John Reith, 1st Baron Reith

thumb|John Reith, 1st Baron Reith in 1934 John Charles Walsham Reith, 1st Baron Reith, (20 July 1889 – 16 June 1971), was a Scottish broadcasting executive who established the tradition of independent public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. In 1922, he was employed by the BBC (British Broadcasting Company Ltd.) as its general manager; in 1923 he became its managing director and in 1927 he was employed as the Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation created under a royal charter. His concept of broadcasting as a way of educating the masses marked for a long time the BBC and similar organisations around the world. Quotes If you see one minute a brother officer, laughing gallant at one's side, the next moment an unrecognisable bloody mass in a ditch, you would thank God that you could say in the words of the Shorter Catechism, "The Souls of Believers are at their death made perfect in holiness and do immediately pass into Glory." If you have stood by a hundred open graves and seen your comrades laid in that shallow bed – about two feet deep with nothing more than a sandbag over their face, and the fair hair which was once a mother's pride mingling with the clay of a foreign land – you would realise something of the necessary preparedness of war. "War and Character", address to the Presbyterian Social Union (January 1917), quoted in Ian McIntyre, The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (1993), p. 70 Broadcasting is a development with which the future must reckon and reckon seriously. Here is an instrument of almost incalculable importance in the social and political life of the community, in affairs national and international. As quoted in "The History of BBC Radio – World Radio Day", Amberley Museum He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy November, 1925 as quoted in Burton Paul, Television and Radio in the United Kingdom, University of Minnesota press, Minneapolis, 1981, p. 8 Quotes about John Reith I met Reith once, at the fortieth-anniversary dinner of the BBC in 1963. We merely shook hands, without conversation. But to be briefly in his presence was to sense the grandeur of his personality. He was an immensely impressive figure, with the face of an Old Testament prophet. Robin Day, The Grand Inquisitor (1989), pp. 169-170 Lord Reith created the B.B.C., and most mortals would consider this a suitable monument, judged simply by standards of size and importance, to quiet the naggings of pride or ambition. But not a bit of it; the seventeen years of achievement are, in Lord Reith's perspective, neutralised by the ten years of frustration that followed them, and the result is one of the most bitterly disgruntled books of reminiscence that can ever have been written by a public man. Edward Hodgkin, 'Opportunity Fails to Knock', The Spectator (25 November 1949), p. 748 A review of Into the Wind by John Reith Lord Reith's acute sense of having been hardly dealt with makes his autobiography a most uneven chronicle. Much of the first half, in particular his experiences in the First World War and in the earliest days of the B.B.C., is fascinating, but this tails off into a catalogue of all the jobs he was offered which were too small and all the jobs which were big enough but which he was never offered. The interest here is surely ephemeral. The narrative is not helped by being written in a series of short snorts, rather as though Mr. Jingle had got hold of a dictaphone, of which this is a random example: “It was decided that I should become a mechanical engineer. A mechanical engineer. I knew it was wrong; not at all mechanically minded; abhorrent the idea was.” Not a well written book; fruits of idleness; but diverting. Edward Hodgkin, 'Opportunity Fails to Knock', The Spectator (25 November 1949), p. 750 Sunday is what the lawyers call a dies non on the wireless because Sir John thinks that Bloomsbury is good for us. To him, doubtless, we also owe the flawless Oxford accents of the announcers... He speaks with the urgency of a pontiff... You too rarely hear from the admirable staff he has gathered about him. He gives the impression that the B.B.C. pivots too exclusively upon his private sense of right and wrong. We have endless sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, could not Sir John risk a communist? Can we have a discussion on birth control? Can we not hear about the Five Year Plan? I am agreeing that Sir John is a big man. But no man is ever big enough or wise enough to exercise what is practically unlimited power. He must learn that the wicked heresies of today are the sober commonplaces of tomorrow. Harold Laski (1931), quoted in Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties 1919–1940 (1963), p. 50 He has a reputation of a man of forcible character, a natural organizer, thoroughly convinced of his own powers of organization, and something of an autocrat in his dealings with his staff. The one doubt about him indeed is whether his long enjoyment of an independent command may have rendered it difficult for him to collaborate in a team. 'The Two Resignations', The Times (8 January 1940), p. 7 To his high seriousness and missionary drive was yoked an autocratic temper that imposed consistency of detail and secured compliance. 'Lord Reith's Achievement', The Times (17 June 1971), p. 15 His conception, which has been admired, studied and occasionally applied in other countries of the world, still has its home base at Broadcasting House. It is a still operative principle. The corporate personality of the BBC still gets, and will continue to get, a twitch on the thread from that angular Scots engineer, of unabashed earnestness and unbending strength, who, having survived a sniper's bullet in 1915, felt himself to be elected by Providence to do something great in the world. He did. 'Lord Reith's Achievement', The Times (17 June 1971), p. 15 External links Category:1889 births Category:1971 deaths Category:Businesspeople from Scotland