Abstract
THE traditional attitude of the British governing class to the dissemination of information has had a lot in common with the ancient public school attitude to sex. Ideally, it does not happen. If it turns out to be unavoidable, it should be carefully controlled and regulated, like some form of disease. How it is in fact done should never be mentioned in public; and if anyone goes too far and breaks the gentleman’s code of practice, he should be expelled immediately.
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Notes and Reference
See Philip M. Towle, ‘The Debate on Wartime Censorship in Britain’, in B. Bond and I. Roy (eds), War and Society, vol. I (London, 1975).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Quotation in Colin Lovelace, ‘British Press Censorship during the First World War’ in Newspaper History from the 17th Century to the Present Day, G. Boyle, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds) (London, 1978).
For the full details of how the Foreign Office did this, see Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Propaganda1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1980).
A policy exactly opposite to that advanced by the Americans, who went out of their way to feed the public appetite for information on the terrifying new discovery. For examples of the ludicrous lengths the British government was prepared to go to try to ensure atomic research was shrouded in secrecy, see M. Gowing, Independence and Deterrence (London, 1974), Vol. 2: Policy Execution, pp. 126–37. It is worth noting that once again, the comic fastidiousness was a total flop: the Russians got much more secret information from the spies Klaus Fuchs and Donald MacLean. Gowing notes that ‘the men in charge of the project – Portal and then Morgan as controllers, Cockcroft, Hinton, Penney and Perrin … believed the extreme security surrounding the project was irrational and counter productive’ (p. 134).
G. M. Thomson, The Blue Pencil Admiral (London, 1947), p. 30.
Ibid., p. 136.
Nigel West, A Matter of Trust: M15, 1945–72 (London, 1982).
See A. Protheroe’s article in the Listener, May 1982. Robert Harris, Gotcha! The Media, the Press and the Falklands Crisis (London, 1983) documents the shortening tempers and growing suspicions of mauvaise foi in detail.
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© 1984 Christopher Andrew, Robert Cecil, David Dilks, David Kahn, Ian Nish, Eunan O’Halpin, Alasdair Palmer, Harry Howe Ransom, Jürgen Rohwer, Jean Stengers, Wesley K. Wark
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Palmer, A. (1984). The History of the D-Notice Committee. In: Andrew, C., Dilks, D. (eds) The Missing Dimension. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07234-7_12
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