ABSTRACT
He was a Calvinist who helped define the notion of public service broadcasting in Britain; an authoritarian with administrative power over an entire medium of communication; a visionary whose cultural legacy endured deep into this century. Few figures would seem to illustrate better the relationship between private conscience and public duty in twentieth-century Britain than John Reith, the first Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation. “Reith did not make broadcasting,” Asa Briggs later wrote, “but he did make the BBC.” The Times called him “one of the outstanding personalities of his time” and even his more hostile critics acknowledged the impact of his character and idealism upon a major new institution in Britain.1 From 1922 to 1938, Reith created a cultural mission for the BBC which later officials could emulate or mock, but not ignore.
