WHEN TELEVISION STOPPED: 1939-46 by Jonathan Bignell

Anniversary celebrations are being planned to mark the start of BBC radio in 1922 and Channel 4 TV in 1982 next year, as John Ellis’s blog last week discussed. But rather than celebrating a beginning, I thought I would look at the time when television stopped, after a mere three years of existence, during the Second World War. There was wartime television in Germany and France[1] but not in Britain, and I think its absence tells us a lot about how broadcasting worked here.

Peacetime television was an extension of the BBC’s national radio broadcasting and in 1936, after years of test transmissions, the BBC began a daily television service using John Logie Baird’s technology and also a competing system developed by Marconi, another British company.[2] Television was demonstrated in department stores and exhibitions, and although hardly anyone owned a TV set, many thousands had seen one at a public event and expected that the medium would become politically and culturally important.

The early television receivers cost about £85, affordable only by the wealthy, so although prices had fallen to about £30 by 1939 this was still six weeks’ salary for the average worker and there were only about 20,000 sets in use.[3] On the other hand, during wartime watching television could have seemed like an ideal way to spend the long evenings isolated in dark, blacked-out rooms. For one thing, the relatively weak pictures on the small early sets would have been easier to see! But there was concern that television signals might be used for enemy bombers’ navigation, because the sole transmitter aerial was located on the top of a hill (to maximise its range) at Alexandra Park in inner London and was thus a potential homing beacon.[4] Moreover, television news pictures of bomb damage might give useful feedback to the enemy on the success or failure of German air raids.

It was clear before the war, however, that broadcasting would be crucial for disseminating news and emergency instructions, and for maintaining morale. These were the roles that radio played instead of TV, nationally and also internationally. Britain could broadcast radio to its Empire as well as within the nation, creating an imagined community, “a deep, horizontal, comradeship”.[5] The metropolitan, relatively elite form of 1930s British television was in tension with the discourses of national unity and inclusiveness that the outbreak of war validated.

So, what did the television staff do in the war? A Broadcasting Committee was created by Government in 1935 to plan for war, and BBC staff, tasked with creating and maintaining technical infrastructure, dropped television to free up resources.[6] The Alexandra Palace transmission equipment was used to jam German air navigation, and BBC television technicians worked on new Very High Frequency (VHF) equipment for the RAF’s GEE navigational system. BBC scientists installed new oscillator drives in 1938 to enable synchronised radio transmission from the sixteen transmitters around Britain, creating a single national radio channel, and the BBC set up new radio channels for the Empire, occupied countries and Allied military personnel. These were national and international publics that television could not reach.

In mid-1939 the British Army comprised 224,000 troops plus 320,000 Territorials but by 1944 this had risen to 4.5 million including 350,000 women.[7] Another 3.25 million people worked in war industries and 350,000 more in full-time civil defence. Collective listening to radio was important for military morale and maintaining concentration during long periods of shift work, whereas private domestic viewing had characterised British television.[8] Public desires for visual pleasure were satisfied not by television but by magazines like Picture Post and by cinema.

On the day war broke out, there should have been TV programmes from 11.00 to 12.00, then 3.00 to 5.00 pm, and then in the evening from 8.00 pm until about 11.00 pm.[9] The daytime schedule was aimed at women and children, and included light music from Mantovani and his orchestra, Mickey Mouse cartoons and a live visit to Regent’s Park Zoo. The evening was to include entertainment in Variety, a talk called Practical Household Suggestions, a film newsreel and a performance by the BBC Television Orchestra. But at 10.00 am Douglas Birkinshaw, the senior engineer at Alexandra Palace, received a telephone call from the Director of Television telling him to close down at noon. Far from getting into a panic, the staff transmitted Come and be Televised from the Olympia exhibition hall, in which interviewer Elizabeth Cowell talked to people visiting the event. Two women discussed their love of outdoor swimming, Australian and West Indian visitors gave their impressions of Britain, and there were short performances by people who had brought along a ukulele and violin. The live show ran late, and eventually the cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premiere was broadcast until 12.15, followed by test transmissions for viewers to calibrate their receivers. Television came to a stop calmly and would restart nearly seven years later with the BBC presenter, Jasmine Bligh, saying brightly: “Good afternoon, everybody. How are you? Do you remember me?”

Radio, television and radar were variations on the same principles and each reached maturity in the late 1930s. Experts knew the military potential of radio waves to create television images of enemy positions, unobstructed by weather and over long distances. It would be much better than photographing enemy emplacements using cameras mounted on aircraft (as in the First World War). In 1924, Baird had published an article that mentioned “radio vision”, using reflected waves to register an object.[10] In wartime this became a radar technique used by RAF bombers to image the terrain beneath them and thus recognise their targets.[11] The electronics companies that made television receivers transferred to war production, making military radar screens. Baird Television Ltd. eventually produced 110,000 of them.[12] In a way, British television did continue during the Second World War, but in the form of radar imaging rather than broadcast programmes.

A Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence investigated rumours that Germany had an invisible Death Ray that could destroy our aircraft, and although Robert Watson-Watt, head of the Radio Research Laboratory, rejected the idea he did know that radio waves might reflect from and thus identify attacking bombers. Watson-Watt had been an advisor to Baird Television Ltd., because of his expertise in cathode ray tubes, and he had demonstrated radar as early as February 1935.[13] Using TV signals broadcast from the BBC’s Daventry transmitter, he showed that they were reflected off an RAF bomber, making a visible trace on a cathode ray screen. Watson-Watt’s team began a top-secret project using modified Marconi television sets and achieved radar detection of aircraft at 60 miles range. The Government financed Chain Home, a network of radar stations on the east coast based on designs by Baird Television, that could detect aircraft 200 miles away.[14] Signals were tracked on huge maps by staff from the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, so that fighter aircraft could defend English cities. After the war the radar towers were almost all demolished, though one was used for test transmissions of colour TV in 1964.

The sinking of ships bringing food and raw materials to Britain gave urgency to the development of air-to-sea radar to detect U-boats. There was also an arms race between Britain and Germany in air-to-air radar. German night fighters had on-board radar to intercept British bombers, while British Mosquito night fighters used detectors that could hunt German opponents by tracking their radar transmissions.

The BBC entered the war with a staff of 4,233 and 23 radio transmitters, which had grown by 1945 to a staff of 11,417 and 138 transmitters.[15] The Hankey Committee, meeting in 1943, recommended the continuation of television as part of the BBC’s monopoly and Britain’s television service resumed in London in June 1946. The main spur was the need to grow the economy by enlarging the market for television sets, as consumer goods came back into production.

After the discovery of electromagnetic waves at the end of the 19th century, the evolutionary paths of radio, TV and radar were by no means determined. In the Second World War both civilian and military uses of radio thrived, while television was relatively marginal and mutated instead into its sister technology, radar. The wartime seas and skies were busy with variations of offensive and defensive transmission systems and screens deriving from television technology.

 

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Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading. He got interested in radar’s relationship with TV after holidaying in a converted WW2 RAF radar station on the Welsh coast this summer, and a much longer and more detailed essay on the topic will appear as J. Bignell, ‘The Absence of Television: Broadcasting and the Outbreak of War in Britain, 1939-40’, in Renee Dickason (ed.), Issues and Singularity in the British Media (Paris: Atlande, 2022). Jonathan works on histories of television drama, cinema and children’s media. Some of his work is available free online from his university web page or from his academia.edu page.

 

References

[1] Truckendanner, Petra, “Paris during the Nazi Occupation: Nazi Propaganda from the Eiffel Tower”, Spiegel Online, 3 December 2014.

[2] Hickethier, Knut, “Early TV: Imagining and Realising Television”, in Jonathan Bignell and Andreas Fickers (eds), A European Television History (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 62-4.

[3] Emmerson, Andrew, Old Television (Oxford: Shire, 2009), p. 10.

[4] Gorham, Maurice, Broadcasting and Television since 1900 (London: Andrew Dakers, 1952), pp. 160-1.

[5] Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalisms (London: Verso, 1983), p.16.

[6] Gorham, pp. 142-4.

[7] Brown, Mike, Wartime Britain, 1939-45 (Oxford: Shire, 2011), p. 30.

[8] Street, Sean, A Concise History of Radio (Tiverton: Kelly, 2002), pp. 73-4.

[9] Graham, Russ J., “The Edit that Rewrote History”, Transdiffusion, 31 October 2005.

[10] Baird, John Logie, “An Account of some Experiments in Television”, Wireless World and Radio Review, 7 May 1924, pp. 153-5.

[11] Baird, Malcolm, Douglas Brown and Peter Waddell, “Television, Radar and J.L. Baird”, Newsletter of the Narrow Bandwidth Television Association, September 2005.

[12] Hills, Adrian, “Baird Television Ltd. and Radar”, BairdTelevision.com, undated.

[13] Baird, Brown and Waddell.

[14] Anon., “Scannings and Reflections: Television and Aircraft Detection”, Television and Short Wave World, September 1938, p. 35.

[15] Gorham, p. 213.