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GOING THEIR OWN WAYMary VipondPublished online: 19 Feb 2009.

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GOING THEIR OWN WAY

The relationship between the Canadian Radio

Broadcasting Commission and the BBC,

1933�36

Mary Vipond

The goal of this article is to demonstrate and analyse how two public broadcasters with cultural

and technical mandates to foster identity formation, the BBC in Britain and the Canadian Radio

Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) in Canada, came to terms with the fact that the British and

Canadian identities were different, and growing more so, in the 1930s. The focus is on how two

BBC officials, Malcolm Frost and Felix Greene, assessed the public broadcasting experiment in

Canada and gradually came to understand that the CRBC, while a Dominion broadcaster and

potential distributor of the Empire Service, was also a North American broadcaster striving to gain

legitimacy and credibility with Canadian listeners accustomed to the popular commercial

programming of the large American networks. It concludes with a discussion of Greene’s role in

the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the appointment of Canadian-

born BBC official Gladstone Murray as its first general manager.

KEYWORDS radio history; BBC; Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission; CRBC;

Empire Service; CBC

For all the talk of Empire unity, the Dominions always wanted to go their own way, and

control of broadcasting seemed almost to be a test case of national sovereignty. (Briggs

378�79)

The British legislation that created Canada in 1867 was entitled the ‘British North

America Act’. Until the Second World War at least, Canadians (especially English-speaking

Canadians) were pulled by the tension inherent in that term: they maintained many

links with Britain, both formal and sentimental, but at the same time participated in a

continental lifestyle more similar to their American cousins to the south than to their

British kin across the Atlantic Ocean. The interwar period particularly marked an era of

extensive debate about the nature of the Canadian identity in a British/American world as

Canada evolved to full national status within the British Commonwealth while

simultaneously becoming much more closely tied to the USA economically and culturally

(Thompson 38�57, 303�29; Berger 137�59; MacKenzie). Of course there was not, nor ever

had been, a single Canadian identity. Identities are always multiple and complex, and

always evolving. In the Canadian case there is no doubt that a significant proportion of the

population retained a sense of belonging to a ‘British World’ until after the Second World

War (Buckner; Buckner and Francis). Nevertheless, many of those involved in the discussion

in the 1920s and 1930s envisioned the development of a sense of ‘Canadianness’ that was

unique and nation-wide (Thompson 158�92). They also recognized that national identities

are created and constructed, and that among the principal agencies of national identity

formation are the media of mass communication. In the interwar period, a new medium,

Media History, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2009ISSN 1368-8804 print/1469-9729 online/09/010071�13

# 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13688800802583323

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radio, was recognized by Canadian cultural nationalists as a significant site for the

definition and promotion of the emerging Canadian identity (Prang). The struggle

to provide an institutional structure for that task was forwarded in 1932, when, after 10

years of commercially-sponsored private broadcasting a la the American model, the

Canadian government created a public service broadcaster, the Canadian Radio Broad-

casting Commission (CRBC), charged explicitly with developing a national network to link

Canadians from coast to coast and implicitly with helping to create a sense of what it

meant to be Canadian.

In the UK in the interwar years as well, radio, specifically the monopoly public service

broadcaster the BBC, became an instrument for the definition of a British identity (Scannell

and Cardiff 277�303). The Corporation also realized by the late 1920s that the new

medium could serve the purpose of imperial consolidation, a goal particularly dear to the

heart of Director-General Sir John Reith (Mansell 9, 18; Briggs 388). In December 1932, after

several years of discussion, the BBC launched its Empire Service with the powerfully

emotive King’s Christmas broadcast at almost exactly the same moment that the CRBC

formally began to function. From a transmitting station in Daventry, the BBC offered five

(later six) services to different parts of the world, particularly but not exclusively aimed at

the British colonies and Dominions. This was a short-wave service, however, and could

only be heard by those with short-wave receivers. Thus there was motivation in London to

try to make arrangements with Dominion broadcasters such as the CRBC either to pick up

and re-transmit BBC programmes over their land networks, or to persuade them to

purchase recordings of BBC programmes for network distribution.

While all at the Empire Service agreed with its general mission, there was some

debate about what types of programmes would best serve imperial purposes.1 The needs

of different parts of the Empire differed. The lonely emigrant in the middle of the desert

might be delighted with any mention of the homeland, but other listeners, particularly in

the Dominions, had much more demanding tastes by the 1930s. In the case of Canada,

most BBC officials had little concrete knowledge of the development of either Canadian

radio programmes or the Canadian identity they helped construct. They seem to have

simply assumed that the Canadian venture into public broadcasting would more or less

follow the BBC model and tended to cast themselves as advice-dispensing experts. The

goal of this article is to demonstrate and analyse how two media institutions with cultural

and technical mandates to foster identity formation came to terms with the fact that the

British and Canadian identities were different, and growing more so, in the 1930s. There

was misunderstanding and, ironically, lack of communication, at both ends, but the focus

here will be on how two BBC officials who visited Canada in the middle of the decade,

Malcolm Frost and Felix Greene, came to understand that the CRBC was not simply a

duplicate of the BBC, and that it had quite a different mandate as it attempted to become

an authoritative national � and nationalizing � public broadcasting voice in Canada.2

The CRBC

The CRBC was the product of perceived problems that had developed in Canadian

radio during the 1920s, including the poverty of stations and hence of programming, the

lack of a viable national network and the encroaching appeal of the major American radio

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networks whose popular programmes were easily accessed from across the border.3 While

there were about 80 privately-owned commercially-financed stations in Canada by the end

of the decade, networking arrangements were sporadic and ad hoc, and four stations in

the two largest cities were affiliates of NBC and CBS. Canadians had become accustomed

to American-style radio, whether from powerful US stations or from their own, and by all

accounts enjoyed it as much as Americans did.4 It seemed to some Canadian nationalists

that radio, instead of serving Canadian purposes by developing a national culture that

would foster unity and identity, was becoming, like film, an instrument for the

Americanization of Canada. In 1928 the Liberal government of Mackenzie King set up a

Royal Commission headed by banker Sir John Aird to investigate the state of Canadian

radio. The Aird Commission’s Report, issued in 1929, recommended the creation of a

monopoly public broadcaster similar to the BBC, although retaining some commercial

elements. Before the government could act on the report, however, the Depression began

and an election replaced the Liberals with a Conservative government under R.B. Bennett.

The Conservatives stalled radio reform; they had other problems on their minds, and

certainly had no desire to antagonize the private station owners who for the most part

were strongly against the Aird recommendations. The project was rescued by the intense

lobbying of a group of young nationalist activists who created the Canadian Radio League

(CRL) to fight for the public broadcasting idea. Both Alan Plaunt and Graham Spry, the

key spirits behind the CRL, had been educated at Oxford in the 1920s and had watched

the early development of the BBC with interest. They identified Americanization and

commercialization as the greatest threats to Canadian broadcasting and believed that

state ownership was the solution to both problems. Neither Plaunt nor Spry could be

described as ardently pro-Imperial; their emphasis was always on the emergence of a

sense of nationalism in Canada. But on the subject of broadcasting, they found their

model, and some allies, in Britain.

The Radio Broadcasting Act of 1932 fulfilled some but not all of the CRL’s hopes.

While it created the CRBC, it did not give it a monopoly but allowed the continued

existence of private stations. The CRBC was charged with developing the only national

network; it was also the regulator of all stations, public and private. For a variety of

reasons, including suspicions that Plaunt, Spry and their friends were too left-wing,

Bennett froze them out of appointments to the new Commission. The three men chosen

to head the new organization (in a very awkward and ultimately destructive structure)

were: Hector Charlesworth, a long-time journalist and arts critic with good Conservative

credentials, who was appointed the chairman; Thomas Maher, a French-Canadian forestry

engineer who had served as a Conservative party organizer, and who became the vice-

chairman and Quebec representative; and William Arthur Steel, an ex-army engineer with

considerable background in radio, the technical expert. With the exception of Steel’s

technical knowledge and contacts, none of them had evinced much interest in radio prior

to their appointment and none of them had much knowledge of or sympathy with the

BBC. Neither Charlesworth nor Maher had even visited Britain in the radio era. Almost from

the outset, their attitude toward the BBC was suspicious and even negative. Neither its

structure nor its programming, they believed, provided a useful model for the Canadian

situation (Vipond ‘Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission’).

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The three new Commissioners had a huge challenge to meet. They had to create

a new kind of institution on a continent where public broadcasting was virtually

unprecedented; they had to do so with very minimal financial support from the

government; and they had to do so in the face of opposition from private broadcasters

and indifference and hostility from ordinary listeners who were inclined to believe that

‘state broadcasting’ in the BBC model was antipathetic to North American freedoms

(Vipond ‘Desperately Seeking’). The Commissioners’ basic dilemma was how to inaugurate

a service that would be distinctive enough to justify their organization’s existence, but not

so different that it alienated listeners accustomed to commercial North American radio

fare.

The difficulties in the BBC�CRBC relationship manifested themselves very early. To

cut a long and tangled story short, the CRBC was very busy in its first year of existence in

getting its network set up and programmes in place. In the circumstances, it would have

made sense to use anything the Empire Service was willing to offer. The problem,

however, was that the Commissioners, especially technical expert Arthur Steel, were

convinced that poor BBC programming (whether because of faulty transmission or

unpopular content) would be worse than useless, for it would only damage the CRBC’s

nascent reputation among Canadian listeners. Moreover, the Commission had very little

money for programmes, so its officials only wanted BBC material if it was very inexpensive

or preferably free.

The attitude at the BBC was somewhat different. The Corporation’s employees in the

Empire Service did want their programmes to go around the world, particularly to the

Empire, and they did want them to be of good quality � entertaining while also serving

educational and imperial purposes. But they also wanted to retain control of the situation,

and they were not much interested in reciprocal arrangements whereby Canadian

programming would be broadcast in Britain. Initially, Empire Service officials concentrated

on promoting their short-wave broadcasts from Daventry. When the Canadians

complained about the poor quality of the transmissions, the BBC officials professed

themselves bewildered; when Steel attempted a long and complicated set of experiments

that involved a much-more-expensive option, the BBC engineers were as discouraging as

it was polite to be. In contrast to the radio personnel they worked with in the other

Dominions and in the USA, they reported, they found Steel to be ‘unpleasant’ to work

with, indeed a ‘nuisance’.5

Similar difficulties arose over attempts to send BBC programmes in transcription

form, that is, on large recorded disks that could be broadcast by the CRBC at any time it

wished. Here cost was again a prohibitive factor: on the one hand, why should British

licence-holders have to subsidize programmes they would never hear; on the other, why

would the CRBC pay for full-hour transcriptions from the BBC when it could get more

flexible and cheaper equivalents from the US networks? Moreover, like other advanced

broadcasting systems of the day, the CRBC preferred live programmes, and indeed

imposed regulations on the Canadian private stations strictly limiting the amount of

recorded material they could use. Steel became convinced that the autocratic Reith did not

care about Canadian preferences; he had ‘made up his mind that Canada will take what he

is willing to give them [sic] or nothing at all’, Steel griped.6 On the other side of the ocean,

Steel’s continuous delays and complaints led some BBC officials to conclude that he was

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simply ‘prejudice[d] against the BBC’.7 As the letters and telegrams flew back and forth, the

BBC sent a representative to Canada and the USA charged to report on conditions there

and to try to convince the Canadians to purchase BBC transcriptions. His report provides an

interesting glimpse not only into the broadcasting situation but into his perceptions of

Canadian character and worldview.

Malcolm Frost

Malcolm Frost, one of the original employees of the BBC’s Empire Service, by 1934

working for its Press (publicity) section, visited Canada and the USA in January and

February 1934. On his return to England he submitted an 18-page report on ‘Empire

Broadcasting in Canada’, most of which concerned the CRBC. From that document and his

correspondence while travelling, we can learn much about Frost’s perception of the intra-

Empire relationship, a view that was somewhat more sympathetic to the CRBC than those

of some of his colleagues back in London, but which was nevertheless not without an

unfortunate air of condescension.

Frost’s report begins with an interesting characterization of the CRBC as a

‘combination’ of the functions of the US Federal Radio Commission and a major US network

such as CBS or NBC.8 In other words, he viewed the CRBC as a North American radio system,

with little resemblance to the BBC. Moreover, he perceived the CRBC’s programmes as

American as well:

In its general programme policy the Commission has strictly followed the American

principles of production and presentation. In this respect they appear to have been

foolish, for with the lack of necessary experience and facilities, and with the limited

amount of talent available north of the border, their programmes appear of second-rate

quality to every listener who is able to tune in with ease direct to the stations of the

National Broadcasting Company and the Columbia broadcasting system. If only they had

adopted the British style, the Canadian listener would at least have been assured of an

alternative type of programme, even though the quality of production might have been

inferior. On the other hand, compared with the programmes which are broadcast by other

Dominion broadcasting organizations, the quality of programmes radiated by the

Commission is excellent. One can well appreciate why they look askance at the suggestion

that they should relay the present programmes which we radiate from the Empire Station

in Transmission 5 at their peak ‘programme hours’, particularly when they are received

with comparatively poor technical quality . . . . I am quite sure that we shall never be able

to obtain the agreement of the official broadcasting authority in Canada to relay our

programmes regularly until we can offer them programmes of such quality or novelty that

they are vastly superior to those which emanate from sources in the Dominion.

While somewhat patronizing, Frost’s support for the Canadian viewpoint seems to

have eased some of the pressure at the London end, at least for the moment. He fully

recognized and was able to explain to his superiors that the situation in Canada was

unique and that the BBC would do well to recognize that and to meet the Canadians’

needs half way. His further comments are even more interesting in terms of his growing

understanding of Canadian public opinion. The puzzle at the BBC was why the American

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networks were much more eager to pick up BBC programmes for relay than was the CRBC.

Here is Frost’s conclusion:

The answer to this is in the interest which the average American displays in European

affairs. This is exemplified by the amount of European news which is printed daily in the

average American newspaper. On the other hand, the average Canadian, somewhat

surprisedly [sic], does not display a great deal of interest in affairs which take place on

this side of the Atlantic, and one becomes only too aware in Canada of the National, or

self-centred outlook which is characteristic of all our Dominions, with the possible

exception of New Zealand. . . . [E]xcepting those people who have recently emigrated

from the mother country, the greatest interest in European programmes is displayed by

French Canadians.

Frost offered both a competitive and a psychological explanation for the

indifference or even hostility of the Commission officials toward the BBC. His analysis

concluded that NBC and CBS in the USA were so anxious to maintain good relations with

the CRBC that they offered programmes at cut-rate prices and were willing to ‘pander’ to

the ‘personal whims’ of the Commissioners. ‘You will then appreciate’, he concluded, ‘why

the members of the Commission are annoyed when they do not receive the same servile

reception to their demands from the B.B.C. as they obtain from the American companies.’

Frost also mentioned the ‘resentment’ the Commissioners had felt towards the fact that

Canadian-born BBC official Gladstone Murray had been asked by the government to

survey Canadian broadcasting in 1933, and concluded that ‘the members and staff of the

Commission . . . all suffer from an acute inferiority complex and are only too ready to react

to the slightest suggestion of criticism or interference on our part’.

Frost’s recognition of the middling quality of the programmes the BBC sent to

Canada, partially a result of the fact that they had to be produced late at night in London

in order to be heard in the evening in Canada, was significant. In fact, although he did not

mention it, the Canadian Commissioners would have been quite enthusiastic about well-

produced news and specialty programmes from London, especially those that featured

monarchical spectacle; they had no interest, however, in what the BBC tended to offer

them: either ‘long drawn-out talks without any point to them’, or folk and other light

music coupled with nostalgic commentary that the CRBC could very well produce for

itself.9 Frost urged his superiors to concentrate on creating special programmes for relay

to the CRBC. He reiterated that the Canadian case was different from other parts of the

Empire � there was sufficient high-quality material available from both the US networks

and the CRBC itself to satisfy Canadian listeners, hence they did not need routine BBC

material nearly so much. Frost also admitted that there were problems of timing

programmes and of promoting them that the BBC could well reconsider in order to attract

North American audiences.

In sum, while Frost had some sympathy with the Canadians’ position, he also had a

rather negative view of some of the personalities on the Commission, of their political

infighting and of the stubbornness that he attributed to their inferiority complex vis-a-vis

the BBC. Most importantly, Frost recognized that the position of the CRBC Commissioners

derived from a more general Canadian point of view. As the senior Dominion, Canada

already possessed a certain self-centred focus (which Frost saw as navel-gazing) and

seemed to be losing interest in the imperial connection. Close to self-supporting in many

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endeavours, including radio programming, the Dominion also had access to the vast

resources of the USA. Frost may have viewed the reliance on American-style programming

as misguided, but he recognized the facts on the ground, and realized that if the BBC

wanted to develop any significant influence in Canada it must abandon its easy

assumption that imperial loyalties would trump ingrained North American radio listening

habits. The Canadian Commissioners could not ignore those habits if they wished to gain

legitimacy in the Canadian market.

By the end of 1934, despite Frost’s visit and report, some BBC officials had more or

less given up on the CRBC. Controller Charles Carpendale wrote to C.G. Graves, Director of

Empire and Foreign Services, that the Commission had become ‘in many quarters . . . a

laughing stock’.10 ‘There is no endeavour on their part to co-operate with us, and however

much we try we get very little result.’ He went on to suggest that there probably was no

point in worrying about it, as Publicity Department head Gladstone Murray, the Canadian

who had gone over to study the CRBC a year earlier, had told him that Prime Minister

Bennett knew there were serious problems at the Commission but for various reasons

could not sack either Charlesworth or Steel, and so was just intending to let things drift

until he lost the next election and could ‘let somebody else do this job’. Murray himself

confided to his old friend Alan Plaunt of the Canadian Radio League that by the end of

1934 the combination of ‘suspicion’, ‘sullen aloofness’ and ‘intentional obstruction’ in

Ottawa had resulted in a situation where ‘relations between BBC and CRBC were

practically non-existent and it was only my being Canadian that prevented an open

split’.11

Felix Greene

In 1935 the BBC decided to appoint a North American representative to liaise with

both Canadian and American radio establishments. Felix Greene, who had previously

worked in the Talks Department, was appointed to the position that August. While

Greene’s primary responsibility was for the USA, and he was based at the Rockefeller

Center in New York, he also regularly visited CRBC headquarters in Ottawa and

programme planners in Toronto, and provided a number of useful reports on the

Canadian situation. By the time he made his first visit to Ottawa, the Conservative

government that had created the CRBC had been defeated; the new Liberal government,

again under Mackenzie King, vowed to reform the public broadcasting system. Change

was in the air, and Greene, more by coincidence than design, arrived in Ottawa at exactly

the right moment.

Greene’s first trip to the Canadian capital occurred in mid-December 1935. He

immediately began a round of meetings with various officials, politicians and other

interested parties. As a consequence of an interview with C.D. Howe, the new minister

responsible for broadcasting, the latter invited him to provide advice on the reform of

Canadian radio.12 Greene was aware that Howe had already asked for similar advice from

Reg Brophy, formerly with Canadian Marconi and now an official with NBC. He cabled the

BBC:

N.B.C.’s proposal inevitably will be largely based on commercial principles as applied in

the United States and with value of Canadian organization to the United States

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companies in mind. Is there any hope of my accepting Minister’s invitation as it would be

greatest pity if Government have before them only suggestions for reorganisation on

commercial lines, particularly as I am told Prime Minister and others are favourable public

corporation principle, if detailed plans put forward.13

He was authorized to go ahead, so he conducted a number of interviews in Ottawa and

then returned to New York to write up a report for Howe over the Christmas holidays. The

significance of this consultation cannot be overstated. It ushered in a whole new era of

closer relations between the BBC and what ultimately became, on 2 November 1936, the

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Much of what Greene wrote in this and other

reports for Howe and for his superiors in London is about the internal organization of the

Canadian public broadcaster and need not concern us here. The emphasis in my summary

of Greene’s report will be on his analysis of the underlying reasons for the tensions that

had existed between the CRBC and the BBC.

One of Greene’s key points, parallel to the observations of other BBC officials, was

summed up in a single sentence of his report:

They [the Commissioners] are unable to mobilize even the remote sympathy of their

listeners, whose general attitude is one of annoyance at having to pay for a license when

they spend the greater part of their time listening to the more virile programming from

across the border.

From the beginning, Greene was conscious of the peculiar situation in Canada, where

proximity to the USA not only provided institutional models but also audience-attracting

programmes. How then to maintain a viable public broadcaster in the Dominion, one that

would maintain the kind of contact the Empire Service wished to foster?

Greene wrote that among the people he had met in Ottawa, he had been

particularly impressed by Charles A. Bowman, editor of the Ottawa Citizen and a former

member of the Aird Commission that had recommended public broadcasting for Canada

in 1929. Greene described Bowman as ‘perhaps the best friend that the B.B.C. has in

Ottawa’, and a ‘keen and regular listener to our Empire programmes’. Greene felt that

Bowman would strongly support ‘any proposals put up for re-organizing the Canadian

broadcasting system on Public Corporation principles’ and that ‘such support would not

be unimportant’. In contrast, he had also met Commander C.P. Edwards, the long-time

head of the Radio Branch of the Department of Marine which had regulated broadcasting

from its inception until 1932, whom he characterized as ‘hostile to the B.B.C.’ and

moreover ‘against England generally’, despite (or possibly because of) the fact that he was

British-born. ‘The only time that he showed any real feeling’, Greene added, ‘was when he

talked about the patronizing and supercilious young men England as a rule sent to

Canada.’ He ruefully went on: ‘I was wondering whether he was including me in that

criticism.’ Greene correctly identified Edwards as a key figure in the situation, who not only

had the ear of Howe but had been the one to suggest requesting Brophy’s advice. ‘His

leaning towards the United States system’, Greene concluded, ‘is, to my mind, one of the

major dangers, and one which may well jeopardize any attempt at proper reform of

Canadian broadcasting.’

Greene also met with Commissioner Arthur Steel, whom he knew by reputation to

be ‘resentful against us’, but whom he also recognized as extremely able. He had heard in

advance of Steel’s reputed rudeness and aggressiveness, and he reported that he was

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subject to a display of temper when he dared to suggest that perhaps the location of the

CRBC’s new short-wave receiving station just outside Ottawa was less than ideal. ‘This was

just the kind of thing he expected from a B.B.C. official’, Steel apparently sputtered; ‘What

right did [Greene] have to criticize his judgment.’ Greene concluded that Steel’s attitude

arose ‘from nothing but an extreme sense of inferiority, aggravated now by insecurity’,

because the reorganization of Canadian broadcasting would undoubtedly cost him his job.

Aside from frank remarks about the personalities and the politics surrounding the

revamping of the Canadian broadcasting system, Greene knew after two weeks in Ottawa

that any proposals he put forward for the unity of control (i.e. monopoly) and government

funding that he assumed necessary to truly reform Canadian broadcasting along BBC lines

were bound to be rejected; the best he could hope for was a compromise. He did not

really blame those who favoured a commercial model � after all, they knew nothing

different. But that was precisely the problem. ‘I was distressed’, he concluded, ‘at the lack

of knowledge, apparent everywhere I went, about B.B.C. policy, programmes and

organization.’

I imagine that this is partly a result of misrepresentation of the B.B.C. drifting across the

border from the United States. That is only part of the cause. There is a less deliberate

cause which I cannot help feeling we might do something to prevent. I am thinking now

of criticisms of the B.B.C. arising not from prejudice or deliberate misrepresentation but

from simple ignorance. . . . These people [Steel and Edwards] matter and they should be

put right.

Greene’s proposal, which was forwarded to Howe early in January, among other

things included the suggestion that all private stations be taken over and that spot

advertising be eliminated in the long run. In a confidential letter to C.G. Graves in mid-

January 1936, Greene explained the delicacy of the situation. First, there was the danger

that his proposals would seem ‘to apply B.B.C. principles’, which would make them

‘unworkable’.14 Secondly, there was the problem that ‘the B.B.C. is considered a somewhat

stuffy organization that does not give full scope to the entertainment side of broad-

casting’. Thirdly, he had to concede that given the high cost of radio service in a country as

large as Canada and given the government’s unwillingness to pour huge amounts of

money into the public broadcaster, commercial programmes would inevitably be part of

the service ‘for a great many years to come’. He concluded by admitting that there was

virtually no chance that the private stations would be taken over by the public

broadcasting body, but with the hope that someday the Canadian system would be set

up ‘in the proper way’, by which he clearly meant following the BBC model of a non-

commercial monopoly. By the end of January, after his second visit to Ottawa, he was

feeling discouraged:

I felt once more on leaving Canada a sense of some despondency. Whatever future that

country creates for itself I cannot believe it will be a very glorious one. A collective

national will hardly seems to exist, not even in the form of national pride or confidence in

the future, such as one feels so strongly in South Africa. Canada’s strength seems sapped

by the virility of its neighbour. . . . A country ridden with petty corruption and governed

by politicians of second-rate ability, it stands querulously complaining both of unfair

American ‘influence’ and Whitehall ‘imperialism’.15

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Although deeply critical, Greene did make a valid point: in the course of struggling to

define their national identity, Canadians often fell into playing the British off against the

Americans, and into negative definitions that were more anti-American and anti-Imperial

than they were positively Canadian (MacKenzie 575). The CRBC trod the same narrow and

often negative path in its relationship with the BBC.

The rest of the story of Greene’s involvement in the reorganization of Canadian

broadcasting may be told very quickly. He was distressed when the Canadian government

decided to convene a parliamentary committee to study the situation, anticipating that

this would give the ‘private interests’ the opportunity to campaign against his proposals.16

Virtually no one in Ottawa other than Howe, Edwards and Bowman had any idea that he

had been advising the government on the bill, and all concerned (including British High

Commissioner Sir Francis Floud) wished it to remain that way. Although Greene therefore

did not testify before the committee, it came up with a proposal more or less along

the lines he had recommended, with the notable exception, as he had predicted, that no

private stations would be taken over. The new Corporation came into existence in

November, under the leadership of its new general manager, none other than former BBC

employee Gladstone Murray.

The choice of W.E. Gladstone Murray to head the CBC promised a new

rapprochement between the Canadian public broadcaster and the BBC. He was the

candidate of the revived Canadian Radio League, which had worked assiduously behind

the scenes to persuade Prime Minister King to replace the CRBC with an institution closer

to the British model. This is not to say that Alan Plaunt, the prime mover in this regard, was

an anglophile; on the contrary, his emphasis was always on the development of a distinct

Canadian identity and he was an isolationist with respect to Canadian involvement in

British foreign entanglements right up to the Second World War (Nolan 28�30, 154�57).

But he also believed that Canada’s unique character lay in its retention of certain British

institutional models. Charles Bowman, the Ottawa newspaper editor whom Greene had

described as the BBC’s ‘best friend’ in Ottawa, and who worked alongside Plaunt in the

Radio League in both 1932 and 1936, wrote a most favourable assessment of Gladstone

Murray’s capabilities:

He is no Imperialist, but truly Canadian, with the right liberal vision. . . . Some of the

efforts to discredit him have doubtless been inspired by imperialist interests. Certain

interests in London as well as in New York would much rather see someone with less

Canadian vision as executive head of the new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.17

In the view of his supporters, Murray was the right man to head the CBC for two reasons:

because he understood broadcasting at its very best, and because he understood the

mixed loyalties at the heart of the Canadian identity.

In conclusion, then, we return once again to the peculiarity of the position of

Canadian radio. Malcolm Frost was right. It was and always had been North American

radio, with all that implied. As of early 1933, when the CRBC began to function as a public

broadcaster and Canada’s only national network, and when the BBC began to pour

resources into the Empire Service, the two organizations were drawn into a relationship

with no precedent, and one that raised wider issues. The root of the difficulties lay in

complex questions about the ideas and practices that should or would guide a North

American public broadcaster. The BBC personnel believed in ‘BBC principles’, in public

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service broadcasting that provided education, illumination and some light entertainment

for a captive audience without commercial input, and in using radio to foster national and

imperial unity. But the CRBC operated in a continental marketplace; it was a very small and

inexperienced voice in an environment dominated by a private radio industry devoted

primarily to entertaining a mass audience in order to attract advertising dollars. The BBC

was intended to be the voice of British society, a society already comparatively well-

defined and well-integrated; its Empire Service was designed to promote the centre’s

imperial vision. The CRBC was charged with developing a sense of Canadian unity and

identity in a colony just on the cusp of nationhood, bordered, to use Greene’s term, by the

world’s most ‘virile’ nation.

In 1936 Gladstone Murray seemed to be the man who best understood the nuances

of the situation, particularly with respect to programming policy and public relations, but

also regarding Canada’s evolving sense of national identity. Murray’s achievements in his

first three years as general manager in expanding and consolidating the CBC were indeed

impressive. As he explained later, he had constantly to find the delicate balance between

‘establishing that I did not mean to try to make the CBC a subsidiary or puppet of the BBC’

while at the same time working hard ‘to spread the conviction that membership of the

British Commonwealth provided Canada with the best prospects of healthy progress’.18

The relationship between the two organizations improved in the late 1930s to the point

where regular exchanges of broadcasts and of personnel were instituted, and these links

expanded even further as the result of the close cooperation needed for the Royal Tour of

Canada and the USA in May 1939 and with the outbreak of war that fall. But the underlying

issue did not disappear. Canada remained tenuously balanced between the British and the

American empires, and its elites continued to place a great burden on the CBC by

demanding that it act as a principal creator of a Canadian national consciousness. Before

the war was half over Gladstone Murray was ousted from the CBC in a conflict which

admittedly was many-faceted, but which ironically included the growing conviction of

Alan Plaunt, who had lobbied so hard for Murray, that the general manager was

insufficiently attuned to Canada’s essentially North-American character, and that he was

much too pro-Imperial to be in charge of a major Canadian cultural institution (Nash 162).

Acknowledgement

I acknowledge with thanks permission from the BBC Written Archives Centre at

Caversham for quotations from material it holds.

Notes

1. Mansell (20�39) provides a good overview of the debates within the Empire Service about

both the technical and the programming choices that had to be made in this early period.

2. These reports are particularly useful because the surviving records of the CRBC do not

contain much correspondence between its staff and the BBC; it is possible that this is an

artefact of archiving choices made in the 1960s but it is more likely a sign of how marginal

to their task the Canadians believed the BBC to be. See Vipond ‘Canadian Radio

Broadcasting Commission’ 285, n.29.

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3. This section is based on the three standard academic histories of early Canadian radio:

Peers; Raboy; Vipond Listening In.

4. There were no national or ‘scientific’ audience surveys in Canada in this period, but all

contemporary commentators as well as local surveys attested to the popularity of

American radio with Canadian listeners. See Vipond ‘London Listens’.

5. C.G. Graves to Malcolm Frost, 5 Jan. 1933 [1934]. File E1/492/1, BBC Written Archives Centre

[WAC], Caversham UK. For more detail on the technical issues raised by Steel, see Vipond

‘Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission’.

6. W.A. Steel to W.E.G. Murray, 1 Mar. 1934. Steel Papers, vol. 26, file 144, Library and Archives

Canada [LAC], Ottawa.

7. Felix Greene to J.B. Clark, 29 Feb. 1936. File E5/9/1, WAC.

8. ‘Mr. Frost’s Final Report’, n.d. [spring 1934]. File E1/528/1, WAC.

9. W.A. Steel to W.E.G. Murray, 1 Mar. 1934. Steel Papers, vol. 26, file 144, LAC.

10. Charles Carpendale, Memorandum to C.G. Graves, 19 Sept. 1934. File E1/522/1, folder 1A,

WAC.

11. W.E.G. Murray to Alan Plaunt, 2 Feb. 1935. Alan Plaunt Papers, file 3-14, University of British

Columbia Library, Vancouver.

12. The following account of Greene’s activities in Ottawa is based on the report he sent to

London in late December. Felix Greene, ‘Canada’, 27 Dec. 1935. File E1/528/1, WAC.

13. Felix Greene, cable to BBC, n.d. [late Dec. 1935]. File E1/528/1, WAC.

14. Greene to Graves, 10 Jan. 1936, confidential. File E1/528/1, WAC.

15. Greene, Memo to Controller (P), ‘Canada’, 16 Jan. 1936 (completed 22 Jan. 1936). File E1/

528/1, WAC.

16. Greene to Graves, copy of cable, 20 Feb. 1936. File E1/528/1, WAC.

17. C.A. Bowman to Mackenzie King, 24 June 1936. Mackenzie King Papers, mfm C-3685,

pp. 184182-3, LAC.

18. Murray to B. Trotter, 23 Jan. 1962, attachment. CBC Papers, vol. 170, Acc. 86-87/031, LAC.

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