In 1914 Britain had entered the First World War almost completely unprepared for the conduct of propaganda in foreign countries. That this was not the case on the outbreak of the Second World War was largely because of developments which occurred between 1935 and 1939.

The rapid growth of the peacetime machinery during this quinquennium, from the foundation of the British Council to the creation of the Industrial Publicity Unit, has already been discussed. These organisations were, however, designed to promote Britain's prestige in a peaceful, albeit troubled, world. It did not automatically follow that they would be called upon to undertake British overseas propaganda in time of war, when an entirely different set of conditions would require different solutions. Moreover, from an organisational point of view, one of the chief lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Great War was that if inter-departmental rivalry, overlapping and inefficiency were to be avoided in any future conflict, it would be advisable to centralise the conduct of all official propaganda under one roof. As the very appointment of the Vansittart Co-ordinating Committee in 1938 revealed, the record of the peacetime agencies was not a good one in this respect. Parallel to, but quite distinct from, the expansion of the peacetime apparatus, a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence was secretly working out the details for the establishment of a Ministry of Information to take charge of all propaganda – both at home and abroad – in the event of war.

Early in 1938 British overseas propaganda was about to enter a critical phase of its development. The advancements made in the direction of national projection during the previous three years had undeniably been impressive, but despite the progress now being made by the British Council with the energetic Lord Lloyd at its helm, despite governmental approval for the inauguration of a foreign-language service by the BBC and despite the investigations of the reconstituted Kingsley Wood committee into the deficiencies which still existed in the distribution of British news abroad, there nonetheless remained much work to be done in the cause of psychological rearmament. Hitherto the tendency had been to tackle each individual part of the propaganda problem separately. The Travel Association had been set up to conduct tourist and trade propaganda and the British Council for cultural propaganda, and the BBC had agreed to broadcast news in foreign languages on behalf of the government. In this somewhat spasmodic manner, the official British machinery for conducting propaganda overseas had been gradually built up. It was, perhaps, the only way that progress in this direction could have been made in the face of at times overwhelming opposition from the more traditionally minded elements in Whitehall who could not – or would not – accept the need for such work. Yet there still remained an urgent need to approach the subject in its entirety.

Although the exact nature of the contribution made by British propaganda towards the achievement of victory in 1918 must necessarily remain the subject of historical debate, the value of propaganda as an effective instrument of warfare was nonetheless widely appreciated by contemporaries. Regardless of whether the reputation for success either in helping to attract the United States into the war on the Allied side or in bringing the Central Powers to their knees is an undeserved myth or an undervalued reality, the fact remains that many people believed (or chose to believe) that these decisive events were not unrelated to the British government's skilful employment of propaganda between 1914 and 1918. There was, after all, much profit to be made from praising the work of Wellington House or that of Crewe House. In the United States, for example, the belief that the American people had somehow been duped into involvement in 1917 by propaganda merely served to reinforce the arguments of those isolationists who advocated withdrawal from the devious machinations of the Old World. And in Germany, the testimonies of prominent enemy personalities such as Hindenburg and Ludendorff (‘we were hypnotised by the enemy propaganda as a rabbit by a snake’) were seized upon by Adolf Hitler to perpetuate the legend that the German army had not been defeated on the field of battle but had been betrayed from within following the collapse of morale at home caused by Lord Northcliffe's propaganda from Crewe House. Northcliffe was himself more modest about his achievement, being content merely to claim: ‘We have to some extent hastened the end.’

The British propaganda experiment had certainly proved an impressive lesson in improvisation.

This book is a pioneering study of a little-known aspect of British foreign policy between the wars. Essentially, it is an examination of the peacetime origins and early development of what are today loosely termed Britain's Overseas Information Services. Accordingly, the book traces the work of the Foreign Office News Department and its important press office, the commercial propaganda conducted by such organisations as the Empire Marketing Board, the Travel Association and the Industrial Publicity Unit, the foundation and rapid expansion of the British Council, and the origins of the bbc's World and External services. It is not, however, designed to provide a definitive history of Britain's world-wide propaganda activities during the twenty years of peace that followed the First World War. Nor does this book aspire to be comprehensive in its treatment of the issues it does examine. Rather, it is intended to be a preliminary investigation into those official and semi-official organisations which were established to ‘project’ Britain abroad, the reasons for their creation, and the peculiar features which characterised such work.

Despite considerable scholarly interest in this subject during the inter-war period itself, historians, at least in the United Kingdom, have only recently begun to appreciate the importance of studying propaganda and its impact upon public opinion as part of our understanding of the twentieth century. There is still a long way to go before the subject earns the credibility its significance deserves. Few textbooks or general historical surveys dealing with the period devote more than a brief mention to the British government's activities in this direction, and even then it is usually in the context of the First and Second World Wars.