The BBC External Services and the Hungarian Uprising, 1956

Abstract

During the British General Strike of 1926 John Reith, managing director of what was still the British Broadcasting Company, wrote: ‘I do not welcome crises, but admit to welcoming the opportunities which crises bring.’2 He later described the period of the General Strike as one of ‘unprecedented strain’, but was relieved his fear that BBC ‘prestige and tradition’ might suffer had been proved groundless.3 Reith could well have been anticipating events which were still thirty years in the future, for in 1956 the Suez crisis collided with an uprising in Hungary to make it the busiest, certainly the most controversial, and perhaps the most important year in the history of Cold War external broadcasting by the BBC. These events, already well documented by several historians of the BBC,4 confirmed beyond doubt that international radio broadcasting by the external services assumed a new political importance in the conditions imposed by the Cold War environment. On an international level broadcasts were used to project the British government’s policies, intentions and reactions to crises, to transmit propaganda and to ensure that closed societies could enjoy access to news and information they would otherwise have been denied.