Reith was born in Stonehaven in Scotland on 20 July 1889, the son of a strict Presbyterian minister, and trained in Glasgow as an engineer. After service in World War I during which he was severely wounded in the cheek – his 6ft-6in height having presented an easy target – he soon grew bored with engineering. In 1922, he answered an advertisement in the Morning Post for the job of general manager at the newly created commercial British Broadcasting Company. Despite knowing nothing of radio or broadcasting and not even owning a radio set, he was hired and, a year later, became managing director, working from an office little bigger than a broom cupboard.
Reith compelled broadcasting to adhere to the extremely high moral, quasi-religious standards, and he quickly identified the BBC (which became a public corporation in 1927) with the political establishment. At the same time, he also insisted on BBC operational independence from any political pressures. During the 1926 General Strike, he demonstrated how he reconciled these apparently irreconcilable differences, when he argued that, because the BBC was the people's service and the government was the people's choice, so it followed that the BBC supported the government.
Reith was determined that the BBC would 'educate, inform and entertain', with entertainment coming very much in third place. His management style, particularly as applied to broadcasting, has come to be known as 'Reithian'. According to his supporters, it is characterised by public service, high standards, probity and universality, while his critics see it as establishment-minded, élitist and overwhelmingly white and middle class.
Like his friend Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury, Reith was an ambitious, driven, sexually ambiguous Scot who was determined to use the BBC to inculcate a morally cohesive society. Also like Lang, Reith saw the monarchy as central to his campaign. The result was an alliance between the monarchy and the BBC that was almost as close and important as that between the crown and the Church of England.
On 11 December 1936, Reith personally oversaw Edward VIII's abdication broadcast. When the king accidentally knocked the table leg with his foot, the noise could be heard over the airways. Some newspapers later reported it as the sound of Reith 'slamming the door' in disgust at Edward's decision.
By the late 1930s, the systems that Reith had set up and the key people he had selected were all doing their jobs well, and he felt increasingly under-utilised. In mid-1938, as a result of a managerial coup, Reith – who, at the age of 50, was both revered and somewhat feared – was eased out as director general by the BBC's Board of Governors. They were supported by the government, which had grown tired with Reith's self-righteousness and inflexibility. After 16 years, he left the BBC, consumed by a bitterness that remained for the rest of his life.
Reith's remaining three decades were a disappointment to him and others, occupied as they were by minor cabinet posts and the top spots in a number of companies, including Imperial Airways when it became the British Overseas Airways Corporation. His strong views, his conviction that he was nearly always right and his dour personality made the postwar world difficult for him to accept and for it to accept him. In his autobiography Into the Wind (1949), he complained that he had never been 'fully stretched'. To him, his life was a failure.
He deeply disapproved of the creation of independent (commercial) television in Britain in 1954, which ended the BBC's broadcasting monopoly. In the House of Lords, he held nothing back:
... Somebody introduced Christianity into England and somebody introduced smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death. Somebody is minded now to introduce sponsored broadcasting ... Need we be ashamed of moral values, or of intellectual and ethical objectives?' It is these that are here and now at stake.
Reith died in Edinburgh on June 1971, following a fall, leaving only £75 in his will. Thirty-five years later, his daughter Marista published a biography of her father in which she claimed that Reith sympathised with the Nazis and hated Jews, had extra-marital relationships (including one with a man) and kept a hate list that he continually updated.
|
|
 John Reith – Lord Reith of Stonehaven
www.europaworld.org/issue17/johnreith121
01.htm
Concise biography of the former BBC director general.
| |
The Expense of Glory: Life of John Reith by Ian McIntyre (HarperCollins, 1993)
This biography uncovers Reith's life, using his diary, found in the BBC archives, 'which must form one of the most complete and extraordinary confessional documents of any figure in British public life in the 20th century'.
Get this book
|
 |
My Father: Reith of the BBC by Marista Leishman (St Andrew Press, 2006)
A memoir by his daughter who 'grew up in the dramatic and awkward household of Sir John Reith, where she learned a solitary self-reliance that helped her to maintain her equilibrium in the world of her mercurial father'.
Get this book
|
Channel 4 Television takes no responsibility for the content of third-party sites. |
|
