Churchill's Wizards (38 page)

This is essentially what the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley started doing. His
Postscript
talks after the 9 o'clock news on Sunday nights between June and October 1940 had enormous popular impact in that crucial year (but were not liked by the establishment). Priestley did not sound like an upper-class chap from Oxford or Cambridge. He was a solid Yorkshire bloke who had seen a thing or two, and he had definite ideas about what kind of broadcasting worked.

In a similar way, everyone who heard him felt that Tommy Handley (1894–1949) was real and true. The first great star of British radio was someone who could play the straight man or be the comic and yet always remain himself. Born in Liverpool, he acquired the scouser's gift for backchat and daft surrealism. From his schooldays, Handley spent all his pocket money on wigs, masks and false moustaches, and loved conjurors, drama, pantomimes and pierrot shows. While serving in the Royal Navy Air Service Kite Balloon Section at the end of WW1 he toured with a concert party giving three shows a night to troops and wounded. Tommy Handley had a good singing voice and after the war travelled the country doing musical comedy. In 1924, Handley made his first broadcast from the BBC studios at Savoy Hill, so he was in at the birth of radio, the perfect medium for his kind of quick-fire patter. Ted Kavanagh (father of the poet P. J. Kavanagh) was a stout, balding, red-haired New Zealander who sold his first radio sketch to the BBC for 3 guineas and had the pleasure of hearing Tommy Handley bring it to life. Handley asked Kavanagh if he could write some more; they worked together for the next twenty-three years.

In August 1937, a corduroy-jacketed BBC producer in Bristol called Francis Worsley (ex-schoolmaster, ex-colonial service) had to put together a sound picture called ‘Evening in Cheddar' from the famous caves in Cheddar Gorge. Worsley livened things up by getting Tommy
Handley to join the party of tourists being shown around the stalactites. Equipped with a few gags scripted by Kavanagh, Handley got some exuberant repartee going with the guide, but the BBC drew criticism from scientists for allowing ‘a red-nosed comedian' to contaminate knowledge with humour.

In June 1939, Francis Worsley was working in BBC Variety in London, looking for a new radio comedy show. Tommy Handley suggested Ted Kavanagh as the writer, and over pink gins at the Langham Hotel, the trio came up with an imaginary venue for the show: a pirate radio station on a cruise ship. It would be a floating mad hatter's party with Handley in charge of broadcasting.

This was a crucial moment in the run-up to WW2. The Spanish Civil War had just ended and Adolf Hitler was all over the news. Whenever the Führer demanded further concessions from the democracies, the
Daily Express
used to run the headline ‘It's That Man Again!' Good title for the show, the trio thought. They hired Jack Harris's band from the London Casino and the first programme went out live from the big BBC studio at Maida Vale from 8.15–9.00 p.m. on Wednesday, 12 July 1939.

In the ensuing ‘emergency period', BBC Variety and its Repertory Company were at first evacuated to Bristol. Worsley the public-school
New Statesman
reader, Handley the nonconformist, animal-loving Conservative, and Kavanagh the Roman Catholic follower of G. K. Chesterton all got together to think about the new
It's That Man Again!
, which was due for live broadcast in a fortnight's time. What were they going to do now war had broken out? Their cruise ship idea was
kaput
with the peace. All around was evidence of heightened security procedures, new Ministries issuing orders, government bumf, urgent acronyms. Handley was, as usual, doodling on a pad, when he ringed the first letters of
It's That Man Again!
Thus
ITMA
was ready to join ARP, FANY, MEW, MoI, RAF, WVS and the rest of the baffling initials of wartime. Kavanagh's idea of radio-writing was ‘to use sound for all it was worth, the sound of different voices and accents, the use of catchphrases, the impact of funny sounds in words, of grotesque effects to give atmosphere – every device to create the illusion of rather crazy or inverted reality'. The surreal half-hour show contained over eighteen minutes of scripted dialogue and they aimed for a hundred laughs in that time, with a gag, pun or tongue-twister every eight seconds.

The madcap world of
ITMA
was like a series of bright cartoons, strung together by the cheery voice of Tommy Handley, playing a busybody in the government, dealing with bizarre situations. The first
ITMA
, censored, security-vetted, and broadcast from Clifton Parish Hall three weeks into the war on Tuesday, 19 September 1939, did not have most of the characters and the catchphrases that it would develop over three hundred shows in the next ten years, but already ridiculed the officious nonsense that everybody was having to live through.

The next show introduced Funf, the serio-comic German spy, a caricature of Adolf Hitler. ‘This is Funf speaking' became a telephone catchphrase of the Phoney War and helped reduce the Abwehr and the Führer to a laughing stock. The feature ‘Interned Tonight' had harmless characters like Herr Cut the barber. By November the show was running smoothly. The fictional camouflage unit made everyone invisible – so invisible that Tommy Handley, Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries in charge of the Office of Twerps, could not find his own desk and he was evacuated to ‘somewhere in England' to set up a secret broadcasting station.

The nation listened to
ITMA
right through the war and loved its succession of fantastical characters and topical jokes. You could not interrupt the King and Queen of England between 8.30 and 9 p.m. on Thursdays when
ITMA
was on. Princess Elizabeth's sixteenth birthday present in April 1942 was a two-hour command performance of
ITMA
at Windsor Castle.

ITMA
comforted people by making light of dark times and showing the British that they could still laugh at themselves. The spirit was very similar to that of Heath Robinson's drawings, satirising official
pomposity and secrecy with surreal inventiveness; in 1940 his series of cartoons of Winston Churchill included a drawing of the First Lord of the Admiralty ‘disguised as a swan' laying magnetic mines in the Thames to discredit the Nazis. Heath Robinson's absurdity, like
ITMA
's, left you with no other option but laughter. Lord Haw-Haw's aim was the opposite, gloatingly telling people how bad things were in Britain, and how divided the country was, how inevitable their defeat. Poor Mrs Bellamy of Sheffield, who killed herself after listening to Haw-Haw, must count as a small triumph of Nazi demoralisation.
ITMA
's well-known catchphrases played an important bonding role in wartime. The diver's lugubrious ‘I'm going down now' was heard in every lift and even over RAF frequencies as pilots swooped to attack ground targets. When a rescue party located a schoolboy buried in a bombed house, he managed to refer to Mrs Mopp from under the rubble – ‘Can you do me now, sir?'

When the German airship
Hindenburg
burst into flames on 6 May 1937, the reporter Herbert Morrison broke down in tears on radio – ‘Oh the humanity!' – at the sight, although he did not stop recording sounds and interviews from the scene. That same summer, Edward R. Murrow moved to London as the European Director of the US radio network CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System). He hired William L. Shirer in Berlin, and made his own first broadcast from Vienna during the
Anschluss
of March 1938. Murrow soon became an authoritative news reporter who could speak directly and naturally to the American people in vivid vignettes. During the Munich and the Czechoslovak crises, US audiences became used to CBS news reports from the likes of Bill Shirer and Ed Murrow dramatically interrupting regularly scheduled programmes, because all news was live.

It was on CBS radio that Orson Welles pulled off a Hallowe'en sensation in October 1938, using apparently live radio reports from New Jersey to dramatise H. G. Wells's
The War of the Worlds
. The faked authenticity of the actor playing the radio reporter – Welles made him listen repeatedly to Morrison's
Hindenburg
broadcast and mimic his jerky speech and emotional excitement – was so effective that listeners called the police, and people fled their homes before the Martian invaders.

By the time war broke out in September 1939, Murrow had put
together a good team of correspondents. But unlike Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, who were quick to grant neutral broadcasters the facilities and interviews they wanted, Britain initially bungled its relations with the American radio people. For the first year of WW2, the War Office and Admiralty were unhelpful, the Ministry of Information strangled them in red tape, and Home Security blocked their movements. This all changed with the Blitz.

At 11.30 p.m. on Saturday, 24 August 1940, during the first general night attack on the London region, Edward R. Murrow was standing on the steps of St-Martin-in-the-Fields looking towards Nelson's Column and holding a microphone: ‘The noise that you hear at this moment is the sound of the air-raid siren … People are walking along very quietly. We're just at the entrance of an air-raid shelter here, and I must move the cable over just a bit so people can walk in.' He crouched down to record the sound of footsteps, the shelter door, the background noise of red double-decker buses and sirens in the background. Even though Murrow was using BBC equipment, British listeners were not permitted to hear such live material in 1940. Everything was scripted, censored, and then checked against the script as it was being read.

The bombing heard faintly on Murrow's broadcast got worse in September and October with air raids every night. He made his first adlibbing broadcast from the roof of Broadcasting House during an air raid on 21 September 1940, and was inside it during the great raid of 15 October when a 500-lb bomb hit the building while Bruce Belfrage was reading the nine o'clock news. This delayed-action device finally exploded in the music library, killing four men and three women, injuring many others and blowing a hole in the starboard or west flank, five storeys up. Murrow saw the pub on his street corner, the Devonshire, demolished, with thirty dead. His friends and neighbours, Claire and Alan Wells, were killed by bomb shrapnel in Portland Place. Murrow went out at night and talked to people, the poor in the tube shelters, the rich in hotels, the wardens and the first aiders, the fire and rescue services, civil defence on duty, and reported it all in his restrained graphic way, letting neutral America see the dead of London.

This was important at a time when the ‘America First' movement, led by the isolationist aviator Charles Lindbergh and supported by the US Ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, thought that the USA should
remain well isolated from European entanglements and foreign wars. Britain urgently needed America's help, but when Churchill inspected civil defence in Glasgow with President Roosevelt's envoy, Harry Hopkins, on 17 January 1941, he did not actually ask for direct intervention: ‘We do not require in 1941 large armies from overseas. What we do require are weapons, ships and aeroplanes. All that we can pay for we will pay for, but we require far more than we shall be able to pay for.'

In the propaganda job of persuading the Americans to help, the British knew that Americans would make a better job of wooing the USA than Britons. The connection between the two countries is caught beautifully in Alice Duer Miller's narrative verse book
The White
Cliffs
, a superb piece of emotional propaganda that went through eleven American editions in three months in late 1940, and eight British editions in five months early in 1941.

The White Cliffs
is the story of an Anglophile New England girl called Susan Dunne who falls in love with and marries a pink Englishman from Devon in the summer of 1914, and slowly becomes ‘almost an English woman'. Her husband and his older brother are both killed in WW1, and Susan sees it as her duty to bring up her son in the expected English tradition in their inherited leaky manor. But her Yankee father sees the English as ‘the redcoat bully – the ancient foe', and as WW2 looms, Susan is afraid that her only son will die like his father and uncle. She wonders, is contemporary England worth it?

But then she thinks back to Elizabeth I and Cromwell and ‘the sullen might/Of the English, standing upon a right' and she comes to understand that American quests for freedom were also rooted in English liberty.

Other Americans helped to get the message across. Quentin Reynolds was probably the best-known American print journalist in Britain. He was due to return to the United States not long after the
bombing of London started in September 1940, and the Crown Film Unit wanted him to take a film about the Blitz back under his arm. Humphrey Jennings, Harry Watt and editor Stuart McAllister made
London Can Take It
, a strong, simple film about British stoicism amid wreckage and destruction, in ten days. Quentin Reynolds wrote and narrated its tough-guy script: ‘I am a neutral reporter… I can assure you, there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London town …. [A] bomb has its limitations: it can only destroy buildings and kill people. It cannot kill the unconquerable spirit and courage of the people of London … London can take it.' Reynolds screened the film for President Roosevelt.