by Jack Thorne. It was called ‘When Winston Went to War with the Wireless’. In this short YouTube clip, Thorne talked about why he was drawn to retelling a century-old story for modern day theatre audiences:

In this second YouTube clip, members of the cast, and the play’s director, Katy Rudd, also suggest that those nine extraordinary days in May 1926 still cast a light on broader themes – about truth, impartiality, and independence – that broadcasters and politicians alike still grapple with today:

As the success of Thorne’s play – as well as the flurry of new books and radio programmes - makes clear, the General Strike remains a timely reminder that, despite the BBC’s formal independence, the relationship between the national broadcaster and the Government of the day, is so intimate, and so mutually interdependent, that it’s unlikely ever to be entirely friction-free.

Written by David Hendy, author of ‘The BBC: A People’s History’ (London: Profile Books, 2022).

Youtube footage with kind permission of the Donmar Warehouse.