Music, Poetry, Propaganda

Sounding the Nations 37

of the BBC and the Britain it symbolised. Policy was reconfigured to enable
its music programming to fulfil demanding new criteria associating music
with revenue, propaganda, national projection and allied solidarity.

One solution was to promote British music helping to appease rela-
tionships with both the Foreign Of fice and its power over overseas broad-
casting and the domestic music establishment who had long felt the BBC
wrongly seduced by continental contemporary composers and artists.
British repertoire could function thus both as an identifying mechanism
and as a propaganda tool combining British cultural output with the BBC’s
desired reputation for trust, integrity and freedom. It also had the advan-
tage of countering the long held notion of das Land ohne Musik as well
as creating revenues for the British economy. Although such policy was
a winner on the home front, sending such music behind enemy lines and
into to Europe was obviously a dif ferent matter. At best ambivalent about
British music, European audiences were not natural enthusiasts and the
technical limitations of short-wave transmission precluded any chance of
successful broadcasts of the large-scale works because the dense texture
of concentrated string music, in particular, risked being reduced to white
noise. The frequency lent itself to music arranged for military band, fitting
a more conventional idea of wartime propaganda music broadcasting, but
this was a sacrifice to the higher-minded ambitions of cultural propaganda
that was not tolerated by the Music Department. Where possible music
from the allied countries was broadcast, ideally in live transmission, to
demonstrate loyalty and solidarity capitalising on its ‘f lattery value’: ‘You
can only hold your Overseas audiences by the personal touch. “Live” must
speak to “live”’.49

Acutely aware of the successes of German cultural propaganda, Bliss
advocated the initiation of ‘a standard of culture at least equal to that adver-
tised by Germany’ in which ‘our own great music and our own great poetry
must be broadcast by our living artists’. Achieving this aim was foreseen
particularly in the context of international broadcasting. ‘Complimentary’
concerts were to showcase the music and musicians of the empire – works

49 BBC WAC R27/245/1: A. Bliss, ‘The case for live music’ (22 Jan. 1942).

38 Chapter 2
by Canadian and South African composers performed by ‘dominon’ art-
ists resident in Britain, and in another strand to focus on the concert of 
the allies – special Latin American concerts, gala events that marked the
birthdays of Stalin or Roosevelt, and indeed an evening of broadcasting
devoted to French topics. Such broadcasting was designed to evoke ‘memo-
ries in exiled audiences’ and ‘encouraging and stirring countries whose own
music has been forbidden by the enemy’.50

Banning Controversy

Fraught negotiations between competing aesthetic, commercial and politi-
cal strategies in relation to the resurgence of previous institutional wran-
gles are shown up by examination of the experimental implementation of
a policy to ban copyright music written by alien enemy composers. This
policy was initially introduced for a six-month period in July 1940 and
remained in place with slight variation until mid-1945. There had been a
lot of discussion about the BBC’s music policy in the run up to the ten-year
Charter Review in 1935, especially through the findings of the Ullswater
Committee. This committee marked the first time that the Corporation
had been made properly accountable to peer-review and its listeners. In
short, quarrelling occurred between the BBC and organisations such as
the Incorporated Society for Musicians (ISM) and the Performing Rights
Society (PRS). In representing the interests of their members, they volubly
resented the BBC for metropolitan centralisation, and, as a result, their
failure to prioritise homegrown musicians. It is perhaps ironic that it was
a complaint resonant of later Vichyist discourses about the corruption
of the metropolis, in which the cosmopolitan decadence of the interna-
tional city overrode national privilege, regardless of the quality, expertise
or brilliance that foreign music and musicians might bring. The BBC had

50 Ibid.

Sounding the Nations 39

an obligation to British music and British musicians. As Jenny Doctor
quotes in her analysis of the Ullswater Committee findings, the ISM was
particularly vocal in reinforcing its protectionist stance on this latter point.
They had, in fact, already sought to ban BBC administrative staf f from
also participating in public concerts, and the sentiment was extended to
accuse the BBC of anti-national bias ‘probably due to the predominant
inf luence of London, and to the superficially cosmopolitan pretensions
of some of its more active cliques’.51

At the outbreak of war, the initial response was a firm decision to
not change anything in relation to music policy, however, the Director of 
Programme Planning, G.D. Adams, outlined some nascent foundation of 
the later censorship policy in September 1939:

There is no change of policy regarding the broadcasting of music by foreign compos-
ers. We are not, I mean, banning German music. It is, however, desirable that music
by British composers should be fully exploited and that – within the convenience
of programme planning – the broadcasting of music by foreign composers to whom
PRS payments are due, should be limited. There is no desire to leave you with any-
thing but complete discretion in this matter.52

Clearly the opportunity to promote works by British composers and
performers was very much in line with vested interests at the ISM. The
development of initial discreet programming alteration into full-blown
Corporation policy was encouraged, if not abetted, by Frank Eames, the
Society’s general secretary. Rolled out for a six-month experimental period,
the BBC decided it desirable for both ‘psychological’ reasons and for the
‘increase in performing rights [revenues] which are thereby made avail-
able for British, Allied and friendly composers to whom the PRS and its
corresponding societies have access’ to exclude rigidly from programmes
copyright works by composers of enemy nationality. It was inevitably the

51 BBC WAC R4/7/8/5: Ullswater Committee 1935/Other Written Evidence/Papers
71–90, Paper 83 quoted in Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 302.

52 BBC WAC R27/3/1: Music General/Alien Composers/File 1 (1939–40), Adams
quoted in memo from R.S. Thatcher (DDM) to Hubert Murrill (MO (Bristol)),
‘Foreign Music’ (11 Sept. 1939).

40 Chapter 2
exceptions mooted ‘by reason of the firm hold they have obtained on
the af fections of the public’ or because the ‘individual and characteristic’
nature of the work rendered it ‘irreplaceable’ that exposed most clearly
the ideological holes in the policy.53 These exceptions also placed BBC
wartime music policy within a broader discourse as the politics of the
composer or artist in relation to his or her work became the crucial issue
under scrutiny.

Within the Corporation itself the policy was immediately resented,
and the most vehement opposition voiced by regional directors in the
North and Midlands – those representatives of the very provinces that the
ISM felt had been marginalised by the decadent metropolitan centralisa-
tion of Broadcasting House. W.K. Stanton, the regional music director
for the Midlands, was ‘horrified and disappointed’ by the proposed policy
and felt precisely the inherent contradiction between the conceptual con-
sequences of prohibition and the romantic belief in the ability of music to
transcend the tawdry political and national: ‘We have heard so much about
music having no boundaries, and all that, and I should have thought that
this policy, besides causing embarrassment to programme builders, would
bring down a shower of curses on our heads on the score of smallness of
vision and pettiness.’54

Similarly, Maurice Johnstone, charged with directing the Northern
region, expressed how ‘At first blow … my colleagues and I are stunned by
a regulation which seems to disclaim the liberal principles for which we
thought this war was being fought.’55 The most unusual reaction was derived
from R.C. Glendinning, the Assistant Director of Outside Broadcasting,
in a memo to Arnold Perry, Chorus-Master in the Variety Department:

53 BBC WAC R27/3/1: Music General/Alien Composers/File 1 (1939–40), draft memo
[R.S. Thatcher (Deputy Director of Music)] [ July 1940].

54 BBC WAC R27/3/1: Music General/Alien Composers/File 1 (1939–40), Internal
Memo from W.K. Stanton (Midland Region Music Director) to R.S. Thatcher
(DDM (Bristol)) ‘Copyright Music by Alien Composers’ (24 July 1940).

55 BBC WAC R27/3/1: Music General/Alien Composers/File 1 (1939–40), Internal
Memo from Maurice Johnstone (North Region Music Director) to R.S. Thatcher
(DDM Bristol) ‘Music by Alien Composers’ (24 July 1940).

Sounding the Nations 41

Although we agree it is better by far
To exclude from our programmes the works Lehar,
We view, with distaste, the obvious haste
In which you set up such a permanent ‘bar’.
We have, for example, done many a mouldier
Tune than the Waltz from ‘The Chocolate Soldier’
Which it seems you exclude – not because it is rude,
But because it was written by an enemy ‘dude’.
But this, we inform you, our passions arouse
As the composer in question is OS-A-CAR STRAUS!
Shame on you! Shame on you! Oh, Fie! Fie!
You don’t even know who ‘My Hero’ is by!56

Reporting on the experimental policy’s implementation, it was noted that
there had been strong reactions on the part of many members of the BBC
Staf f about the ban, ‘which they condemned as “fascist” and completely
opposed to the liberal principles which should be upheld in the realm of
art’.57 Opposition was in fact expressed by ‘practically the whole of the
Head Of fice Music Staf f, by all Regional Music Directors, [and] by many
Directors of other Departments’.58 However, it was claimed that the eco-
nomic sanction element of the policy was unanimously approved and
opposition was ‘concerned solely with the artistic principle involved’.59

56 BBC WAC R27/3/1: Music General/Alien Composers/File 1 (1939–40), ‘Copyright
Music by Enemy Composers’ (28 Oct. 1940). The poem is annotated with a wither-
ing ‘Oh how I hear the dark disgrace, of poetry in Portland Place’.

57 BBC WAC R27/3/2: Music General/Alien Composers/File 2 (1941): R.S. Thatcher,
‘Copyright Music by Composers of Enemy Nationality: Report and recommenda-
tions based on a summary of evidence after experimental period of six months’ (21
March 1941), 2.

58 BBC WAC R27/3/2: Music General/Alien Composers/File 2 (1941): DDM (R.S.
Thatcher) to C (P): ‘Copyright Music by Enemy Alien Composers’ (22 May 1941),
1. Thatcher reports that DFD (Director of Features and Drama), V.H. Gielgud was
‘especially violent’.

59 BBC WAC R27/3/2: Music General/Alien Composers/File 2 (1941): R.S. Thatcher,
‘Copyright Music by Composers of Enemy Nationality: Report and recommenda-
tions based on a summary of evidence after experimental period of six months’ (21
March 1941), 2.

42 Chapter 2
One public commentator was the critic, Ralph Hill, who described

the movement to ban the music of enemy countries as ‘childish, totalitarian
and anti-musical’.60 Hill described the policy in the following words: the
‘principle is that music by composers of Nazi sympathies and old works that
can be interpreted in terms of modern Germany […] shall be excluded from
the programme’.61 The fundamental problem with the list was that while it
could be justified itself on financial grounds, the moral argument was lost
when it contained works by such composers as Alban Berg, Gustav Mahler
and Hugo Wolf, and further still when those listed were also émigrés who
had f led Nazi Germany, including Korngold, Schoenberg, Weingartner
and Zemlinsky – composers and artists who had been banned equally by
the Nazi authorities. Leonard Isaacs, the European Music Supervisor felt
strongly opposed to the policy:

I feel very deeply by withholding performances of music by men who themselves
are anti-Nazi or even died before 1933, we are using the enemy’s own technique to
our own moral disadvantage … The matter embraces both money and ethics and I
submit that the economic aspect of the question should be subservient to the ethi-
cal one.62

Defining artistic policy was much more dif ficult than the interdiction of
composers due to nationality or age. Instead, the policy made numerous
appeals to the undesirability of works that embody ‘German spirit’, which
was felt to be self-evident enough to the extent that producing a list of such
works was considered unnecessary (although it would have also been much
more dif ficult to justify a list once published):

I feel that we are apt to make ourselves over-conscious of  the ‘German spirit’ in
certain works of music eg: portions of the ‘Ring’. In broadcasting, one is not really
conscious of the sort of underlying philosophy, which is chief ly evoked by the night
on the stage of those silly helmets and huge swords. For varying reasons one would
probably exclude ‘Kaisermarsch’, ‘Heldenleben’, perhaps Brahms’s ‘Triumphlied’, but

60 Ralph Hill, ‘Radio Music’ Radio Times (1 Nov. 1940), 7.
61 BBC WAC R27/3/2 Music General/Alien Composers/File 2.
62 BBC WAC R27/3/2 Music General/Alien Composers/File 2.

Sounding the Nations 43

I think the making of a list would be a controversial business. My point is that the
very obvious works blackball themselves, and it is pretty safe to leave it at that.63

Once the six months were up, the policy was duly reviewed and ‘slight
relaxations’ were introduced that permitted anew the broadcasting of 
transcriptions of otherwise non-copyrighted works by composers of enemy
nationality who themselves would benefit from a payment.64 These were
predominantly works transcribed by Italian composers Busoni, Respighi
and Tommassini, about whom questions had been made at the initial imple-
mentation of the policy as the works (transcriptions of Bach, Rossini and
Scarlatti) were a staple of the Music Department’s repertoire. Special ‘lati-
tude’ was given to music productions of a ‘continental nature’, and works
considered of ‘exceptional character and significance’ were to be admitted
with a repeat of the proviso that they must not be works ‘infected by the
German spirit’. Additionally, ‘music of nationals belonging to non-culpable
enemy countries’ was permitted, but at the same time ‘a policy of consider-
able representation of music by British composers, and a subsidiary bias in
favour of the music of our Allies’, was reaf firmed.65 The BBC was keen not
to let this policy be made overtly public, believing that ‘the mere absence
of certain composers from our programmes would cause much less com-
ment than a public statement of the principles which have guided the
omissions.66

There was caution about the policy in general expressed by the Music
Advisory Committee – a body of independent representatives of  the
music profession – and they organised a sub-committee to discuss the
matter in spring 1942. In summary the belief expressed was that there was
‘a moral obligation on the Corporation’s part to perform the finest music,

63 BBC WAC R27/3/2: Music General/Alien Composers/File 2 (1941): DDM (R.S.
Thatcher) to C (P): ‘Copyright Music by Enemy Alien Composers’ (22 May 1941),
1.

64 BBC WAC R27/3/3: Music General/Alien Composers/File 3 (1942), A.B. [Arthur
Bliss], BBC Policy with regard to Copyright Music by Composers of  Enemy
Nationality (21 Oct. 1942), 1.

65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.

44 Chapter 2
from whatever sources’.67 However, the report by the sub-committee was
described by the Controller (Programmes), B.E. Nicolls, in a memo to the
Director General, Cecil Graves, as ‘nobly vague’.68 In short: ‘It is intended to
recommend a definite relaxation of our present policy on its copyright (i.e.
economic) side, while, as you see from (b) retaining (“so long as reasonable
and proper consideration is given in respect of present international com-
plications”) a recognition that certain music may be barred for political or
“kultural” grounds.’69 Certain artists and composers became the particular
topic of discussion resulting either from external correspondence received
by the BBC or through concern raised internally. In what were British
interpretations of French collaboration, which I will cover in further detail
below, both Charles Trenet and Maurice Chevalier fell under suspicion for
collaboration, and the British highlighted their relation to contemporary
discourses about light music. So too were Nadia Boulanger and Poulenc
assessed in some detail, with the latter making it brief ly onto the list of 
banned composers. These individual cases demonstrate enactment of the
general policies outlined above, but also indicate interference obtained by
personal interest or in relatively subjective expressions of taste – regardless
of the ostensible privileging of principle. One way of determining a sense
of scale when talking about degrees of collaboration is to fast-forward
chronologically to the liberation of France and examine the work of the
French épuration committees. Their findings, which resulted also in the
prohibition of artists and composers, retrospectively this time, had close
parallels in application to the BBC’s own policy, namely of banning in order
to stem revenue profits. Comparison between these two methodologies
helps to clarify some of the individual cases mentioned above, since they
are often concerned with the same individuals.

67 BBC WAC R27/3/3: Music General/Alien Composers/File 3/1942, Memo from
OMD (Kenneth Wright) to ADPA (OS), ‘Composers of Alien Nationality’ (10
April 1942). Interestingly, Frank Eames, the director of the ISM refused to sign in
favour of any relaxation of the banning policy.

68 BBC WAC R27/3/3: Music General/Alien Composers/File 3/1942, C(P) to D.G.,
‘Copyright Music by Enemy Composers (24 September 1942).

69 Policy was of ficially modified on November 1942.

Sounding the Nations 45

Degrees of Collaboration

In order to address what was considered collaborationist activity and how
this af fected aesthetic conceptualisations of the artwork and arguments
that seek to justify freedom of expression, I am going to examine not just
the BBC’s ideas of ‘notorious anti-allied behaviour’ but also the processes
undertaken in France itself to clean out and, in no small measure, exert
revenge on those felt to have profited from the Nazi Occupation. The two
policies coalesced in the aftermath of the liberation when the BBC felt it
necessary to follow the French lead and ensure ‘that we all ban the same
people’.70

The banning policies operated according to a scale of judgement under
which – regardless of copyright issues – composers and artists would be
assessed on whatever evidence was available to establish whether their
professional activity and or their political sympathy indicated collabora-
tion with the occupying forces, or, more nebulously, with their ideas. The
Comités d’épuration undertook a similar style of judgement post-liberation,
by measuring the amount of participation on Nazi-run Radio-Paris. This
information was passed on to the BBC:

The black list kept by Radiodif fusion Française is based mainly on the evidence
of the Radio Paris account books during the years of occupation; any artist who
received a fee of more than Fr 5000 for a performance is automatically banned from
the microphone indefinitely, unless there is good reason to act otherwise. The cases
of smaller people are judged on their merits, and in most cases of individual artists
a scale of fifteen days’ fine per appearance at Radio Paris is applied before they can
be given work.71

70 BBC WAC R27/3/5: Music General/Alien Composers/File 5/1945 French Liaison
Of ficer (Cecilia Reeves) to Assistant Controllor (Programmes) (AC (P)) (Harman
Grisewood), ‘Collaborators’ (17 January 1945).

71 BBC WAC E2/24: France/Anglo-French Collaboration/Collaborators/1943–1945,
Sullivan to Clark ‘Radiodif fusion française’ (4 May 1945).

46 Chapter 2
The length of professional ban was related to the number of hours broadcast,
additional exceptions being those who had been involved in propaganda
broadcasts for whom the ban was nominally for life.

French composers were assessed by a dif ferent committee, the Comité
National d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs. Within
this committee, representatives from the major performing rights organisa-
tions, SACD and SACEM, assessed the activity of composers.72 Writers
and littéraires more generally were assessed by representatives of the Société
des auteurs et conférenciers and the resistance group, the Comité national
des écrivains (CNE). Together this committee was responsible for follow-
ing the legal dossiers of composers and writers under suspicion of what
appears initially as clearly defined ‘indignité nationale’ (loi du 30 mai 1945)
in which collaborative activity was defined as:

• avoir participé à l’organisation de manifestations artistiques en faveur de la col-
laboration avec l’ennemi.

• avoir publié des articles, brochures, livres du fait des conférences en faveur
de l’ennemi; des collaborations avec l’ennemi, du racisme ou des doctrines
totalitaires.73

The French were determined to punish retrospectively creative participation
with the Third Reich, while the BBC was keen to ensure such collaboration
was kept of f air during the war. The Corporation’s principal objection was
to the generation of revenues for those who opposed its values (and thereby
values shared by the allied cause). However, it was also wary of of fending
an allied-French public by broadcasting works and performances of those
sympathetic to the Nazi regime and Pétain’s ‘Révolution nationale’. The
argument against revenue was also shared by the Comités d’épuration, and
the parallels here with BBC policy are clear, outlining how public disap-
proval engenders the policy:

72 Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (founded in 1777) and the Société
des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de musique (founded in 1851).

73 AN F21/8114 Définition: Indignité nationale.

Sounding the Nations 47

L’opinion publique du pays dont l’indignation contre les crimes de l’occupant et
contre ceux qui lui ont apporté une aide matérielle et intellectuelle, s’accroît chaque
jour, ne pouvait supporter que des œuvres ayant eu pour objet ou pour résultat de
favoriser les entreprises de l’ennemi ou de contrarier l’ef fort de guerre de la France et
de ses alliés continuent d’être, pour leur auteurs, une source de profits.74

Yet, the Journal Of ficiel also contains an important disclaimer that states,
in spite of the ruling appearing to be public censorship: ‘il y a lieu d’éviter
soigneusement tout système de répression portant atteinte au droit de la
libre expression de la pensée’.75 It was an occasion to punish such writers and
artists with a ban and restrictions on their professional activity, on the one
hand, but it did not seek (in contrast to, and in purposeful distance from,
the preceding fascist regime) to repress the right to express opinion.

It is perhaps a central irony of the BBC’s policy in this regard, that
the Corporation gave the première of the cantata, Figure humaine on 23
March 1945. It is a work set to resistance poems by Eluard – texts which
had themselves been airdropped into France by the Royal Air Force. Yet
its composer, Francis Poulenc was the only Frenchman to find his name
added to the list of banned composers in June 1943:

The following have been added to the main list of  those whose works should be
included only after special application to Assistant Director of Music (General):
     BIXIO
     BUNK, Gerhard
     POULENC, François [sic]76

Kenneth Wright clarified the situation in part in a memo to the Gramophone
Director:

74 AN F21/8114 Ordonnance no. 45–1089 du 30 mai 1945 ( JO du 31.5.1945), ‘Exposé
des motifs’, Comité d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs.

75 AN F21/8114 Ordonnance no. 45–1089 du 30 mai 1945 ( JO du 31.5.1945), ‘Exposé
des motifs’, Comité d’épuration des gens de lettres, auteurs et compositeurs.

76 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien Composers/File 4/1943–1944 K.A.
Wright ‘Copyright Music by Alien Composers (New edition, June 1943)’ (4 June
1943).

48 Chapter 2
The point about Poulenc is mainly musical. D.M. feels strongly that these are not the
days to emphasise his music. At the same time he is suspected of collaborating with
the Nazis although, we cannot prove this. We therefore were asked to soft-pedal his
music and his recordings, and this is the way to interpret it please.77

In August 1942, Nadia Boulanger, who had left France for the United
States on 6 December 1940 to take up the post at the Longy School of 
Music she had been of fered in July 1940, was mentioned during a meeting
of the Overseas Music Department: ‘Mr Rollo Myers reported that Nadia
Boulanger had returned from America to co-operate with Vichy, and Mr.
Cooper quoted William Walton as having expressed similar suspicions
regarding both Poulenc and Honegger.’78

Further ref lection on the general question of co-operation or collabo-
ration with Vichy and other Nazi or pro-Nazi party in occupied countries
led to reports that ‘definite information was available, especially about cer-
tain light music composers, but executants had not previously come under
discussion, though it was well known that such artists as Cortot, Backhaus,
Mengelberg, Gieseking and Kuhlenkampf were definitely pro-Nazi’. An
inversion of the banning policy saw the active promotion through increased
airtime for artists known to be actively working against the Nazis. One such
case was Jo Vincent ‘who was known to have made public protests against
the Nazis in Holland, and who was now taken as hostage’.79 There was some
hesitation before labelling artists ‘pro-Nazi’ and the cases of Poulenc and
Honegger were referred to Emile Delavenay, Head of European Intelligence
and M. André Philippe. However, in the meantime, ‘records of known
anti-allied performers were to be labelled “Do not use”’.80

77 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien Composers/File 4/1943–1944 K.A.
Wright to Gramophone Director [G.E.H. Abraham] ‘Poulenc’ (6 May 1943).

78 BBC WAC R27/198/1 Music General/Meetings/Overseas Minutes/File 1/1941–1943
Minutes of the Overseas Music Meeting (24 August 1942).

79 BBC WAC R27/198/1 Music General/Meetings/Overseas Minutes/File 1/1941–1943
Minutes of the Overseas Music Meeting (7 September 1942).

80 BBC WAC R27/198/1 Music General/Meetings/Overseas Minutes/File 1/1941–1943
Minutes of the Overseas Music Meeting (7 September 1942).

Sounding the Nations 49

Charles Trenet – along with Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett and Edith
Piaf – fell under the scrutiny of BBC policy makers whose instincts were
in favour of broadcasting him:

1 Monitoring have no record of his having broadcast for Radio-Paris.
2 He has sung a fortnight in December 1942 at a music hall show at the Paris ABC.

Collaborationist press appear to have derided him for his taking a part in ‘Swing’
performances – ‘Swing’ being synonymous with pro-Allied sympathy. There is
therefore a slight presumption in his favour and no indication that he has ever
‘collaborated’ with the enemy in any precise way.81

However, an outside agency communication to the corporation, via Mann,
one of the BBC governors, thought dif ferently. Following a broadcast
of Lucienne Boyer and Charles Trenet, Lt-Col. Gielgud of the Political
Intelligence Department, wrote to state that these artists enjoyed ‘an unen-
viable reputation as collaborators’ and continued to state that ‘items of this
kind must inevitably a) be of fensive to French listeners in England and b)
liable to serious misconception by French listeners in France’: ‘The idea I
hope you may be able to put across is that the voices of notoriously disloyal
allies whatever their artistic merits may be, ought to be kept of f the air in
the same way as I suppose (and devoutly hope!) it would be considered
inexpedient in the present circumstances to put on the air the works of 
P.G. Wodehouse.’82

The BBC had made investigations of its own in relation to Trenet
through the European Intelligence Director, Delavenay, via a contact at
Carlton Gardens, and found ‘no sure ground for banning him’. Trenet ‘seems
to be a Jew who has to pay heavy bribes to the Germans to be allowed to
sing’.83 This reply solicited a response that resulted in Trenet’s banishment
from the BBC airwaves until at least September 1945:

81 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien composers/File 4/1943–1944, Harman
Grisewood [AC (Eur S)] Howgill [AC(P)] Charles Trennet [sic] and French Cabaret
Artists’ (29 Jan. 1943). Trenet had been ‘outed’ in a New Statesman article along with
Guitry and Maurice Chevalier.

82 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien Composers/File 4/1943–1944 Lt-Col.
Gielgud to Grisewood (23 April 1943).

83 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien Conposers/File 4/1943–1944 Grisewood
to Lt-Col. Gielgud (30 April 1943).

50 Chapter 2
1 As regards Charles Trenet, I am unable to follow your argument. If he pays heavy
bribes to the Germans to be allowed to sing, that is surely grounds for banning him
from the BBC for paying heavy bribes to Germans is a form of collaboration.
2 Loyal Frenchmen regard collaboration with the Germans in any form as the
unpardonable sin, and the fact that the gentlemen guilty of collaboration is (as
I learn from your minute) a Jew makes the situation worse rather than better.
   Boyer and Chevalier have appeared in lists of notorious collaborators, and
I have little doubt that they like Trenet, have preferred their duty to their art to
their duty to their country. This really is the whole point. When we are asking
all Frenchmen to make every possible sacrifice in the interests of France, we have
here three people who have taken a course which can only be interpreted as
indicating that they put their duty to their country second either to this artistic
vocation or to their careers or their desire to make money. The BBC ought, in
my submission, to do nothing which suggests that it lends countenance to people
of this calibre. Even if the persons in question are really acting from the purest
motives and are being misunderstood by their compatriots, surely we should take
that line which would command itself to French public opinion, irrespective of 
the merits of the case.84

The issues were muddled even more by the reestablishment of contact
with Radiodif fusion nationale following which, the respective banned
lists were conf lated and followed by yet more additions and deletions. On
12 October 1944, Lockspeiser wrote that M. Moyens of Radiodif fusion
nationale française had examined the banned list of 4 June 1943 (one which
had remained fairly constant) and suggested the following alterations in
reference to French composers and artists:

French composers banned
Delete: Francis Poulenc
Add: Jean Françaix
Florent Schmitt
Alien artists banned
Add: Claire Croiza
Pierre Fournier (cellist)
Delete: Magda Tagliofero

84 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien Composers/File 4/1943–1944, Gielgud
to Grisewood ‘Your minute of April 30th’ (3 May 1943).

Sounding the Nations 51

Lockspeiser proposed to keep abreast of the changes of the status of artists
in France by supplying information received from both Tony Mayer of the
French Foreign Ministry and the BBC’s own intelligence department.85

However, as the potential for British and French collaboration was
renewed, the music publishers Paxtons contacted the British Council to
complain that, in the spirit of Anglo-French collaboration as outlined
by then French finance minister, Paul Reynaud, the BBC had broad-
cast a substantial number of French works but the French radio had not
reciprocated with anything like the same enthusiasm for British music.86
In their reply, the Music Committee of the British Council, duly noted
that ‘the increased appearance of French music in British programmes
commenced from October 1939’.87 After the matter was declined by the
Embassy, Cecilia Reeves then acting liaison of ficer clarified the situation
to inform them that:

We think you are actually under a misapprehension, as French interest in English
music has increased considerably since the war, and we have, in fact, received requests
from France to prepare for them a series of programmes of exclusively English
music. […]

It is […] only fair to say that in the last eighteen months, and particularly since the
beginning of the war, the French broadcasting authorities have shown an increasing
interest in our music, both for relay and for performance in their own country, and
we may assure you that we shall do all that is possible to stimulate this interest.88

85 BBC WAC R27/3/4 Music General/Alien Composers/File 4/1943–1944 Edward
Lockspeiser to K.A. Wright [as DDM], ‘List of Banned Artists’ (12 Oct. 1944).

86 E1/709: Countries: France/French Music/A-Z, letter from C. Meil (director),
W. Paxton and Co. Ltd to the Secretary of the British Council (4 Jan. 1840).

87 E1/709: Countries: France/French Music/A-Z, letter from Music Committee to
W. Paxton and Co. (24 Jan. 1940). The British Council enclosed lists of  British
Broadcasts (not retained in the archive) of French music broadcast over the previous
two and a half months, excluding ‘classical French music such as Carmen by Bizet or
some works by Gounod or the Coppélia suite by Delibes’.

88 BBC WAC E1/709: French Music/A-Z Letter from Acting Foreign Liaison Of ficer
(Cecilia Reeves) to W. Paxton and Co. (12 March 1940).

52 Chapter 2

Conclusion

This chapter has shown how the BBC formulated its music policy at home
and, to some extent, overseas in response to dif ficult and demanding politi-
cal situations in the context of cultural propaganda. It was a policy often
forged against the wishes of its key freelancers within the music profession
and that where it was made public received with little positive response from
listeners. A focus on the psychological importance of music in its trans-
mission, and the extra-musical behaviour of its composers and performers,
was something that was invested in highly by programme makers. This was
particularly the case when considering the role of music in broadcasts to
Nazi-occupied countries, but at work too when presenting the repertoire
of a particular country to its domestic audiences.

In the early autumn of 1943, at the instigation of  the Director
General, there was a revival of interest in the rulings of the Ullswater
Committee. It was nearly ten years since the original report had been
filed and it was felt that the Music Department needed to be prepared
to address its relationships with the music profession, its promotion of 
‘foreign music’ and broadcasting responsibility once more. The Director
of Secretariat, M.G. Farquharson, wrote to Arthur Bliss on behalf of the
Director-General:

If you agree, I would propose to tell the D.G. that we consider when the time comes
we shall be able to prepare a case that will be impressive. Do you think that we
should be justified in saying that straight away? Are there any particular points at
which you think we shall be stronger or weaker than at others? What I think D.G.
wants at the moment is some sort of general assurance that we are not going to fall
down badly on any particular point when we later have to provide evidence before
a Government committee.

Obviously war conditions will have to be taken into account. The Ullswater people
no doubt contemplated a vista of undisturbed peace. What has actually happened
is that since their report we have had about four years of peace followed by an equal
period of war. We must take credit for what was done before war broke out and also

Sounding the Nations 53

for what we have done since war broke out under all the burdens of wartime imper-
fections (e.g. indif ferent reception, scarcity of artists, etc., etc.).89

Bliss passed the task of compiling the Music Department’s response to
Kenneth Wright. As Assistant Director of Music (General), Wright gave
the following broad impressions of how the war had thus far af fected the
Music Department’s adherence to the aims of the Committee:

After initial disruption, our music output has not only adapted itself to greatly
changed national conditions, but steadily continued along the lines followed in peace
time; indeed, factors introduced by war, whether social or economic, have oper-
ated for good – for example, in the reintroduction (after many years) of full-length
broadcasts of symphony concerts, the engagement of specialised small orchestras to
play light music of still greater virtuosity and range, the frequent appearance of our
orchestras before less sophisticated, yet appreciative audiences all over the country;
the creation of new repertoires such as libraries of orchestral and band music based
on our folk-music; the broadcasting night and day of a steady stream of music and
music-making of Britain to unseen audiences all round the globe.90

The massive alterations and changes brought to the BBC by the Second
World War in relation to music led to some of the most detailed considera-
tion of what music might mean when communicated by radio, in which
audience expectation, standards of performance and political implications
of music were all new currency in the contemporary discourse.

But what conclusions can be made about music programming at the
BBC? Ambitious plans for a new, streamed network dedicated to broad-
casting classical music and drama were underway while the wars were still
being fought under the unimaginative working title of ‘Programme C’.
Designed, famously, to be ‘the envy of the world’, the Third Programme,
as programme C was eventually termed, although it took away a propor-
tion of music from the Home Service, was a bold enterprise. As with all

89 BBC WAC R27/245/1 Music General/Music Policy/File 1A/1930–1943 M.G.
Farquharson to Arthur Bliss ‘Ullswater Committee on Music’ (23 Sept. 1943).

90 BBC WAC R27/219 Music General/Music and Music Department 1930–1943
Kenneth Wright (ADM Gen) to M.G. Farquharson (Director, Secretariat) ‘Ullswater
Committee on Music’ (5 Nov. 1943).

54 Chapter 2
processes of transformation at the BBC, old policy troubles reared an ugly
head. An old guard of the ISM, the British Composer’s guild and other
establishment bodies whose power had been so comprehensively usurped
by the BBC seized any opportunity to make their position felt. The self-
evident greatness of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms had survived war with
Germany relatively intact, but to show a bias towards the music of Britain’s
nearest continental neighbour resulted in hostility. While the employees of 
the BBC music department were often Francophiles who had studied and
worked in Paris – Lennox Berkeley, Edward Lockspeiser, Francis Chagrin
were all at one time pupils of Nadia Boulanger – in 1950, Kenneth Wright
in a new function as Artists Manager found himself again having to organise
evidence to defend a bias for French music in the Third Programme:

It is still being maintained in some quarters, particularly the ISM and the British
Composers Guild, that the Third Programme is over-generous to French music, old
and new. […] [I]t would be a good idea if someone could be spared to check up and
have ready for the next MAC [Music Advisory Committee], at which the point
may be raised, fairly exact data of the proportions of French music of the output of
general music in T[hird] P[rogramme] over the past couple of years.91

French music had become so central to the Third programme repertoire that
a year before a member of the committee stated: ‘Your Third Programme
is being called the French Programme in some quarters.’92

91 BBC WAC R27/107 Music Department/French Music/1945–1954, Memo from
Kenneth Wright, ‘French Music in the Third Programme’ (4 December 1950).

92 BBC WAC R27/107 Music Department/French Music/1945–1954, Memo from
Kenneth Wright, ‘French Music in the Third Programme’ (4 December 1950), the
statement is attributed to Roy Henderson of the Music Advisory Committee.

Chapter 3

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and
‘French Night’ at the BBC

If through acts of remembrance – particularly through the transmission
of texts (literary, visual and musical) – shared frames of reference are con-
structed, then the job of the BBC in its invention of Frenchness was simul-
taneously to acknowledge those frames and then make them understandable
to a dif ferent and sometimes sceptical listenership. In this chapter I examine
how the presentation of France was manipulated by the construction of a
sense of Frenchness in broadcasts to the BBC’s domestic listeners with an
eye, nevertheless on the eavesdropping audiences in occupied Europe.1
This is contextualised by considering the presence of French musical culture
in London more generally since the presence of the Free French had brought
a strong political aspect to the British capital and indeed to aspects of its
music-making. Periodical publications in French such as La France libre
founded by André Labarthe and the dissemination of resistance poetry –
both in French and English – formed part of a complex of cultural activity
in which French cultural memory was being constructed outre-Manche. It
was a cultural memory that in its displaced translation became in Rigney’s
terms, doubly vicarious.2 It is this mediated process of the translation, and
displacement of cultural memory that is central to my analysis here. By
concentrating on the BBC’s own presentation, conception and programme
making associated with France I focus specifically on the creation of radio

1 BBC WAC E2/188/1 Foreign General/European Intelligence Papers/Studies of 
European Audiences/May 1941–Sept. 1942.

2 La France Libre ran from 15 November 1941–1946, see Christopher Flood, ‘André
Labarthe and Raymond Aron: Political Myth and Ideology in La France libre’, Journal
of European Studies xxiii (1993), 139–58.

56 Chapter 3
features and programming on Bastille Day. These programmes are read as
an enactment of the translation, transfer and recursivity principles we saw
outlined in the first chapter in which the notion of translation as cultural
encounter operates in several ways and on dif ferent levels.3

These encounters help to map an important process of  knowledge
creation evidenced in the perception (of what is truthfully perceivable)
and presentation of truth (as a value of integrity) in which the media-
tion of what constitutes actuality and fact come into play. Here, it is
timely to analyse how the dramatic operates in the creation of the feature
programme, a genre of programming defined by its anchorage to fact
mediated through ref lection and observation; and to consider how the
presence of music participates, either as the object itself of the feature, or
as an element in the evocation of, or accompaniment to, another subject.
Laurence Gilliam, who worked as assistant director and subsequently
director of features from 1941 to his retirement in 1964, wrote in London
Calling that the job of the radio-feature ‘man’ was ‘to ref lect the life of 
the world around him after looking and getting around’.4 A sense of objec-
tive yet authoritative observation underwrote the programmes, which
were situated generically between straight news reporting and fictional
drama. The appearance of such a vehicle for information transmission at
this time linked into much broader thinking about representations of the
real. As the wartime everyday became increasingly fantastic, its reporting
required more and more imaginative modes of expression that needed
to respond further more to ways in which radio and cinema’s mediation
of that reality had already begun to participate in the altered nature of
its perception.5

3 Ann Rigney, ‘Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory’, Journal
of European Studies 35 (2005), 11–28.

4 Laurence Gilliam, ‘The Job of the Radio Feature Man Today’, London Calling: The
Overseas Journal of the BBC, 48 (August 1940, giving listings for 1–7 Sept.), 3.

5 See Phyllis Frus, The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative: The Timely and the
Timeless (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 57

Cultural memory is structured by shared frames of reference elid-
ing with Todorov’s belief that culture is essentially a matter of memory
elaborated into knowledge of behavioural codes (or rituals).6 For Todorov,
however, this concept is extended to the formulation of identity. If the
possession of a particular culture is defined above all by awareness of his-
tory, geography, documents and its ways of acting and thinking, it is also
obtained through the interaction with and awareness of other cultures; a
definition wrought through its own memory, its points of contact, and of
dif ference, from other cultures.7 I investigate how such behavioural codes
became established in relation to French celebration and commemora-
tive acts associated with the storming of the Bastille and its symbolism in
the foundation values of the French Republic on 14 July; how there is a
marked definition between values linked to La République and those of 
La Patrie, and how its own transformation from Dies irae to Jour de fête
(and back again) becomes reworked under the constraints of occupation
and war.8 This analysis seeks to show how the BBC attempted to translate
these ideas for its own audiences and, to an extent, for its own uses, by
employing the idea of translation expressed by Paul Ricœur, as a paradigm
of cultural encounter.9 It is a broad conception of translation that has been
the object of considerable theoretical ref lection and its application here
helps to address aspects of alterity and communality, as well as working
to expose areas of political contingency – particularly in the domain of
cultural diplomacy as outlined in the previous chapter.10

6 Tzvetan Todorov, Les abus de la mémoire [1995] (Paris: Arléa, 2002), 21.
7 Ibid., 21.
8 See Christian Amalvi, ‘Le 14-Juillet, du Dies irae à Jour de fête’, in Les Lieux de mémoire

vol. 1 ‘La République’, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 421–72.
9 Paul Ricœur, Sur la traduction (Paris: Bayard, 2004).
10 A conjunction particularly apparent in 1939, when the state visit of the French presi-

dent Albert Lebrun in March 1939 provided a cue for the BBC to collaborate with
its French broadcasting counterparts in the transmission of concerts from Paris and
the presentation of joint programmes.

58 Chapter 3

From Fact to Fiction: BBC Features

In 1950, Laurence Gilliam edited a book that was simultaneously a celebra-
tion and a retrospective of the development of the feature genre during the
war years.11 Reproducing the scripts from a selection of programmes with a
short preliminary explicatory statement from their writers about the proc-
esses, dif ficulties posed and the relationship with the subjects involved, the
project marks out and claims the genre as radio’s own: as ‘the form of state-
ment that broadcasting has evolved for itself, as distinct from other arts or
methods of publication’, the feature ‘is pure radio, a new instrument for the
creative writer and producer’.12 Dif fering from the talk – which might be
considered a spoken version of a newspaper opinion piece – the feature’s
‘powerful techniques for the presentation of fact’ are combined with an
important element of performativity in which the ‘generation of emotion’
in its listeners is imperative.13 It is in this overlaying of dramatisation that
the creative, and indeed, ideological, comes into play since ‘the business of 
the feature is to convince the listener of the truth of what it is saying, even
though it is saying it in dramatic form’. It is an intersection furthermore
that works in two directions, and the other, which has been predominantly
exposed in theoretical context of American post-war non-fiction novel and
journalistic narrative, highlights a moment, or encounter, in which the fic-
tive imagination has been rendered impotent by the seemingly incredible
content of reality.14 A connection is made between technological innova-
tion – particularly in mass communication – and the increasingly multi-
layered existence it creates. The fictionist is no longer able to out-imagine
reality, and in the words of Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, his or her ability ‘to form
a private metaphysics of life in his culture and weave his vision – his view

11 Laurence Gilliam, ed., BBC Features (London: Evans/BBC, 1950).
12 Gilliam, ‘Introduction’, ibid., 10.
13 Ibid.
14 See Frus, The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative, and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh,

The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1976).

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 59

of man and his experience in relation to a larger order – into the fabric of 
his novels’ is disabled.15 If the fiction project, as described by Zavarzadeh,
is ‘to provide [the] reader with a pattern of the underlying order of external
reality’, then it is challenged by the reader’s – and listener’s – own engage-
ment with actuality through broadcast media. Forms of mass media, as
maintained by Frus and Zavarzadeh, while not necessarily creating a new
‘reality’, work to restructure the way we experience it by af fecting the way we
perceive the world. It is surely the same observation that underlies Nathalie
Sarraute’s theoretical consideration of what she terms the ère du soupçon
and what, in ef fect, retrospectively cradled the postwar nouveau-roman.
‘Le petit fait vrai’, she argues, carries great advantages, of which, first and
foremost, is being true. Through its virtue of truth comes ‘sa force de con-
viction et d’attaque, sa noble insouciance du ridicule et du mauvais goût,
et cette audace tranquille, cette désinvolture qui lui permet de franchir les
limites étriquées où le souci de la vraisemblance tient captifs les plus hardis
et de faire reculer très loin les frontiers du réel’.16 It is no coincidence that
the essay in which Sarraute asks how any fabricated story could rival ‘celle
de la séquestrée de Poitiers ou avec les récits des camps de concentration
ou de la bataille de Stalingrad?’ appears in Les Temps modernes the same
year as Gilliam’s ‘permanent record’ of the BBC feature, even if it is ulti-
mately the cinema over radio that wins the attention of Sarraute’s former
‘lecteurs du vieux roman’.17

As both contributor to features and indeed a collaborator with Gilliam
at the BBC, Louis MacNeice, echoes this now familiar concept of extraordi-
nary reality in an article entitled ‘The Morning after the Blitz’.18 Accounting
for the spectacle of destruction, MacNeice described the aftermath of the

15 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality, 222.
16 Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon, essais sur le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1956),

69.
17 Ibid., 69 and 78.
18 Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) was a producer in the BBC Features department from

May 1941 under the direction of Laurence Gilliam. He produced several important
works for the BBC during this period including The Stones Cry Out, Alexander
Nevsky and Christopher Columbus (in collaboration with Benjamin Britten).

60 Chapter 3
night of 16–17 April 1941, when seven hours of constant bombardment
had caused death and devastation on an unprecedented scale. On hearing
the All Clear, he took himself on a tour of the city and the newly unfamil-
iar urban space left him ‘half appalled and half enlivened’ by a ‘fantasy of
destruction’. It was, for him, he expressed with candour, and some irony,
‘enlivening’: ‘People’s deaths were another matter – I assumed they must
have been many – but as for the damage to the buildings, I could not help
– at moments – regarding it as a spectacle, something on a scale which I
had never come across.’19

MacNeice’s walk around bombed London inspired a celebrated series
of programmes entitled, in direct association with his experience, The
Stones Cry Out – in which the desolation, the ruins, the fallen stones pre-
sented, indeed voiced, the spectacle of the collapse, at its most extreme
of post-Enlightenment civilisation. MacNeice’s contributions to Gilliam’s
features department were among some of the most important and several
of his own scripts were published independently of Gilliam’s anthology.20
His own reading of the BBC’s definition of the feature chimes perfectly,
as one would expect, with Gilliam’s: ‘It is the BBC name for a dramatised
broadcast which is primarily either informative or propagandist (propa-
ganda here being taken to include the emotive celebration of anniver-
saries and gestures of  homage – or of  hatred – to anyone or anything
dead or alive).’21 So, having established something of the nature of the
genre, I want to take a closer look at two examples which are cast within
the paradigm of cultural translation specifically. First, I want to address
Leonard Cottrell’s later feature, written in 1946, in which he presents
the account of a survivor from the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen
and second as a means of transition to consideration of the preservation
and life-support of French culture in London by tracing the presence of 

19 Louis MacNeice, ‘The Morning after the Blitz’, Picture Post 2 (3 May 1941), 9–12,
reprinted in Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, ed. E.R. Dodds (London: Faber &
Faber, 1968), 118.

20 See Louis MacNeice, The Dark Tower and Other Radio Plays (London: Faber,
1947).

21 Ibid., 69.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 61

French intellectual activity in London as a displaced timescape in a short
propaganda programme written by André Labarthe.

The Man from Belsen and Ariel in Wartime

Leonard Cottrell’s ‘The Man from Belsen’ presented the testimony of a
survivor deported to the German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen
in the dying days of European occupation.22 It was broadcast to mark the
first anniversary of the liberation of the camp on 15 April 1946. Harold
Le Druillenec, a schoolteacher, was court-martialled, along with his sister
Louisa Gould (who was additionally charged with harbouring a Russian
prisoner of war) and Ivy Foster on 22 June 1944 on the charge of com-
munal listening to enemy news. His sentence of simple imprisonment for
five months resulted in transportation to Belfort and subsequently, in the
company of French and Belgian prisoners, via Neuen Gamme to Belsen.
Le Druillenec was a rare case since he was a British citizen who had been
arrested under the occupying regime of the Nazis in Jersey. He was arrested
furthermore for listening to ‘enemy news’. Cottrell’s feature acted upon Le
Druillenec’s concentrationary testimony in several ways and its dramatic
presentation was marshalled by paradigms of translation for home audience
consumption specifically. Indeed the attempt to re-create Le Druillenec’s
experience was described by Cottrell himself as an unusual experiment.23

22 The full script is published in Gilliam’s anthology, see Leonard Cottrell, ‘The Man
from Belsen’, in BBC Features, ed. Gilliam, 97–110 and an extract from the final
fifteen minutes of the programme, including ef fects and continuity, is reprinted
as an appendix to Suzanne Bardgett’s chapter ‘What Wireless Listeners Learned:
Some Lesser-Known BBC Broadcasts about Belsen’ in Belsen 1945: New Historical
Perspectives, ed. S. Bardgett and David Cesarani (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006),
142–52.

23 Cottrell, ‘The Man from Belsen’, 97.

62 Chapter 3
Although Le Druillenec voiced the narrative, Cottrell had written the
script after spending several weeks in his company, ‘absorbing the details
as fully as possible’ and ‘the incidents, the character-sketches were all his’,
and they were ‘all true’.24 The first-person narrative presentation was then
interpolated with short dramatised sections written in a way so that Le
Druillenec was always there by implication, even if he did not participate
in all the dramatic scenes.25 It was a full-scale production: a score was com-
missioned from William Alwyn and performed in collaboration with the
violinist Eugene Pini – who played diegetic sequences of the Mozart F
major sonata; it included the sound ef fects of bombardment, cheering
crowds, train whistles were incorporated and the actors included some
of the BBC’s most famous. Valentine Dyall, who played Le Druillenec’s
French camarade, Jean de Frotté, a young maquisard of aristocratic descent
transported to Wilhelmshaven, was familiar to Home Service listeners as
‘The Man in Black’ in the popular Home Service series Appointment with
Fear already into its fifth year of what would be a twelve-year run.26

It was, of course, a bold programme that addressed the Nazi concen-
tration camps. However, it is notably reticent on certain matters: it makes
only f leeting mention of Auschwitz and Dachau as ‘places worse than this’,
even though it was from where many of Le Druillenec’s fellow prisoners
had recently arrived; the extermination policy of the Nazis is only tacitly
presented, and little direct attention is paid to the plight of the Jews. Instead,
the programme focuses on aspects that not only are perhaps more palatable,
but that draw attention to tropes of French Resistance, British liberation
and indeed the BBC’s own broadcasting. Although it is from Belsen that Le
Druillenec was rescued on the bonnet of a British radio truck because he was
‘too lousy and dirty to be allowed inside’, his internment there was for just
ten days, having spent much longer incarcerated at Neuen Gamme.27 His
camarades are people who have been deported for allied-related resistance

24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Bardgett, ‘Some Lesser-Known BBC Broadcasts’, 132.
27 Cottrell, ‘The Man from Belsen’, 110.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 63

activity in Belgium or France, activity to which again served the interests
of British policy and finally, the BBC’s own importance is thrown into
implicit relief as the reason for Le Druillenec’s imprisonment in the first
place: communal listening to enemy broadcasting can only refer to the
BBC itself, broadcasting so ef fective and dangerous to the occupiers that
the Nazis would punish with a sentence utmost severity.

As a text it contrasts, not unsurprisingly, quite starkly with the testi-
monial writing of Charlotte Delbo’s account who also wrote as a deportee
convicted of resistance activity and indeed, taken here as representative of a
body of testimonial writing. However, Delbo’s determination is, in part, to
undermine the central myth of heroic French resistance by documenting in
incredibly haunting and poetic detail, her camp experience. The desires that
motivate individual life writing and those of a public service broadcaster’s
programme are of necessity quite dif ferent in device. Yet the comparison
highlights the contrast between an individually mediated memory written
at the same time – Delbo’s first volume of the trilogy was completed in
1946, although not published until 1965 – and the construction of a cul-
tural memory that uses first-hand testimony to commemorate, ef fectively
overwriting it by emphasising what was in the event limited British engage-
ment with the Holocaust and the liberation of its surviving victims. The
theoretical point that I want the comparison to demonstrate is that it was
not simply modes of fictional imaginary, as we saw outlined by Frus and
Zavarzadeh above, at work in the dramatisation the feature, but that there
is something else at work in their respective modulations of truth claim.
For Delbo the search for truth is an overt preoccupation in her writing
extending beyond her purely testimonial texts, particularly in Les Belles
Lettres (1961) where her focus is on the Algerian war.28 But, in this case, it
is a challenging truth, that through its observation or acknowledgement
calls to account or exposes political expediency or corrupt judicial systems;
working to out injustice or counter of ficial versions. In her testimony, which

28 See Nicole Thatcher, Charlotte Delbo: Une voix singulière, mémoire, témoignage et
littérature (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), 77.

64 Chapter 3
as so often with testimonial accounts fails in the domain of the empirical,
truth lies in its evocation of the tragedy through ‘une information plus
haute, inactuelle … plus durable’.29 While Delbo might seem to want to
decentre the bravery of the Resistance in her testimony, she can be seen
to manipulate her text within the very parameters of the clandestine texts
of that period, particularly in their challenges to authority-driven ‘truths’.
To some extent the motivation behind the feature also wants to work by
‘restituant l’émotion et l’horreur’ and enact that performativity on its lis-
teners – only it does so by emphasis and through mediation, rather than
the poetic means at Delbo’s disposal, in its presentation of the ‘distillation
of one man’s experience’.30 The authenticity of Le Duillenec’s account is
reinforced by his status as the principal prison witness at the Belsen and
Neuen Gamme trials. So, what for Delbo works to give her writings their
theatricality – the fragmentary prose, the poems, the narrative disconti-
nuity, were for the producers of ‘The Man from Belsen’ an obstacle to the
programme’s narrative and, for that matter, dramatic coherence:

Le Druillenec’s active mind, strained and over-stimulated by his terrible experiences,
poured out a stream of reminiscence, anecdote and comment. Stories of heroism, of
degradation, of humanity and horror tumbled out pell-mell.31

It was Leonard Cottrell’s role ‘to disentangle, to pick out the most signifi-
cant facts, to select and arrange them’, a role then of the omniscient nar-
rator, friend and mentor to the listener that for Sartre had been rendered
redundant in literature by the occupation itself.32 The feature then exerted
its own constraints and that this should be the case is of no great surprise,
it was nevertheless a programme that communicated its indictment of the
concentrationary powerfully. It translated, through its memorialistion, the

29 Claude Prévost, ‘Entretien avec Charlotte Delbo’, La Nouvelle Critique: La déporta-
tion dans la littérature et l’art 167 ( June 1965), 41–4, quoted in Thatcher, Charlotte
Delbo, 77.

30 Laurence Gilliam, ‘The Making of a Feature Programme’, in BBC Features ed. Gilliam,
207.

31 Ibid.
32 See Atack, Literature and the French Resistance, 19.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 65

alterity of the camp experience to domestic listeners that for Gilliam, at
least, conveyed ‘a true experience of deep significance communicated by
radio art’.33

André Labarthe’s short script entitled ‘Ariel in Wartime: Keeping
French Culture Alive’ was broadcast on the Home Service on 30 May 1941
at 18.30 and presented by Jacques Duchesne, in a rare foray of the external
services of the BBC into domestic airtime.34 It describes with admirable
concision the determination of French intellectual activity temporarily
exiled in London to maintain ‘faith in France’, even if  that is a ‘France
in chains’. The contrast between the welcoming freedom of Britain and
the totalitarian control of the German invader or its state collaborators is
sharply expressed by considering two cultural activities.35 The first is the
Institut français under the direction of Denis Saurat, which in accordance
with its links with French Departments in British universities endeavoured
to maintain, in the ‘days of French captivity, the presence of French culture
in Great Britain’.

Centred on student university exchanges, language lessons, exhibitions
of painting and concerts, the Insitut français promoted French culture and
education originally as an ‘antenne’ of the université de Lille.36 The Institut
had been at the centrepiece of the President Lebrun’s state visit to Britain
before the war, when its new home was inaugurated at Queensbury Place
in Kensington on 21 March 1939, two years before Labarthe’s programme.
Lebrun’s visit was memorialised by both French broadcasters and the BBC
in collaborative exchanges: several programmes were organised during the
three days of the of ficial visit, including recitals by Ninon Vallin, Alfred

33 Gilliam, ‘The Making of a Feature Programme’, 208.
34 BBC WAC RCont1: André Labarthe/Talks/1938–1962. Memo from Guy Burgess

to BBC Copyright, 30 May 1941.
35 A. Labarthe, ‘Ariel in Wartime: Keeping French Culture Alive’ (30 May 1941) and

subsequent references.
36 See Philip Taylor, The Projection of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1981) and Christine Okret-Manville, ‘La politique de promotion culturelle
britannique en France (1920–1953): De le publicité aux relations culturelles’, thèse
de doctorat, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, 2002.

66 Chapter 3
Cortot and Jacques Thibaud broadcast direct from Paris. There was also
an exchange programme with the station Poste Parisien entitled Paris!–
Londres! that featured Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Sally’ and Gracie Fields
singing ‘Valentine’, in a cross-cultural nod to the songs which had made
them famous. Indeed, a feature programme, The Voice of Paris, associated
with the visit was broadcast on 21 March 1939, having been produced by
Laurence Gilliam and Robert Kemp with music especially composed for
it by Maurice Jaubert who also conducted the BBC Theatre Orchestra in
its performance.37

With the Institut français now the home to intellectuals in exile, it
was the freedom provided by the ‘friendly land’ that hosted it, that enabled
the French intellectuals in London ‘to make known to Great Britain and
throughout the whole world the true feelings of the French nation and
more especially, of the writers and artists’. The political message was clear:
French intellectuals in London wished ‘to place the prestige of the true
French tradition at the service of the allied cause, which is also the French
cause’. The other cultural activity was one very close to Labarthe’s heart, the
publication of his journal La France libre. The journal which by the time
the programme was broadcast ran to a circulation of 17,000 copies with
a worldwide distribution and, according to the script was subject (unlike
the BBC French Service) to no state intervention was edited in an atmos-
phere of ‘complete freedom and complete independence’. As with other
French-language journals produced outside the occupied Metropole, such
as Fontaine in Algiers, it became a forum for resistance poetry and essays
by writers such as Henri Focillon, Jules Romains, Bernanos and Jacques
Maritain. Labarthe’s specific desire was to ‘gather round our review all the
French writers from every part of the world; to demonstrate the confidence
of the Free French in Franco-British friendship’. It was a theme Labarthe
revisited in his contribution to the P.E.N. Writers in Freedom symposium

37 The BBC Music Library holds no record of the scores for this programme. Listed in
works catalogue in F. Porcile, Maurice Jaubert, musicien populaire ou maudit (Paris:
1971).

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 67

in the September of the same year, where he addressed the meeting ‘as a
provisional representative of an imprisoned nation’ alongside Denis Saurat
and delivered a message from the philosopher Jacques Maritain, exiled in
the United States.38 Labarthe expressed how the convocation of a meeting
of writers in London, in the midst of war, was ‘a striking demonstration
to the whole world that the spirit remains free though the battle rages’.
And what his programme outlines, in fairly overt propaganda terms, and
his contribution to the symposium also states in a more subtle way, was
therefore manifest in other collaborative cultural activity in London to
which we turn next.

Franco-British Cultural Activity in London

While Labarthe’s highly-respected revue brought to exiled French and
Francophone readers evidence of intellectual resistance, there were other
manifestations of cultural activity, particularly in the domain of translation,
publication and performance that also worked to create and disseminate a
hybrid Franco-British cultural memory. Translation, particularly of poetry,
was perpetuated through pre-existing established networks sympathetic to
particular movements – figures of the surrealist movement such as Roland
Penrose and the Belgian E.L.T. Mesens translated the poetry of Paul Eluard
and maintained contact with an exiled André Breton. MacNeice translated
three poems from Louis Aragon’s collection Le Crève-Cœur, which were
used in the commemorative broadcasts that are discussed below.39 The

38 André Labarthe, Jacques Maritain and Denis Saurat, ‘Free France Speaks’, in Writers
in Freedom: A Symposium based on the XVII International Congress of the P.E.N. Club,
London, September 1941, ed. Herman Ould (London: Hutchinson, 1942), 38.

39 Louis MacNeice, ‘The Unoccupied Zone’, translation of poem ‘Zone-Libre’ by Louis
Aragon, broadcast as part of The Living Spirit of France, 14 July 1943, BBC Home
Service. Reprinted in Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems, ed. E.R. Dodds (London:
Faber & Faber, 1968), 556.

68 Chapter 3
publication of clandestine resistance texts was undertaken in London by an
outfit evocatively named Les Cahiers du Silence. Five cahiers were published
between 1943 and 1945 of texts selected mainly from the publications of 
Les Éditions de Minuit, with whom Les Cahiers shared its objectives and
ideals.40 Minuit were heralded in a broadcast by Maurice Schumann for
their insolent determination to continue regardless of the Occupiers ‘d’être
un modèle en même temps qu’un miracle’ and through whose ‘audace et
grâce à la fois … l’ennemi reçoit un double souf f let deux fois signé par la
France’.41 Les Cahiers du Silence signalled their participation in the same
field of ideological opposition in a dedication that appeared in the first
of the cahiers ‘aux écrivains qui sur le sol de la France prisonnière livrent
le combat de l’esprit’.42 Debû-Bridel’s text is the most overtly anglophile
and Louis Parrot argues that its rapid dissemination worked to reassure
British opinion both of the favourable sentiments of French intellectuals
in relation to its ally and to reinforce the work of resistance undertaken in
literary circles.43 Debû-Bridel reiterates the trope of ‘esprit’ in a specifically
Anglo-French context:

40 The five cahiers comprised: Vercors, Le Silence de la mer with a preface by Maurice
Druon (London: 1943); Forez [François Mauriac], Le Cahier noir (London: 1944),
including additional essays by Charles Morgan, ‘Lettre à l’auteur du Cahier noir’
and Robert Speaight, ‘Le Christ dans la pensée française d’aujourd’hui’; Argonne
[ Jacques Debû-Bridel], Angleterre (D’Alcuin à Huxley) (London: 1944) prefaced
by Charles Morgan’s article ‘Du Génie français’; Minervois [Claude Aveline], Le
Temps mort (London: 1945) and Vercors, La Marche à l’étoile (London: 1945). The
activity of the publishing house is outlined by Ethel Tolansky, see ‘Les Cahiers du
silence’ in Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology, ed. Roger Kedward
and Roger Austin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 222–31 and on Minuit see, Jacques
Debû-Bridel, Les Éditions de minuit: Historique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1945)
and Louis Parrot, L’Intelligence en guerre (Paris: Castor Astral, 1990), 177–86.

41 M. Schumann, La voix du couvre-feu: cent allocutions de celui qui fait le porte-parole
du Général de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 1964), 268–70 (broadcast 28 November 1943).

42 Dedication in Les Cahiers du Silence 1, cited in Tolansky, ‘Les Cahiers du silence’,
230.

43 Louis Parrot, L’Intelligence en guerre (Paris: Castor Astral, 1990), 210–11.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 69

Deux royaumes, soit, mais presque un seul pays.
Il est des liens que ne peut rompre aucun coup d’épée: ceux de l’esprit.
L’histoire de la pensée et de la civilisation dépasse étrangement celle des batailles;
c’est elle qui fait les nations.44

Finding equivalence in the domain of ideas in a shared space of intellectual
sympathy underwrote several projects that sought to promote French cul-
ture in Britain. Publication of Denis Saurat’s series of BBC Home Service
talks and Roland Penrose’s assessment of French intellectual resistance
bookend the period of Occupation in their consideration of ‘The Spirit
of France’ in the former, and the ‘Service of the People’ in the latter.45 In
a specifically musical context, it was the principle of exchange that was
privileged in the planning by Edward Clark and Elisabeth Lutyens of their
Festival scheduled for June and July 1940 and in a series of Concerts de
Musique Française organised by the Free French in London.46

The Festival of English and French Music and Concerts de
Musique française

Composer, Elisabeth Lutyens and her husband, Edward Clark, who had pio-
neered so much of the ultra-modern programming at the BBC previously,
set about organising an ambitious Festival of English and French Music
under the auspices of the Association of British Musicians Ltd, the London
Philharmonic Orchestra and their commercial arm, Musical Culture Ltd,

44 Jacques Debû-Bridel [Argonne], Angleterre: d’Alcun à Huxley (Paris: Éditions de
Minuit, 1943), 24.

45 Denis Saurat, The Spirit of France (London: Dent, 1940), and Roland Penrose, In the
Service of the People (Au service du peuple en armes) (London: Heinemann, 1945).

46 See Nigel Simeone, French Music in Wartime London: The Festival of English and
French Music and the Concerts de musique française (Bangor: Bangor Monographs
in Musicology, 2005), also M. and S. Hughes, A Pilgrim Soul: The Life and Work of 
Elisabeth Lutyens (London: Michael Joseph, 1989).

70 Chapter 3
in collaboration with the Association française d’action artistique; with the
French Ambassador, Duf f Cooper, as the festival’s distinguished patron.
Four concerts were scheduled at the Queen’s Hall on Tuesdays and six
chamber concerts at the National Gallery on Wednesdays and Fridays
from 18 June to 9 July 1940.

The Association of British Musicians had been established as a non-
profit making Society in January 1939, chaired by William Walton, and its
stated aims were to promote ventures that would provide employment for
British musicians and give the music-loving public greater opportunity to
enjoy concerts. Seeking out, in part, a niche in the London music-making
scene as well as reacting to the political situation, the Council considered
that a ‘Festival of English and French Music, expressing the rapproche-
ment of English and French musicians, [met] such a need at the present
time’.47 The venture had been proposed as one of the initial projects for
the Association of British Musicians Ltd at their second meeting on 23
February 1940.48 Advice was sought from T.J. Guéritte, the founder of 
the Anglo-French Music Society, and the company sought to obtain addi-
tional support from the BBC through them broadcasting as many concerts
as possible. By the sixth meeting on 18 April 1940 draft programmes had
been prepared for four orchestral concerts at the Queen’s Hall and six
chamber concerts at the National Gallery. Joining forces with the London
Philharmonic Orchestra as promoters secured the orchestra sole right
to perform in the four orchestral concerts and conducting, in the spirit
of the event, was to be shared by two dif ferent English conductors and
two French ones.49 Of course the mythical significance of 18 June 1940
was unforeseen, and the Festival opened nevertheless, minus its French

47 Programme for ‘A Festival of English & French Music 1940’, papers of the Edward
Clark archive, Northwestern University Music Library. Thanks to Jenny Doctor for
providing me with copies of this material.

48 ABM Minutes of the Second Meeting of the Members of the Council, London,
23 February 1940, chair William Walton. Edward Clark Archive, Northwestern
University Music Library.

49 ABM Minutes of 4 April 1940, 18 April 1940 and 7 May 1940. Edward Clark Archive,
Northwestern University Music Library.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 71

conductor, Philippe Gaubert and pianist, Marguerite Long replaced at
short notice by Basil Cameron and Clif ford Curzon. The Prime Minister’s
afternoon speech concerning France was replayed to the audience during
the interval. The festival lasted for just two more concerts at the National
Gallery on 19 and 21 June before being abandoned altogether.50 Edward
Dent’s programme note which accompanied the last concert, featuring
Maggie Teyte singing Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’Eté and songs by Duparc with
Constant Lambert conducting emphasised less the role of the festival as
a manifestation of political solidarity, which he deemed ‘superf luous’, but
on correcting the lack of ‘public recognition and admiration’ that French
music is due in England:

We belated barbarians on the outer edge of Europe had successively turned from
France to the Netherlands, thence to Italy and again to Germany as the central source
of music; we know now that it is our duty to go back and sit at the feet of France
again, to learn not only gaiety – as Stanford used to send his most serious pupils to
study Délibes – but clarity, style and craftsmanship from ‘our lively neighbours’ as
Dickens called them. Yet France has far more to teach us than that; for it is the France
of Rameau, Berlioz, D’Indy, Ravel and Roussel that has set before us the greatest
examples of austerity, dignity and nobility.51

Dent’s remarks were picked up by Wagner scholar, Ernest Newman, writing
in the Sunday Times following the termination of the festival, expressed in
the somewhat modified terms of ‘getting the plain man’ to realise things
– in particular, that ‘even the German masterpieces do not exhaust the
possibilities of music’.52 Although, no one was to ‘be foolish enough to
imagine that it is his patriotic duty to try to admire French music or English
music in general more than he used to do merely because we are at war
with Germany’. Indeed, the plain man once more, ‘however hypnotised he

50 Programmes were to have included the British premiere of Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane
suite (scheduled for 9 July 1940) and the world premiere of Milhaud’s arrangement
of Scaramouche for Saxophone and Orchestra.

51 Edward Dent, ‘The Festival of English and French Music’ programme note 21 June
1940, 4, Edward Clark Archive, Northwestern University Music Library.

52 Ernest Newman, ‘Anglo-French Festival’, The Sunday Times (23 June 1940), [n.p.].

72 Chapter 3
may have been in the past by the great German spellbinders, should real-
ise that he himself contributed to that hypnotism by taking far too much
for granted in his too facile admirations’.53 Even though the festival had
ground to a halt – financial support withered to an extent that continu-
ing without the collaboration of French musicians was impossible – its
ambition brought Anglo-French musical discourse into unusually open
forum. While the commentators played down the festival’s role in fostering
political solidarity with France as they did the model of setting up French
music in direct contrast to that of Germany, imparting, in Newman’s case,
some of the blame on the ‘plain man’ and not the critic, there was clearly
an ideological subtext operating in the conception of the festival in which
cultural solidarity was central.

In the absence of any possibility of overt exchange between French and
British musicians, cultural solidarity in a musical form was maintained by
those who remained in or had escaped to London during the war from 1942
onwards in an extensive series of Concerts de musique française. Organised
by Felix Aprahamian at the invitation of the Free French government in
collaboration with Tony Mayer, the series ran for 113 concerts finishing in
1967.54 The Concerts were mainly held at the Wigmore Hall and in spite
of low commercial success attracted some of the finest artists to participate
in them such as Maggie Teyte, Gerald Moore, Benjamin Britten, and horn
player Dennis Brain. An anecdote recounted by Aprahamian was of his
witnessing the elderly Princesse de Polignac, exiled in London, queuing to
hear performances of Fauré mélodies that she herself had commissioned
from the composer.55 Opening on the symbolic date of 18 June 1942, the
first two concerts presented parallel programmes of Ravel and Debussy

53 Ibid.
54 See Nigel Simeone, French Music in Wartime London: The Festival of English and

French Music and the Concerts de Musique française (Bangor: Bangor Monographs
in Musicology, 2005), 15.
55 The concert was on 20 September 1943 where Swiss soprano Sophie Wyss sang a selec-
tion of Fauré’s Mélodies de Venise, settings of Verlaine’s Ariettes oubliées. Winaretta
Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865–1942), died just a few weeks after the
concert on 25 November 1942. Ibid., 17.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 73

on 25 June, the twin architects of French musical modernism. The two
concerts presented the respective string quartets, a selection of mélodies, a
solo work and a chamber sonata. Gaston Richer, a baritone at the Opéra-
Comique had arrived with the Dunkirk evacuation and Maggie Teyte
who had studied the role of Mélisande with Debussy in 1907 mirrored
each other’s programmes of French song. Although larger scale orchestral
concerts took place, the emphasis was predominantly on chamber works in
which works that set texts were particularly important. Indeed, the renewed
interest chamber music, which had long been erroneously associated with
unpopular modern music was cited by Edwin Evans as being an ‘événement
remarquable’, spurred on by the more famous and more numerous National
Gallery lunchtime concerts organised by Myra Hess.56 In supporting a con-
cert series, the Free French movement overtly demonstrated its commitment
to intellectual and cultural activity as an expression of the trope of spiritual
resistance. It involved constructing a form of cultural memory that, as we
shall see, was familiar to BBC programme makers in which the continu-
ity of the spirit of France framed the location of shared encounter. This
was an encounter that was distanced from the Nazi-compromised cultural
project of Pétainism through concentration on the cosmopolitan collabo-
rations between poets and musicians in concerts that concentrated on the
works of Ravel and Les Six, and Milhaud, in particular.57 Yet familiarity to
London audiences was maintained by showcasing contemporary French
music in a manner that reinforced the cultural links between France and
Britain particularly by engaging performers who had significant links to
France through training or experience. Since the concert season finished
before Bastille Day commemorations in July, there is no specific record
of how the symbolism of the day might have been marked in the context
of this chamber music programme series. However, the longevity of the

56 Edwin Evans, ‘La vie musicale en Angleterre pendant la guerre’ La France libre 9 (15
Jan. 1945), 198.

57 On 7 February 1943, there was a concert entitled ‘Baudelaire et la musique française’
and on 13 and 20 September 1943, concerts oriented about Verlaine. The concert of
24 September 1942 was devoted to Les Six. See listings in Simeone, French Music in
Wartime London.

74 Chapter 3
series and its eventual role of renewing contact with French culture once
normal service was resumed following the liberation, both attest to the
cultural significance of music within the political discourses of the Free
French movement in London and the desire of that movement to make
its presence felt in the musical activity of its hosting capital.

So, having mapped some of the ways in which Anglo-French cultural
memory was being constructed through music in the concert hall and
examined in some detail the nature of the Feature programme as a genre,
we can now turn to the BBC’s programming on 14 July. A comparison
of the dif ferences between Bastille Day as commemorated in Occupied
France and the messages conveyed by the BBC’s broadcasts into France
leads us then to look at the Home Service presentation of the same enact-
ing a cultural encounter in its diverse means of translation.

Le Quatorze Juillet

Bastille Day is simultaneously the commemoration of the storming of the
prison in 1789 and the first ceremonial marking of the event at the fête de la
Fédération that took place on the Champs de mars on 14 July 1790. It was
only established as a national holiday from 1880 onwards. Marked typically
by two forms of celebration, the day combines the of ficial military parades
of the morning and the relaxing entertainment of ‘distractions populaires’
in the afternoon. Christian Almavi outlines the dif fering interpretations
of the event through the years as a lieu de mémoire defined on the one
hand by a historical aspect – the foundation myth of the storming of the
Bastille ‘qui dramatise la traditionnelle légende noire d’une Bastille truf fée
de cachots et d’ef froyables instruments de torture réservés au peuple’ –
and, on the other, a symbolic one: ‘l’aurore de la liberté’.58 The dif ferent
claims on Bastille Day, from the Front populaire in 1936, the sombre 150th

58 Amalvi, ‘Le 14-Juillet, du Dies iræ à Jour de fête’, 430.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 75

anniversary of the Revolution in 1939, the hiatus of metropolitan com-
memoration during the Occupation through to the Gaullist reclaim of 1945
are in dif ferent ways expressed according to these two poles of historical
myth and abstract symbolism dependent often on which might achieve
the greatest unity.

Attempting to celebrate liberté and the reclaim of power by the people
in the context of Nazi occupation was always going to involve some com-
promises. The decision by interior minister, Adrien Marquet in 1940 to
reframe the commemorations but not to ignore them altogether trans-
formed Bastille Day into a period of ref lection more in keeping with the
ceremonial activity of the now prohibited Armistice Day: the tricolore
f lew at half-mast, there was a minute’s silence, the death knell tolled during
the sombre parades where the fallen, ‘dignes successeurs des héros de la
Grande Guerre’ would be remembered.59 Until 1942, the Fête nationale
in its new guise as a day of mourning ef fectively prohibited any of the
divertissement and spectacle that had traditionally formed part of the
Bastille Day commemorations and in a surprising move, the church also
began to be involved. Almavi showed how at the initial version of the Fête
national on 14 July 1880, participants in the banquet de Mont, in the Loir
et Cher, incanted strange republican ‘prayers’ glossing the Pater noster with
an evocation of the ‘trinité démocratique’; that substituted ‘liberté’ for
Mary in the Ave Maria: ‘je vous salue, ô Liberté chérie’. For an intrinsically
secular event to appropriate or even parody religious texts in the evoca-
tion of Republican principles is one thing, but to incorporate a religious
ceremony into a state day actively contradicted foundation principles and
marked the full transition of the 14 Juillet from a festive national holiday
to a sombre mass for the dead. Nazi culture chief, Rosenberg, was quoted
in The Times on 15 July 1940, as saying: ‘the French Revolution of 1789 has
been buried in Vichy by the French themselves. Whatever the motives,
the present decision of the French parliament means the collapse of the

59 Rosamonde Sanson, Les 14 Juillet (1789–1975): Fête et conscience nationale (Paris:
Flammarion, 1976), 127. Marquet was named interior minister from 27 June 1940
and replaced on 6 Sept. 1940 by Marcel Peyrouton.

76 Chapter 3
entire position which France had won for herself in Europe in the politi-
cal and intellectual realm.’60 Similarly, the 14 Juillet was appropriated to
celebrate the revolution of the eighteenth century that paved the way for
the National Socialist revolution of the twentieth century.61 French voices
from London had also called for sombre and dignified ref lection on 14
July, but theirs was combined with a call for resistance reconfiguring the
commemoration as a day of promise.

In sharp contrast to Pétain’s sombre ‘messe de morts’, then, the BBC
broadcasts into France as early as 1940 demonstrated a refusal ‘de porter
ce deuil tromper’ (1).62 Concentrating on the presenter’s own member-
ship of an exiled community: ‘Nous sommes séparés de vous, séparés de
nos femmes, de nos enfants, de nos amis – de nos maisons et de nos routes
et de notre ciel de France’ (1), a thirty-minute feature recreated a typical
14 Juillet complete with descriptions of the parades, the banquets and the
‘discours of ficiels, qui parfois nous faisaient rire ou nous irritaient’ (4).
Evoking a shared sense of loss, the feature emphasised that although the
BBC voices from London were missing the commemorations because of 
their geographical displacement, their listeners were also deprived of the
annual celebration because of the armistice.

At least a third of the programme was devoted to the re-creation of 
the final scene of Romain Rolland’s œuvre populaire, Le 14 Juillet, as the
‘représentation populaire gratuite’ which according to the script tradi-
tionally took place in a theatre such as the Champs-Élysées or the Sarah
Bernhardt. In fact the evocation is of the celebrated 1936 performance at
the Alhambra, which had set design by Picasso and music for the play had
been provided through a collective ef fort by Auric, Ibert, Milhaud, Roussel,

60 BBC WAC R19/395 Entertainment/Fourteenth of July/1941–1945, press cutting,
The Times (15 July 1940).

61 A. Rapp ‘Le 14 juillet’, Parizer Zeiting (14 July 1941) quoted in Sanson, Les 14 Juillet,
128.

62 BBC WAC Overseas Scripts/French Scripts 14 July 1940, Jacques Duchesne ‘Quatorze
Juillet Feature Programme’ and subsequent references.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 77

Kœchlin, Honegger and Lazarus.63 The resurrection of Rolland’s piece had
been in the spirit of the Front populaire’s desire to make culture (and music)
simultaneously savante and populaire as well as appropriating revolutionary
imagery for its own political means.64 Its use by the BBC, here, concentrates
on the storming of the Bastille and sets up the République’s devise against
Vichy’s ‘mots froids qui ne sont portée par aucune inspiration’ (7) all the
while being assessed through the bewildered gaze of exile:

Sans y apporter d’esprit parti, on tâche de comprendre; on se dit: ‘Mais ceci ne se
passe pas dans mon pays. Ce n’est pas possible. Je sais que nous avions besoin de
remettre de la vie, de l’ordre dans les af faires de ce pays; il y avait de l’usure, il y avait
du relâchement et de l’instabilité. Nous savions qu’un changement était nécessaire,
nous le souhaitons ce changement.
   Mais je suis certain que la majorité d’entre vous n’a pas souhaité ce changement-là
qu’on veut vous imposer maintenant. Sans vous demander votre avis! sans nous le
demander à nous les exilés volontaires.’ (7)

The BBC sought to avoid conf licting ideologies and political movements
by framing their interpretation of Bastille Day with the history of the
commemoration rather than concentrating upon its symbolism. Tracing
a line of continuity from 1789 and 1790 through to 1880 and 1919, in
tandem with a message from Anthony Eden, the programmes invoked
hope of triumph over oppression: ‘Le 14 juillet est l’anniversaire du jour
où la France se libérait des tyrannies du passé. Aujourd’hui, nous célébrons
cet anniversaire dans l’espoir et la certitude que la France se libérera des
tyrannies du présent.’65 It was the singing of the Marseillaise, in contrast
to the all-pervasive Vichy anthem, ‘Maréchal, nous voilà’ that along with

63 See Christopher Moore, ‘Le Quatorze Juillet: modernisme populaire sous le Front
populaire’, in Musique et Modernité en France, ed. Sylvain Caron, François de Médicis
and Michel Duchesneau (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2006),
363–87.

64 Charles Kœchlin wrote an article about Le 14 Juillet entitled ‘Musique savante … et
populaire’, L’Humanité (6 Sept. 1936). See Robert Orledge, Charles Kœchlin (1867–
1950): His Life and Works (Chur: Harwood, 1989), 174–5.

65 Sanson, Les 14 Juillet, 136.

78 Chapter 3
songs such as ‘Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et Lorraine’, inspired a collective
sense of ‘incantatory exorcism’.66

In the years that followed, the BBC’s Bastille Day programming into
France tentatively encouraged listeners to take action. In the ‘Quart d’heure
du soir’ of 14 July 1941, Bonifas suggested that people wear cocardes: ‘en
étof fe, en papier, au crayon ou à la craie de couleurs, les cocardes et les
drapeaux … marqueront le désir des Français de s’unir par leur libération’.67
Jean Guéhenno, in his Journal des années noires witnessed these small acts
of resistance as the crowds gathered on the streets of Paris in the afternoon.
He observed ‘que d’ingéniosité pour rassembler de quelque manière les
trois couleurs interdites’ and how in looking for the subtle signs of pro-
test between each other led to the creation of ‘la joie d’une communion’.68
Programming in 1941 also included a feature by André Labarthe that
reprised the familiar trope of apostrophising occupied Europe as the
Bastille; a prison of ‘esprits libres’ whose storming originally had been ‘un
geste juvénil, un geste de pureté’ and that was now once again imminent.69
By 1942, the London-inspired demonstrations in France were amplified,
in contrast to the increasingly subdued metropolitan commemorations.
Faith in Pétain had been dealt crucial blows by the invasion of the Zone
non-occupée and Laval’s speech of 22 June 1942 in which he declared his
desire for a German victory combined with his role as an architect in the
implementation of the Service de Travail Obligatoire (STO), all of which
raised significant support for the resistance movement at the broadest level.
A tract airdropped into France at dawn of Bastille Day repeated the text
of a radio talk that had been broadcast in the preceding days. It called for
action on a much larger scale than on previous occasions as a precursor for
the direct action of overthrowing the occupation: ‘Le 14 juillet vous of fre

66 Ibid.
67 BBC WAC Overseas Scripts/French Scripts 14 July 1941, Bonifas, ‘Quart d’heure

du soir’.
68 Jean Guéhenno, Journal des années noires (1940–1944) (Paris: Gallimard, 1947),

132.
69 BBC WAC Overseas Scripts/French Scripts 14 July 1941, André Labarthe, ‘Feature

programme’, 1.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 79

à tous l’occasion de manifester vos sentiments en attendant d’imposer vos
volontés. C’est la fête de la Patrie, c’est la fête de la Liberté. Vous la célé-
brerez avec plus de ferveur que jamais, à l’heure où la patrie est vendue et
la liberté supprimée.’70

Far from the subtle cocardes of 1941, people were instructed to dem-
onstrate by gathering at an appointed hour in places or streets that carried
the name République and singing the Marseillaise in the name of national
duty: ‘Manifester le 14 juillet est un devoir national.’71 By the fourth mani-
festation of Bastille Day in London, French Service programming had set
in to established routines. Programmes were longer and more bombastic
in character, emphasis was placed on French imperial territory freed from
Occupation and allied successes were highlighted. The performativity of 
the BBC programmes resulted in acts that were public demonstrations
of defiance rather than anything that could be termed a ‘fête’, as Sanson
rightly observes.72

How these programmes contrast with the presentation of the French
situation to domestic listeners is demonstrated newr with particular focus
on 14 July 1943 when the entire evening on both Home and Forces net-
works was dedicated to programmes that in dif ferent ways communicated
a translated form of Frenchness to listeners. Such a highly mediated cul-
tural encounter is marked by the desire to appropriate to an extent, but in
such a way that keeps the foreignness intact. This form of programming
entailed the construction of a form of Anglo-French cultural memory that
concentrated on comparable, shared points of common interest weaving
together unifying notions of Frenchness and Britishness yet distinguished
by points of alterity framed as independence.

70 Quatorze juillet 1942, Publications de la France combattante 51, quoted in Sanson, Les
14 Juillet, 134.

71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., 138.

80 Chapter 3

BBC Features for Home Broadcasting on 14 July

In many respects the BBC’s presentation of Bastille Day programming to
its home audiences – remembering that such broadcasts could be overheard
in northern Europe – follows a similar trajectory as the two models of ‘14
Juillet’ described by Sanson above. While initially receiving no specific
focus in July 1940, it was subsequently decided between the Free French,
the Foreign Of fice and the BBC that Bastille Day should be marked in a sig-
nificant way. A feature entitled ‘The Fourteenth of July’ was commissioned
for Home Service broadcast at 21.20 on 14 July 1941 from André Savignon,
who requested to broadcast under the pseudonym, André Varinguien, if 
transmitted into France.73 The basic conceit of the feature was very simple,
an Englishman had three Frenchmen as his guests. He asks them why they
appear sad and they explain that it is 14 July, which would traditionally have
been a happy day at home and they then explain in a series of scenes what
the day means to them.74 On 2 July 1941, Robert Kemp asked Savignon for
two more scenes for the feature. One involved three Bretons meeting in a
bistrot in Paris and speaking of their memories of Brittany and the other
was a scene in which people from the Midi discussed their region’s wine.
The uses of music in this feature deliberately enhanced the simplicity of the
programme’s initiative, evoking the Revolution, the military and French
provinces in popular song as the Frenchmen reminisced of their Bastille
Days in the recent past. One of the most ef fective and interesting means
of communicating the relevance of the Revolution was to stage scenes
where it was necessary to talk about street names or métro stations. So the

73 André Savignon’s 1912 novel Les filles de la pluie won the Prix Goncourt. His wartime
experience in Britain is described in an account of the bombing of the South-West,
Le feu du ciel, Plymouth (1939–1941), un Français témoin de la Bataille d’Angleterre
and his autobiographical account Dans ma prison de Londres (1939–1946) (Brussels:
Le racisme paneuropéen, 1962). He is listed as an ‘anti-Gaullist, anti-Sémite’ in the
fichiers of the BDIC at Nanterre.

74 BBC WAC R19/395: Entertainment/Fourteenth of July/1941–1945. Memo from
Robert Kemp to Dr Ara, ‘Script of le 14 Juillet’ (4 July 1941).

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 81

character, Henri, describes his enthusiasm when a boy at strolling Parisian
streets and seeing the names of his Republican heroes when trying to find
the rue de la Bastille – rue Carnot, rue Danton, la Place de Valmy, avenue
de la République or when taking the métro to Bastille witnesses intermedi-
ary stops at the Gare d’Austerlitz and Nation: ‘For a Parisian who knows
his history, a ride or better a walk across the capital is like an open book in
which the story of the revolution is unfolded.’75

Example 1: List of  Music for ‘The Fourteenth of  July’ Feature (1941) by
E. Mesens

1. La Carmagnole – danse révolutionnaire. La mélodie est d’origine italienne
(Carmagnola).

(a) Il existe un disque (Columbia, je crois) intitulé ‘La Rosière Républicaine’ –
suite de ballet de Grétry – qui se termine par ‘La Carmagnole’ mêlée au
chant ‘Ça ira’:: Musique de l’époque.

(b) Il existe peut-être un arrangement d’orchestre à Bristol.
2. Ça ira – chant de la révolution (Voir 1(a)).
3. Le Chant du Départ – Méhul
4. Le Chant des Victoires – Méhul
5. La Marseillaise – Rouget de Lisle
6. Dans les fêtes de quartier, le 14 juillet, le peuple de Paris chante sur les places

publiques des valses, des javas, etc.
Militaire: Toute musique comme
      ‘Entre Sambre et Meuse’ – Robert Planquette
      ‘La Madelon’
      ‘La Marche Lorraine’ – Louis Ganne
      ‘Le Rêve passé …’ – Helmer et Krier
Danses de province     Bretagne, Auvergne
(Chansons populaires du Pays de France – J.B. Weckerlin, publisher – Heugel –
Paris, Au Ménestrel, 1903).
Other music: ‘Boom’ – Charles Trenet and ‘Plaisir d’amour’ sung by Yvonne
Printemps.

75 BBC WAC R19/395: Entertainment/Fourteenth of July/1941–1945. Script for ‘The
Fourteenth of July’ by André Savignon and translated by Robert Kem.

82 Chapter 3
In 1942, Robert Kemp, again in collaboration with the French Section
produced a feature entitled ‘The Mirror of France’ broadcast at 2015 of
which no script remains. The following year marked a significant change
in the extent and style of Bastille Day commemoration. Following the Nazi
failures at the Eastern Front and at the battle of Stalingrad the tide of the
war had changed and so in 1943 an entire ‘special night’ of programmes
were produced, entitled ‘In Honour of France’; in 1944, six weeks after the
allied invasion had begun a Home Service feature celebrated the ‘Rebirth
of France’ when the staf f of the BBC French Service broadcast to Great
Britain from France itself.

In Honour of France: 14 July 1943

The broad project behind the French Night of 1943 was to rehabilitate the
concept of France as an ally in the eyes of the British public. The source
for this directive was the Foreign Of fice who from 1941 had been call-
ing on the BBC to do what they could to stem anti-French feeling in the
domestic population fostering what in their of ficial terminology was ‘non-
recriminatory sympathetic understanding’.76 Certain sections of British
society, particularly former soldiers of the First World War, had expressed
sentiments in relation to France that ‘she had let us down’.77 Accordingly,
the BBC sought to present a translation of France and French culture that
would propagate sympathy to and solidarity with a beleaguered ally – a
translation that aimed to bring ‘the French and British to a real and last-
ing understanding of each other’.78 The ultimate aim of the programming

76 BBC WAC R19/399/2 Letter from Andrew Stewart (MOI) to Moray McClaran
(24 Jan. 1941).

77 BBC WAC R9/1/3 Audience Research Bulletin 150 ( July 1943).
78 BBC WAC R19/395 July the Fourteenth: Special French Programmes – Revised

Layout (n.a., n.d.).

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 83

was to create a means for a government to prepare a population for the
eventual invasion of occupied Europe and to maintain or restore where
necessary allied solidarity: ‘A well publicised platform and a well-prepared
public for a statement by the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary of the
Government’s attitude to France now and in the future: by underlining in
the most vivid and ef fective way possible to radio, the contribution of the
French people, inside and outside France, to the common cause.’79

Maximising the potential of the medium of radio was achieved by
concentrating at length on a series of programmes related to France. In
an innovative move for the time this involved suspending regular sched-
ules. Fixed point listening and a regular schedules were the bedrock of 
the regulating radio timescape, so breaking the established pattern was
strictly reserved for deliberate emphasis and ef fect, as explained in the
BBC handbook:

One of the problems of the broadcasting showman is how to make an outstanding
impression – a real peak in the endless succession of broadcast programmes. The
Special Night was the answer that evolved in 1943. It had one quality rare in broad-
casting, namely rarity itself. It was used sparingly and only when the justification for
its use was clear. Who could deny the rightness of dedicating, in 1943, a complete
evening of programmes to the Royal Air Force, to the workers of  Britain, to the
Quatorze Juillet of France, and to the people and armies of Russia?80

So, on 14 July 1943, the entire national broadcasting network was dedi-
cated (the only exception wad news information broadcasts) from 19.30
to 23.30 to special programmes marking the French national day. Mainly
divided between the two national Home and Forces services, two plenary
programmes at the ‘fixed points’, which is to say the key moments when
the broadcaster expected most people to be listening, brought the two
networks together at the opening of the sequence at 19.30, made up of an
introduction and a programme of the ‘Songs of the Soldiers of France’ and
again 21.25 where two testimonial talks by servicemen, in the army and air-

79 BBC WAC R19/395 July the Fourteenth: Special French Programmes – Revised
Layout (n.a., n.d.).

80 BBC Yearbook 1944, 48.

84 Chapter 3
force, acted as an invitation to listen to a documentary feature entitled ‘The
French Fight on’, concerned with metropolitan resistance and resistance
movements elsewhere in the French empire. The Radio Times scheduled
the programmes with the following text:

On July the Fourteenth, 1789, the Bastille, symbol of tyranny, fell to the Revolutionary
citizens of Paris. This date was adopted by the French people as their Fête nationale.
In peace, this is an occasion for mass celebrations throughout France. Since 1939
there has been no of ficial celebration of July the Fourteenth. The Nazis have ruth-
lessly suppressed all observance of the spirit of the Republic. In 1943, on the eve of 
liberation, the BBC honours the day in the name of the people of France. Tonight’s
programmes mirror the unbroken will of the French people under the present oppres-
sion, and the undying glories of French civilisation.81

In its mediation of the political objectives outlined by the Foreign Of fice,
the BBC defined distinct voices designated to participate in the counter-
point of ideas that ran through the evening. A substantial committee had
been brought together to discuss the programming that included Harold
Nicolson, Pierre Maillaud, Professor Brogan, Francis Chagrin, Col. Lewis
Gielgud (of the PWE French Section), members of the BBC French Service
and representatives from Music, Variety, Talks and Features Departments.82
The British voice was representative of the listener and charged with express-
ing ‘the doubts, scepticisms and questions’ this constituency was alleged to
have; the French voice would then ‘explain the French attitude to the points
raised’ and finally the impartiality of the pedagogic BBC voice would ‘point
the relevance of the particular programme to be performed’.83 Aspects of 
this tripartite discourse were then illustrated, augmented and enhanced by
musical programming both as an aspect within Feature programmes and
through the concert performance of specific works.

81 Radio Times (9 July 1943), 9–10.
82 BBC WAC R19/395: Entertainment/The Fourteenth of July, ‘July the Fourteenth:

Special French Programmes, Revised Lay-Out’, 1.
83 BBC WAC R19/395: Entertainment/The Fourteenth of July, ‘July the Fourteenth:

Special French Programmes, Revised Lay-Out’, 1.

Translating Cultural Memory in Features and ‘French Night’ at the BBC 85

Example 2: Laurence Gilliam, ‘Presentation Layout’, BBC WAC 19/395:
Entertainment / Fourteenth of July / 1941–1945

1) MARSEILLAISE
a) Announcer states idea and theme
b) Englishman wonders if it will succeed – reason being that France and England are
not natural allies, and is not emotionally moved by idea.
c) Frenchman admits this but points out the basic unity between the two counties.
He also points out that the feelings of the French have not always been on the side of 
the English.
d) Englishman admits point, but points out that as France as a whole passed out of the
war early, there is less to stir up – a feeling of sympathy for France.
e) Frenchman defends fighting ability of his countrymen. Sketches in her war history
and stresses her undying fighting spirit.
This leads to:
f ) Announcer explaining first programme –

‘SONGS OF THE SOLDIERS OF FRANCE’
a) Englishman admits great fighting spirit and ability but points out that it failed badly
in this war. They hardly fought at all, it seems to him. But what could you expect from
a country where history since 1918 was so bewildering: to an Englishman.
b) Frenchman explains reasons: He counters with the statement that the history of 
France is so dif ferent from England that the ordinary Englishman just couldn’t appreciate
the situation. The constant threat of war – enemy separated not by water, but by an
imaginary line etc. This leads to:
c) Announcer explaining next programme:
[NB: Place de la Victoire was not broadcast, a montage was transmitted instead from
previous 14 July and Variety programmes]
3. 9.25 pm:
a) Bugle calls
b) Announcer restates theme and idea of evening
c) Frenchman returns to point that even if not great sympathy for English in early stages
of war, this has completely changed and France looks to Britain for salvation.
d) Announcer, in support of this claim, calls on:
e) RAF pilot repatriated – who gives cue for:

86 Chapter 3

THE FRENCH FIGHT ON
Presentation link
a) Englishman is impressed but points out that the story of resistance stopped short –
it did not finish where France is now – with Giraud and de Gaulle quarrelling. This is
what no Englishman can understand.
b) Frenchman gives explanation – this trouble is inevitable. France has reached a stage
which all conquered countries must one day reach etc. But France is fundamentally
united in spirit. And this spirit has been built up by a great tradition.
c) Announcer uses this as a cue to explain:
Home Service:          Forces programme:
Te Deum           Songs of the People of France
5. Presentation link
a) Frenchman continues his quiet account of civilising importance of his country. This
point stressed at length.
b) Englishman admits the Frenchman’s claim that France has played and must play a
great part in the history of the world, in all aspects.
c) Announcer leads to:

THE LIVING SPIRIT OF FRANCE
6. Closing Presentation
a) The Frenchman sums up
b) The Englishman responds, and admits the necessity for full understanding, greater
sympathy, complete unity, etc.
c) The Announcer speaks to France: shows he feels fully its suf ferings. Of fers comfort.
Now stirring note is introduced and the emotion mounts quickly as the three – the
Frenchman and the Englishman and the announcer – say, in their own ways, Vive la
France!’
La Marseillaise.

Dif ferent musical genres were divided between the Home and Forces pro-
gramme. The advertised feature ‘Place de la Victoire’, a programme that was
to have illustrated the ef fects of German occupation on a French provincial