British Information Services

The British Information Services (BIS) was the New York based information department of the British Embassy in Washington DC, an overseas post of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, London. There was also an office of the BIS in Ottawa (British Information Services (Ottawa))

The BIS aimed 'to answer the questions most frequently asked in the United States about Britain and provide up-to-date government comment on current events where Britain has a role to play'.. It appears that its services have now been taken over by the Public Affairs Team of the British Embassy in Washington DC.

History

Ronald Tree was amongst those who staffed BIS in the early 1940s. A 'connection' of the Astors and part of the Cliveden Set, 'He was born and brought up here, Winchester and all... became joint master of the Pytchley Hunt, was elected to parliament in the awakening 1930s and found Ditchley Park to live in':

Tree is proof that the Astor network (miscalled the Cliveden set) had two quite opposite sides. He and his sort were as actively and resolutely against appeasement as others among their friends, relations and hangers-on were for it. He tells here ... of the birth and growth of the wartime British Information Services in the United States as neutrality shaded into alliance: Tree was midwife -- as he was of other more voluntary transatlantic ventures bringing relief and the co-operation of men with drive and pull.

John Wheeler-Bennet was also at BIS:

The book brings back with startling vividness the political and social flavour of that world of wartime diplomacy and propaganda. With the vividness goes, paradoxically, an equivalent sense of remoteness. How vanished are the years when we stood alone, as well as those when we were at the apex of the grand alliance. Sir John's Anglo-American story begins almost in a Bertie Wooster world -- the New York of the Stork Club and the Ziegfeld Follies and the London of clubland; it persists into a wartime social whirl that can still talk of "cutting" a German diplomat "in public" and of the "kindness" of the Ritz; it ends on the sober note of the atom bomb and Labour's victory in 1945. With great skill Sir John adapts his style to the changing environment. We begin in the columns of the Tatler. We end with the dour prose of Sir John Anderson.

Two main stories dominate the book: first the narrative of Britain's cautious but tireless presentation of its claims to a sympathetic but apprehensive United States from 1939 to 1942; and the second the interweaving of British and American "political warfare" against the Reich which followed on Pearl Harbor. Both are told with vivid character-painting and a wealth of relevant anecdote. In the first narrative Sir John makes a notable contribution to the history still not fully told of the British Information Services in the Untied States. The second theme lends itself less well to narrative and personalisation, but for those who are interested it is just as significant a footnote to history.

The British Information Services office was the British Ministry of Information's administrative offices in Rockefeller Center, New York City. It worked with British Security Coordination, also housed in Rockefeller Center. According to Cull Wheeler-Bennet's role involved working closely with the covert work of BSC:

Although he had technically been employed by the British Information Service - whose head, Sir Gerald Campbell, worked "hand in glove" with Bill Stephenson - in Rockefeller Center in 1941, Wheeler-Bennet had this to say about British Security Co-ordination: "...S.O.E. had established an office in New York under the direction of Bill (later Sir William) Stephenson....I had known many of them from pre-war days.. [and] I had maintained a fairly close contact with them."

Post 1945

After the war BIS disposed of their film collection, giving them away to collector Kent D. Eastin, then 67, whose firm Blackhawk Films, Inc., was based in Davenport, Iowa,:

In 1946, Eastin acquired 50,000 British Information Service films or World War II - for the cost of freight to Davenport.

1970s

On his controversial appointment as ambassador Peter Jay

proposed a 50 per cent staff cut for the New York-based British Information Service - a move that stunned the BIS employees, who grumbled that it stemmed less from his stated desire to trim costs than from an attempt to concentrate control in his own hands. A British Cabinet committee rejects his recommendation, by a vote of 8 to 1.

This was described by Newsweek in 1978 as Jay's 'only setback, so far' Jay was however successful in removing Laurence O'Keeffe as head of the British Information Service in New York. This excited hostility in London from the conservative Party:

Conservative lawmakers Monday accused Britain's ambassador to the United States of trying to turn the government's information service in New York into a propoganda unit for his father-in-law, Prime Minister James Callaghan. A motion entitled "The Truth That is Fit To Print" was introduced in the House of Commons by a group of Tory legislators who say they plan to question Foreign Secretary David Owen about Ambassador Peter Jay's successful efforts to remove Laurence O'Keeffe as head of the British Information Service in New York... The Commons motion "deplores the removal from office of the director of the BIS New York by the prime minister's son-in-law because he O'Keeffe refuses to convert his daily digest of the British press to a pro-government propaganda medium."

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "It is not uncommon in the diplomatic service, for a variety of reasons, for people to leave their posts before completing a full tour.As to the future of the BIS itself we have recently reviewed the level of our information staff in major overseas posts . . . and this review obviously included the BIS in New York."

People

• 1945-1947 John D. Miller - director of British Information Services in the midwest, with headquarters in Chicago.
• 1947 to 1952 Frank Mitchell - headed the news division of the British Information Service in New York. He then was assigned to Los Angeles. He returned to London in 1955, and the following year was transferred to Chicago.
• 1986-91 David Snoxell (British Information Services) (Director)

Publications

• list of BIS publications on the Open Library website: British Information Services