BBC Monitoring — how it started

I wrote this article in August 2019 to mark BBC Monitoring's 80th anniversary. I revised and expanded it in 2022, with further minor amendments in 2023. [1]

The Golden Gates at the entrance to Wood Norton on the cover of Assigned to Listen

What is monitoring?

Today, media monitoring is a well-used term to describe the observation of the output and behaviour of public-facing media in order to collect news and information, to learn the messages and narratives being pushed by governments and other players, and to understand the audience's reaction to the material it is receiving.

"Public-facing media" covers the press and other printed material, television and radio broadcasts, and a huge variety of online content, including that on social media.

Monitoring before the age of broadcasting

The word monitoring has only been used in this sense since the 1930s, when it referred to the systematic listening to radio broadcasts. But the activity, as applied to earlier forms of media, dates back much earlier. As Tsar Nicholas I reportedly said of the London press during the Crimean War (1853-1856): "We have no need for spies. We have The Times." 

During the First World War, the British intelligence agency MI7 read foreign newspapers as part of its work to coordinate the UK's own propaganda efforts.

Alongside foreign newspapers, by the time of WWI governments had another means of acquiring such material - wireless telegraphy (WT). During the war, the Marconi company's "Wireless Press" subsidiary monitored the WT transmissions of Germany's Transoceanic news agency, which were mainly intended for the American press, and supplied the information to the British government.  

1920s: The BBC's first receiving stations

The BBC was formed in 1922 and the earliest documented reception of a foreign broadcast for use in BBC programmes was in December of the following year when KDKA radio in Pittsburgh was picked up by a BBC engineer at Biggin Hill aerodrome, south of London, and relayed to the BBC's own listeners.

From 1925, the BBC operated a signals-receiving station, first at Keston in Kent (a few miles north of Biggin Hill and now in the London Borough of Bromley) and then, from 1929, at Tatsfield on the North Downs immediately south of Biggin Hill. 

The Keston and Tatsfield stations measured the technical characteristics of BBC and foreign transmitters, and picked up foreign broadcasts, such as concerts, to be relayed in BBC programmes. 

They were not, however, tasked in those early days with monitoring foreign radio stations to gather news or report on their political output.

1930s: First British monitoring efforts

The first official British efforts at monitoring foreign broadcasts for news or intelligence purposes are obscure. It is known however that, at the request of the Foreign Office, the Post Office undertook some listening to Soviet broadcasts in English as early as 1930. [2] 

The BBC also listened to Moscow at that time, but only experimentally, and soon dropped the work in the absence of any financial support from the government. 

The BBC's official historian Asa Briggs made no mention of that 1930 activity in his volume covering the period. Instead, he identified the BBC's first monitoring of foreign broadcasts as being that of English bulletins from Italy after the outbreak of the Italo-Abyssinian war in October 1935. Briggs said: 

The Foreign Office gave little sustained support to this venture, which went through a further phase of development at the time of the abdication crisis [in 1936], when Whitehall was especially interested in knowing what American stations were saying about the King and Mrs Simpson. [3]

Briggs noted that in the late summer of 1937 the Foreign Office turned to a target in which they were "genuinely interested", namely broadcasts in Arabic from Italy and Germany, and undertook that work themselves. The FO recruited Sigmar Hillelson, a former Director of Intelligence in the Sudan Civil Service, for this work. He was known as an "Arabic broadcast listener" rather than a monitor. [4]

Another historian of the BBC, Gerard Mansell, described the FO's monitoring efforts in 1937 as "desultory".

The BBC sees the value of monitoring

That same summer the Foreign Office began its monitoring in Arabic, two BBC officials wrote critical reports on the Corporation's overseas activities, calling for them to be improved in both quantity and quality. 

One of them, Felix Greene [5], used his July 1937 report to urge the creation of a monitoring service: 

To know immediately and precisely what is being said by Rome and Germany to our empire and colonial listeners will become of immediate importance. 

The BBC starts small-scale monitoring in 1938

In January 1938, the BBC began broadcasting in Arabic, its first service in a foreign language. (The Empire Service had started in 1932 but it was only in English.) 

Staff of the new service took over from the Foreign Office the monitoring of Arabic broadcasts from other stations. 

Similarly, when the BBC's Latin America service (in Spanish and Portuguese) began in March 1938 its staff also monitored relevant foreign broadcasts. 

BBC staff had to do this monitoring when time could be spared from their broadcasting duties. This was the birth of monitoring as a consistent BBC activity, albeit on a limited scale. It would be well over a year before monitoring became a separate BBC department. 

Alongside Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese, by June 1938 the BBC was also monitoring English broadcasts from Paris, Berlin, Rome, Prague, New York, Pittsburgh and Tokyo. In all cases, signals were picked up at the Tatsfield receiving station and fed to an office on the third floor of Broadcasting House in London to be listened to by shorthand typists. 

The BBC began to broadcast limited services in French, German and Italian at the time of the Munich Crisis in September 1938, and monitoring in those languages would also have started at some point. One of the German service's editors, Leonard Miall, who joined it in early 1939, is known to have done his own monitoring at Broadcasting House of Germany’s shortwave station at Zeesen. [6] 

The results of this monitoring activity were passed to both BBC programme makers and government departments. A.P. (Pat) Ryan served as the BBC's liaison officer with the Foreign Office for this work. Ryan went on to have an interesting wartime career, moving back and forth between jobs in the BBC and government, and being the BBC's "leading figure" (as Briggs put it) in liaising with the Ministry of Information and the armed forces. 

Two monitoring pioneers

David Bowman joined the BBC Latin America service in March 1938 and, like his colleagues, combined both broadcasting and monitoring work. After a year, he was taken off other duties and assigned to work full-time on monitoring. He therefore has the distinction of being the first BBC "monitor".

Bowman also advised the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) on their own monitoring project, which began in May 1939 at the request of the Foreign Office, and involved conducting a comparative survey and analysis of broadcasts from Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

Both a talented linguist (Spanish, Portuguese and French) and a shortwave radio enthusiast, Bowman would remain with BBC Monitoring for over 40 years, including tours of duty at its listening posts in central and east Africa. One of his last assignments was using his Spanish skills to cover the 1982 Falklands War. He continued to show a lively interest in the service during his retirement. 

The Chatham House project had been due to last for six months, but it ended abruptly on 25 August and the members of the small project team joined the new BBC Monitoring Service which was launched the following day. This included the project's leader, David Hallett, who played a leading role in establishing the new service's editorial principles and standards. Hallett would be remembered more than 40 years later by Ernst Gombrich as BBC Monitoring's "scholarly spiritus rector". 

Clouds of war

By early 1939, with the international situation deteriorating, there was an appetite in government for the BBC's limited monitoring efforts to be expanded and various schemes were considered for how that could be done. 

One idea was for the establishment of a number of separate "monitoring centres", along the lines of the station at Tatsfield.

Another suggestion was that equipment be installed in the homes of BBC staff so that they could listen there.

A more ambitious proposal was put forward by the BBC in April 1939, the month that Italy invaded Albania (the previous month, Germany had invaded the rump of Czechoslovakia). 

Rather than piecemeal operations, the BBC recommended that the work be consolidated into a single, dedicated "monitoring unit" with its own staff, working 24 hours a day. A formal proposal was put to the government for an establishment of 34 monitors (covering German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Arabic) plus managerial and clerical staff, with the latter also covering English broadcasts. 

The government (in the form of the embryonic Ministry of Information) agreed in principle with the BBC's proposal. But the ministry queried the size and scope of the suggested unit, its cost and who should pay for it – the BBC or the government. 

Matters were not helped by the Ministry of Information (MoI) being itself still only in a planning stage. It would not be launched formally until September 1939.

The Man from the Ministry

The MoI's discussions with the BBC were led by its Deputy Director-General, A.P. Waterfield, who is remembered by history, if at all, as the civil servant behind the Keep Calm and Carry On poster (which was never displayed during the war). Unfortunately, as Asa Briggs described, Waterfield knew nothing about broadcasting, and was ignorant as to what the BBC would need to do in wartime. 

For example, in June 1939 Waterfield queried whether it was really necessary, as the BBC insisted, that monitoring operations take place around the clock. 

As one BBC official put it:

We ourselves are planning [in case of war] what is virtually a 24 hour programme for both Home and Overseas. Should we not presume that other countries will take similar action?

The BBC buys Wood Norton

While these difficult negotiations with the government continued, the BBC had already found a home for the new Monitoring Service. 

Starting in November 1938, the BBC's Director of Office Accommodation, Ralph Wade, toured districts to the north and west of London in search of suitable properties. It seems unlikely to have been a coincidence that Wade began this search within weeks of the Munich Agreement. 

He was looking for "somewhere in the country" that could accommodate not just Monitoring, but the many other BBC departments that would be evacuated from London in the event of war. 

Wade and two colleagues, later rumoured to have posed as a trio of Midlands industrialists, eventually decided upon Wood Norton Hall, near Evesham in Worcestershire, which had once been the home of the Duke of Orléans, pretender to the French throne. 

Evesham is about 100 miles west-northwest of London.

The estate agent described the property as follows:

Wood Norton, Worcestershire. Evesham 2 miles. A magnificently appointed mansion, reconstructed by the Duc d’Orléans about 40 years ago at cost of £40,000. 40 acres. 9 reception rooms. 30 bedrooms. 7 bathrooms. Swimming pool. The construction is of red brick with stone dressings in the French style, and contains vast quantities of oak panelling, parquet flooring and other fittings. There are two drives – the principal one entered through a pair of magnificent wrought iron gates from the Palace of Versailles. 

The estate agent was wrong about the gates. They came in fact from York House, Twickenham, where Louis Philippe Robert d’Orléans had been born in 1869.

The BBC signed a contract in March 1939 to buy Wood Norton for £10,000 and took possession shortly afterwards, with an Engineer-in Charge (W. Bruce Purslow) taking up his duties there on 10 April to begin equipping the new site for both broadcasting and monitoring operations. 

For monitoring, the BBC initially spent £810 on a wooden hut, six receivers and some simple aerials. The Ministry of Information declined to assist with the cost. 

Several wooden huts were eventually built in the grounds of Wood Norton

Preparations accelerate

After weeks of discussions in the spring and early summer of 1939, the Ministry of Information (which was still operating in "shadow" mode) formally requested the BBC to make arrangements to run a dedicated Monitoring Service in case of war. 

But there was still disagreement over funding. The MoI agreed to pay for the new service, but rejected the proposed budget. The BBC had estimated that it would cost £100,000 to run the service in its first year. 

The MoI initially provided just £24,0000, plus £4,000 for capital expenditure. Arguments over money continued for months after the start of the war, with the MoI making piecemeal additional grants from time to time. By February 1940 these had totalled £90,000, not far short of the BBC's original estimate. 

Meanwhile, the government was pressing the BBC to provide more information from foreign broadcasts. To bridge the gap before Wood Norton became operational, the head of the BBC's Overseas Intelligence Department (OID), Malcolm Frost, arranged for receivers to be installed at the home of a member of OID's Spanish section, R.J. Baker, at Flackwell Heath, between High Wycombe and Beaconsfield. [7]

German-speaking members of OID's staff joined Baker at his home while others were sent to Tatsfield to monitor English broadcasts from the US and the USSR. 

The OID had been formed in December 1937. Although its name suggests a focus on political intelligence-gathering, its main purpose was what we would now call audience research in the countries to which the BBC was starting to broadcast. [8] 

OID appears to have been the main sponsor within the BBC of the corporation's monitoring activity at that time, and the face of the results of such work to those in government who used it. Thus the first editions of Monitoring's Daily Digest in August and September 1939 were produced by the OID and distributed to recipients under the OID's name.

The men in charge 

In June 1939, a BBC foreign liaison officer, Richard D'Arcy Marriott – described as "one of our ablest young men" – was assigned to take charge of the "monitoring unit" at Wood Norton in the event of war. He would be assisted by Oliver Whitley as Chief Monitoring Supervisor. 

Marriott would report to OID head Frost, who was given the title Director of the Monitoring Service and would have overall supervision of the new department. 

Marriott, Frost and Whitley all went on to have eventful BBC careers. [9]

Recruitment of other staff

With at least some funding guaranteed for the new Monitoring Service, and its new managers appointed, in July and August 1939 the BBC began recruiting linguistic staff. By 24 August, 32 monitors had been formally engaged,. 

The new recruits were told that they would be based in "the West of England", but that their work would only start if war broke out or a national emergency was declared. 

The records differ on exactly which languages they covered. By then the BBC was broadcasting in Afrikaans, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and it was policy that if the BBC broadcast in a language then it should also monitor the output of other stations in that language. But one source does not mention Italian or Afrikaans as among the "core" languages monitored at the outbreak of war, while it adds Polish as one that was covered. By the end of 1940, coverage was taking place in more than 20 languages. [10]

It's striking that Russian was not one of the languages covered from the very start, given the importance it would soon have, though some of the first monitors were Russian speakers who had been recruited to work in other languages. They included Anatol Goldberg, who had passed the recruitment test in Spanish (by no means his strongest language - he also spoke Chinese and Japanese), a member of the Russian nobility, Prince Andrey Belosselsky (who was initially recruited to monitor French), and Vladimir (Vova) Rubinstein (taken on for his German - he also spoke Russian, French and Hebrew). 

Goldberg thought the offer of an annual salary of £300, plus free accommodation and two meals a day, "absolutely magnificent". [11] 

The last week of peace

Just as the recruitment of the first monitors was being completed, there came the news on 22 August that German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop would visit Moscow the next day. It seemed that the BBC's preparations were only just in time. 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in the Kremlin during the night of 23-24 August. War was now certain, and the BBC moved to implement its plans. 

Events moved rapidly. On 24 August, the British parliament passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act. The same day, Ralph Wade – the BBC manager who earlier in the year had found Wood Norton for the corporation – drove there with his secretary, a typist and £100 in cash for emergencies (the equivalent of around £6,000 in 2019). 

One of the tasks of Wade and other BBC administrators who arrived from London was to arrange the billeting in private homes of the many BBC staff (both broadcasting and monitoring) who were about to descend on Evesham. 

Evesham was a largely agricultural community at the heart of one of England's main fruit-growing districts. When Wade arrived, the main concern of the town’s residents was preparing for its annual Gala in aid of the local hospital. 

Back in London, on 25 August the BBC sent telegrams and made phone calls to the newly recruited monitors telling them to report to Broadcasting House the following day to be taken to Evesham, or to make their own way to Worcestershire. 

Amid the preparations to start work at Wood Norton, the limited monitoring operations in London, Tatsfield and Flackwell Heath continued.

26 August 1939

On the morning of Saturday 26 August, a bus carrying staff of the newly formed BBC Monitoring Service set out from London for Evesham.

Those on the bus included Dr Gustaaf Renier, a Dutch historian recruited from the Royal Institute of International Affairs and author of several books, including The English, Are They Human? [12]

They arrived to find Evesham under drizzle and en fête, enjoying its annual Gala. It was not the best day to sort everyone out with a billet in a local home. Locals received one guinea a week for hosting a billetee, who became known as "guinea pigs". 

The billeting fee was soon raised to two guineas a week (£2.10, equivalent to around £120 pounds in 2020). Problems with billeting feature prominently in the reminiscences of wartime monitors. 

Transition to Wood Norton

Although 26 August 1939 is the official birthday of the BBC Monitoring Service, it's unlikely that much serious monitoring took place at Wood Norton that day. The operations in London, Tatsfield and Flackwell Heath continued while WN became established. It was at Broadcasting House in London, which was keeping a constant watch on the main German station, Deutschlandsender, that a transcript was made of Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on the morning of 1 September announcing the invasion of Poland. 

All the monitoring in those very early days was of public radio broadcasts on shortwave, mediumwave and longwave. The reception of news agencies by Morse, Hellschreiber and radioteletype came later. 

The first "Digest of Foreign Broadcasts", a nine-page document circulated to BBC and government departments, was dated 27-28 August 1939. [13]

In the early months of Monitoring's life, during the so-called Phoney War, Pathé newsreel cameras visited Wood Norton – described only as being "somewhere in England" – and made a lovely two-minute feature. The press was not invited back to Monitoring until after VE Day. 

It's tempting to continue this article to describe Monitoring's work during the war, with the organisation growing to 1,000 staff. But that deserves a separate article, and this story of how the service came to be launched must end here. Further information is in the sections below. 

One of the huts of Monitoring's "M Unit" at Wood Norton in February 1941
The separate "Y Unit" focused on specific intelligence targets

 

Russian monitor Vladimir Rubinstein (top) and German monitor Max Brehm
in one of the Wood Norton huts

 

Notes

[1] Originally known as the BBC Monitoring Service, the name was shortened in the mid-1980s.

[2] Brian Bridges (1985): A note on the British monitoring of Soviet radio, 1930 

[3] Asa Briggs (1965): The Golden Age of Wireless (page 373 of the 1995 edition)

 

[4] Hillelson was later taken on by the BBC to do Arabic monitoring. In 1940 he became Director of the BBC’s Near East Service.

 

[5] Felix Greene was a cousin of Hugh Carleton Greene, who would run the BBC German service during the war and serve as BBC's Director-General in the 1960s, and the novelist Graham Greene.

[6] Miall was one of several Monitoring pioneers who went on to have notable careers elsewhere in the BBC or outside it. He left the BBC German service in 1942 to work for the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), including in the US, returning to the BBC in 1945 to become its Washington correspondent and then holding BBC various managerial posts until 1974.

Other notable figures in post-war life who had been Monitoring pioneers included the publisher George (later Lord) Weidenfeld, the art historian Ernst (later Sir Ernst) Gombrich (author of "the most popular art book of all time"), the dramatist and critic Martin Esslin (credited with coining the term "theatre of the absurd"), the radio and TV personality Gilbert Harding (once described as "the rudest man in England"), the poets and critics Geoffrey Grigson and William (later Sir William) Empson, the radical Austrian author and journalist Ilse Barea-Kulcsa, the Czech poet and literary translator Ewald Osers, and the prominent Cold War broadcaster Anatol Goldberg (see note 11 below).

Ilse's husband, the exiled Spanish Republican leader Arturo Barea, was also taken on the staff.  

Also notable was the Austrian art historian Ernst Buschbeck, a walking encyclopedia. Anyone at Wood Norton looking for information on any topic was told to "look it up in Buschbeck". After the war he became director of the national art gallery in Vienna. 

One famous name who was turned down by Monitoring was the novelist Arthur Koestler. The author of Darkness at Noon passed the listening and translation tests given to all aspiring monitors, but the BBC recruiting staff felt they "couldn't imagine that particular brain straining to catch Moscow's endless repetitions". 

[7] The BBC Written Archives Centre has a letter from 1975 saying that monitoring also took place that summer at a private house at Seer Green, which like Flackwell Heath is near Beaconsfield. It's unclear whether there really were two separate operations near Beaconsfield or whether the writer of the letter had misremembered the details. 

[8] A BBC document from the time said the Overseas Intelligence Department had been formed "for the purpose of initiating and maintaining publicity and of studying and interpreting the reaction of the [BBC's] audience and the effects of the broadcasts".

[9] In June 1940, Frost handed over the job of Director of the Monitoring Service to Marriott and spent the rest of the war in both MI5 and various other BBC jobs. At the end of the war, Frost returned to the BBC to serve once again as Monitoring's Director, with orders from the BBC Director-General, William Haley, to "go down [to Caversham] and clean up" the service. BBC official historian David Hendy says Frost, with his MI5 background, took this as an instruction to clear out perceived security risks. 

Frost continued as HMS until 1952, including negotiating a formal partnership agreement on global monitoring in 1947 with the newly formed CIA. After leaving Monitoring he became head of the BBC Transcription Service.

Marriott and Whitley both resigned from the BBC (along with another senior Monitoring manager, John Shankland) in early 1942 after a prolonged dispute with the BBC Director-General, Frederick Ogilvie, over Monitoring's proposed move from Wood Norton to Caversham Park (which had been decided in the summer of 1941 but did not take place until April 1943). The dispute was among the factors that led to Ogilvie being asked to resign as DG by the BBC Governors, also in January 1942. 

Both Marriott and Whitley returned to the BBC after the war and went on to hold senior posts. Whitley eventually became Deputy Director-General, while Marriott's career included another job swap with Frost, serving again as head of the Monitoring Service in 1952-53 after Frost left Caversham. 

[10] See Laura Johnson, The operation of the BBC Monitoring Service during WWII. Johnson also cites Marriott as saying at the start of October 1939 that almost half of the monitors were working on covering Germany. 

[11] After the war, Goldberg became the BBC's chief commentator on Eastern Europe and a household name in the USSR through his broadcasts on the BBC Russian service, of which he was for a time also its head. He died in 1982.

[12] Renier's wife Olive was another Monitoring pioneer and one of the co-authors, with Vladimir Rubinstein, of Assigned to Listen. 

[13] The Digest was soon renamed as the Digest of News Bulletins from Foreign Stations (an inaccurate title, as it covered more than just news bulletins, such as notes on broadcasting behaviour and propaganda trends). In November 1939 it was given the simpler and better title of Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts. But the practice of giving Monitoring's products clumsy titles continued and in January 1940 an additional daily document was launched called Notes and Repeated & New Items on Daily Digest of Foreign Broadcasts. 

Further reading

No single comprehensive description of how the BBC Monitoring Service came to be formed (or, indeed, of its subsequent history) has been published, though as Brian Rotheray noted in a booklet to mark the service’s 70th anniversary, "more has been written about the Evesham period than any other".

Laura Johnson's 2013 PhD thesis Establishing Broadcast Monitoring as Open Source Intelligence: The BBC Monitoring Service during the Second World War comes closest to providing a detailed account of events leading up to 26 August 1939. We are grateful to Johnson for her careful and well-sourced narrative. For example, her thesis is invaluable in correcting other vague descriptions of the 1935 monitoring of Italy and confirming that it was the BBC, not the Foreign Office, that undertook that work. 

But only the very briefest accounts of, for example, the Foreign Office’s Arabic monitoring in 1937, and of the listening that took place at Flackwell Heath in the summer of 1939, have been published.

A good overview of the birth of Monitoring is provided in BBC Monitoring Service, August 1939 – August 1979 by Ramon Silva, which focuses on the service's early years. This 35-page unpublished history was written at the time of the 40th anniversary. Silva had been a member of the service between 1939 and 1972, including as head of the Reception Department.

The 1986 book Assigned to Listen by Olive Renier and Vladimir Rubinstein tells the story of Monitoring at Evesham between 1939 and 1943, when the service moved to Caversham Park. It is based on the recollections of Monitoring staff of the time and was inspired by a staff reunion in September 1979 to mark the 40th anniversary. Along with many interesting chapters – including an essay by Dr Lux Furtmüller on "Changing techniques of German home propaganda" and a vivid description by Rubinstein of the difficulties of monitoring Soviet broadcasts in the first months after the German invasion of June 1941 – it has personal accounts of events leading up to August 1939.

A third fruit of the 40th anniversary was Listening to War, an excellent hour-long Radio 4 documentary written by Norman Longmate, produced by Barbara Crowther, recorded in 1980 and broadcast in January 1981. It includes interviews with several of Monitoring’s pioneers, including David Bowman, Malcolm Frost, Richard D’Arcy Marriott, Anatol Goldberg, Vladimir Rubinstein, Lorna Swire, Ray Barker, Ivan Bilibin, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Lord Weidenfeld, Molly Warren-Evans, Stephen Szego, Martin Sullivan, Karl Lehmann and Susan Temple.

Preparations for the launch of the Monitoring Service are described in the two relevant volumes of the official history of the BBC by Asa Briggs, The Golden Age of Wireless (covering 1927-39) and The War of Words (looking at 1939-45), published in 1965 and 1970 respectively. These set the work to form the service in the broader context of the other preparations that the BBC was making for war.

Gerard Mansell’s excellent 1982 history of the first 50 years of BBC external broadcasting, Let Truth Be Told, has a particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s, including Monitoring. 

Edward Pawley’s mammoth and comprehensive BBC Engineering 1922-1972 is my constant companion when researching anything about the BBC’s first 50 years. It deals with much more than pure engineering (for example, it is a good record of the many buildings owned and used by the BBC across the country) and is crammed full of precise facts, figures and dates.

© 2019, 2022, 2023. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.