Presiding over the [BBC] Home News Division, and therefore responsible for setting the overall tone and content, was the domineering and ultra-conservative New Zealander, Tahu Hole. He had been appointed to the job in May 1948 by William Haley, who valued what he saw as the man's 'tremendous streak of independence'. 'I was absolutely certain that whether he did right or wrong, he would not give way to anybody inside or outside the Corporation.' It was an assessment that turned out to be all too accurate. Among Hole's most infamous decrees was the requirement that at least two reliable outside sources were required to verify the accuracy of every news story. Hole illustrated this by describing what would happen if a BBC correspondent called in with 'a news story which said that, let us say, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem had been damaged by whatever - a bomb or an earthquake'. 'If we got that from our own correspondent we wouldn't use it,' he said bluntly, 'because unless our correspondent had been right next to the Wall when it was damaged he would have got it from someone else and he might conceivably have been the victim of a hoax... We would have to wait until we had satisfied ourselves from attributable sources that it was so.' For Hole, the over-arching principle was simple: 'Accuracy at all costs.' Leonard Miall, who was now the BBC's Washington correspondent, saw things rather more negatively. "Tahu Hole's concern was that the News should never make a mistake: it didn't matter how slow it was, how dull it was, as long as it didn't make a mistake.' He remembered how in 1950 he had been among a tiny handful of reporters who had been given advance information from White House sources that there was to be a military response to North Korea's invasion of the South, yet was prevented by Hole from breaking the story. I just simply lost my temper, and I said "Well, it's no good trying to expect Correspondents to have any initiative if this is what you do".
Hole believed equally strongly that consistency was as important as accuracy, and that news could not be told properly through pictures. The ensuing conflict between his News Division and the television department at Alexandra Palace was described by one insider as 'like a battle between a school of whales and a herd of elephants... two powerful forces locked against each other'. One source of friction was Television Newsreel, which Alexandra Palace had launched back in 1948 - a short, lively magazine that pulled together brief filmed reports on sporting events, ship launches, disasters, sundry royal visits and the like. Its great strength lay in its camerawork and editing - unsurprisingly, since it was made by television's own film unit. Its ability to deal with the very latest news of the day was less striking, and this provided the excuse for Hole to make a territorial grab, insisting that News Division take charge. When the Hole-approved format, under the title of News and Newsreel, was first broadcast in 1954 the Daily Mail called it 'a mixture of the dull, trivial and ineffectual'.
Tahu Hole's tenure at the BBC did eventually come to an end - though a rather ignoble one. In 1958, the Director-General Ian Jacob shunted him sideways, putting him in overall charge of the BBC's administration and making room for Hugh Carleton Greene, who would become head of an enlarged 'News and Current Affairs' directorate. Two years later, Greene took over the top job from Jacob. 'I realised when I became Director-General that I must do something":
Tahu Hole had an appallingly corrupting effect on the characters of otherwise good people. People used to bring him in their little bouquets of flowers from their gardens to present to him as if he was some sort of heathen idol. To speak quite frankly, I have had to do with the Nazi leaders in Germany and I have never had such a sense of evil from any of them as I had from Tahu Hole.
It was a devastating assessment. And it was with the full backing of the Governors that Greene - 'like a snake striking' as one of his colleagues put it - insisted on Hole's immediate resignation.
- David Hendy, The BBC: A People's History, London, 2022, p.385-6.
See also:
Blog: Later With Jools Holland, 5 May 2011
Blog: Mock The Week, 20 February 2010
Blog: Guardian angels sung this strain, 15 September 2008
