John Reith, First Baron Reith of Stonehaven

Scottish media director

• Born: July 20, 1889
• Birthplace: Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, Scotland
• Died: June 16, 1971
• Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland

Reith created in the British Broadcasting Corporation the world’s most famous radio broadcasting system, which combined “high” culture and moral uplift as well as entertainment.

Early Life

First Baron Reith (reeth) of Stonehaven was born John Charles Walsham Reith in Stonehaven, Kincardineshire, Scotland. His father, the Reverend George Reith, of the Scottish Free Church, was a prominent Glasgow minister, and his grandfather, also George Reith, had been an engineer and manager of the Clyde Navigation Trust. His mother, Adah Mary, was the daughter of a London stockbroker. Reith was the last of seven children, born when his parents were in their forties. He attended Glasgow Academy until the age of fifteen and then a minor public school in England for two years. Reith was an indifferent student, and although he hoped to attend Oxford or Cambridge, he instead entered Glasgow Technical College and in 1908 was apprenticed as an engineer.

Reith’s was a somewhat lonely childhood because of his father’s busy ministry and because most of his brothers and sisters were near adulthood when he was born. His parents were loving but strict, and at an early age Reith felt the weight of living up to their ideals. Theirs was a very religious household; Scottish Presbyterianism, with its Calvinist foundations, played an important part in Reith’s character. Something of a dreamer, he felt driven to accomplish great things, called both by God and by the example of his father and grandfather. Throughout his life, in spite of his accomplishments, he often feared that he had not responded sufficiently.

In Glasgow, during his engineering apprenticeship, Reith joined the Officers’ Training Corps and received a commission in the territorial reserves in 1911. When World War I broke out in August, 1914, Reith was mobilized and sent to France as a transport officer. Like so many of his generation, he matured in No Man’s Land. Reith was an imposing figure, more than six feet six inches in height and with beetling brows; he was an able officer, popular with the men under him, but he often came into conflict with his superiors. Combat ended for Reith in October, 1915, when he was shot through the head by a German sniper and was permanently scarred. After he recovered, he was sent to the United States in 1916 as part of the British war effort to facilitate the purchase of weapons from American manufacturers. He also discovered, when he talked about the war to American audiences, that he could be an inspiring speaker. He came very much to admire America, its energy, its efficiency, and particularly its people, and in later years he occasionally voiced the wish to emigrate to the United States. Reith never did so.

When the United States entered the war in April, 1917, Reith returned to London. During the rest of the war, he worked as an engineer for the military, and after the armistice he helped to liquidate munitions contracts. Like so many former soldiers, Reith felt frustrated about the future, and his belief that he had been called to do great things made that feeling more intense. Although before the war was over he had fallen in love with Muriel Odhams, daughter of a London publisher, he postponed their marriage until 1921 because he considered his life to be too unsettled. Unable to find a challenging position in London, he returned to Glasgow in 1920 to manage a manufacturing firm. Reith was very successful in reorganizing the factory, but the company eventually failed, and, in 1922, leaving his wife in Glasgow, Reith returned to London to what he hoped was a political career. In the election that followed, the fall of David Lloyd George’s coalition government, Reith served as a secretary for a London member of Parliament and met a number of important politicians. Nevertheless, it was not politics that would be his destiny.

Life’s Work

During the election campaign, Reith answered a newspaper advertisement seeking a manager for a new firm, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Reith knew nothing about broadcasting but his experience as an engineer and manager and his recent political contacts were sufficient, and he began work in December, 1922. Although Reith would become known as the founder of the BBC, he came to broadcasting only after many earlier developments. In the United States, as in Great Britain, wireless broadcasting had been taken over by the government during World War I. After the war, however, it was demanded that the government end its monopoly and allow private enterprise to develop radio broadcasting, and by 1924, 530 broadcasting stations had been established in the United States. The lack of governmental control and the size of the country led to considerable chaos. Developments in England were different, where the tradition of government involvement was much greater. The Post Office had been given power over the telegraph in 1869, and early in the twentieth century, the same department was given control over wireless transmissions. By early 1922, radio manufacturers and prospective listeners were pressing the British government to allow more wireless broadcasting. The result was the formation of the BBC, a private company, but one that had a monopoly in the United Kingdom, operating under a license granted by the Post Office and funded in part by license fees paid by listeners. Reith became its first manager; he had found that for which he had long been looking.

In the early years of the BBC, Reith was given considerable freedom; the directors, representing the manufacturers, were more concerned with selling radios than broadcasting, and generally the Post Office officials did not interfere. Initially, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, there was a reluctance to use the medium for advertising purposes; in both countries, there was also a belief that the new technology should be used for public service and should be educational, not simply entertaining. In the United States, however, entertainment quickly dominated and advertisers were soon selling their wares over the airwaves. With Reith’s influence, though, mere entertainment came second on the BBC, for Reith had always been a person of strong opinions, and his opinions about radio broadcasting reflected his middle-class, Christian background. He believed that broadcasting should be, in a broad sense, morally uplifting and educational, and until he retired in 1938, Reith was able to dictate both policy and performance on the BBC. Advisory committees were established in such areas as religion and the arts to ensure the moral and intellectual quality of the broadcasts. Many members of the staff came from Reith’s own background, often from Cambridge and Oxford, and there soon developed a recognizable BBC style of speech. His announcers wore dinner jackets when broadcasting over the radio, and not only were the shows to be of high moral content, so was the staff: Personal moral lapses were not tolerated. Reith was successful in molding the BBC to his view both because of his own vision and energy and because the British middle classes and politicians of the day shared his values.

Reith and the BBC did have their opponents. At first, the company was forbidden to report news, a protection that the powerful newspaper publishers demanded. Moreover, there were complaints about the company’s monopoly status. After several governmental commissions had examined the status of the BBC, in 1926 it was decided that the company should divest itself of its private business character and become instead a public corporation: As a result, the British Broadcasting Company became the British Broadcasting Corporation, headed by a board of governors appointed by the government and still funded from listeners’ license fees. Reith became the first director general, and in 1927 he was awarded a knighthood. Reith had accepted the restrictions against news reporting, but the BBC was forced into it suddenly in May, 1926, as a result of a general strike, launched by trade unions at the urging of the coal miners . Most of the major newspapers shut down, and Reith reluctantly stepped into the communications vacuum. In reporting the strike, Reith saw it as his duty, and the duty of the BBC, to be as objective as possible and not simply to take the side of the government against the strikers, but it was not an easy task. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, opposed that approach and never forgot Reith’s unwillingness to support the authorities more fully.

As the years passed, the BBC became more and more Reith’s creation. He continued to oppose advertising and the development of any competing broadcasting system; under Reith, the BBC retained its monopoly. It increased in staff and in functions, establishing both television and foreign-language facilities, and became more bureaucratic in nature. Although Reith usually picked excellent subordinates, and on paper he delegated responsibility, because of his domineering personality the corporation somewhat stagnated during the 1930’s. Still, the BBC under Reith’s leadership had become one of the most important institutions in Great Britain, and it was greatly admired, if not always emulated, throughout the world. Reith, having once found his destiny, was reluctant to allow his grown child to continue on its own; it was not until the eve of World War II that he left the BBC, to take over Imperial Airways, and when he left it was with an angry emptiness. Reith felt like a rejected father.

Significance

With the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939, Reith prayed that Prime MinisterNeville Chamberlain would give him a task commensurate with his abilities; after a few months, Reith was made minister of information and was necessarily elected to the House of Commons. Before he could implement needed reforms, Chamberlain was replaced by Churchill, in May, 1940. Reith unwillingly became minister of transport and then, after a few months, minister of works. He was forced to give up his seat in the Commons and became instead Baron Reith of Stonehaven, with a seat in the House of Lords. In early 1942, Churchill, in a cabinet reshuffle, removed Reith from the government. Although Reith had wanted to go into politics as a young man, he would have made a poor professional politician; he lacked the ability to compromise, and he was unable to disguise his feelings about his colleagues. Churchill remembered Reith’s part in the General Strike and also blamed Reith for not allowing him more speaking time on the BBC during the 1930’s, but it was probably as much Reith’s failures as Churchill’s memory that destroyed Reith’s ministerial career.

Deeply hurt, Reith joined the Royal Navy, and, although not a senior officer, he was responsible for bringing together the ships and matériel necessary for the successful D day invasion of 1944. In 1945, Churchill was defeated by the Labour Party, and Reith briefly hoped that the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, might appoint him to office. Reith’s lack of a proper grasp of political realities was again apparent, however, as he was not a member of the Labour Party and refused to join. In the late 1940’s, he was chair of the National Film Finance Board as well as holding what he believed to be were other minor positions. During the 1950’s, he directed the government’s Colonial Development Corporation and did much to reverse that institution’s difficulties. Through it all, Reith continued to hope that he would be once again summoned for a great task, but the call never came. Although he was made Knight of the Thistle, the highest royal order for a Scotsman, and though he became Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland, in his old age he looked back on his life with a sense of failure. In the 1920’s, Reith had created out of his own vision and need the most famous broadcasting system in the world and one of the most important institutions in twentieth century Great Britain, but that was not enough for him; he spent the rest of his life attempting unsuccessfully to recapture that earlier sense of achievement.

Bibliography

Avery, Todd. Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922-1938. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. Examines how British writers complied with the moral values and public service mandate implemented by the BBC’s founders and early administrators. The book contains information about Reith, including the first chapter, “Arnold over Britain? John Reith and Broadcasting Morality.”

Boyle, Andrew. Only the Wind Will Listen. London: Hutchinson, 1972. A complete biography of Reith that relies heavily on Boyle’s personal discussions with Reith toward the end of his life. Because of this, the volume reflects Reith’s own attitudes in his old age as he looked back at his childhood and his days at the BBC.

Briggs, Asa. The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. 4 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961-1979. Briggs has written a masterful and comprehensive study of broadcasting. The first volume takes the story to 1926 and the establishment of the public corporation, and the second volume goes to the eve of World War II. Reith is a dominant subject in both volumes. The third volume covers the war years, and Reith plays some small part as minister of information.

Chisholm, Kate. “Reithian Values.” Spectator 302 (October 28, 2006): 71. A profile of Reith, including his views about broadcasting and morals.

Leishman, Marista. My Father: Reith of the BBC. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew, 2006. Reith’s daughter provides an intimate look at her father and his work.

Reith, J. C. W. Into the Wind. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949. This is Reith’s autobiography, written in the years after World War I. It shows the author’s attitudes at that time, but it is not always entirely accurate when discussing the events of his earlier life. Nevertheless, it is absolutely necessary for any understanding of Reith.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Reith Diaries. Edited by Charles Stuart. London: William Collins Sons, 1975. Reith kept a diary for more than fifty years, which eventually resulted in many volumes of manuscript. Unfortunately, the result was somewhat superficial and formless. Editor Stuart has sifted the whole and has produced the best single volume on the life of Reith. Stuart’s editorial comments are extremely helpful.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wearing Spurs. London: Hutchinson, 1966. Although not published until late in his life, here Reith wrote of his experiences in the Great War. As such, it belongs to the genre of personal accounts of World War I, but it does not achieve the literary level of Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929).

Taylor, A. J. P. English History, 1914-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. This volume in the Oxford History of England series is perhaps the best. It is a brilliant if somewhat controversial account of British history from the beginning of World War I through the conclusion of World War II. Taylor is not particularly an admirer of Reith, but this book is the place to begin any study of the history of England during the first half of the twentieth century.