"BILLINGSGATE" FOR BRITAIN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 71, 1 November 1940, Page 11

"BILLINGSGATE" FOR BRITAIN

T least four German stations now prtend to be secret British broadcasting groups, writes the Diplomatic Correspondent of the "Times." Apparently the German authorities have at last become convinced that their official broadcasts in English are either boring or ridiculous. They still maintain them, but much of Goebbels’s effort now seems to be devoted to the anonymous stations. For some weeks he has been running the "New British Broadcasting Station" -a synthetic affair which specialises in being dull and out-of-date. More lately, the Germans have begun what they call the "Workers’ Challenge Station"probably a challenge to the workers to make out what the station is saying. News is giving out in what is meant to be working-class idiom: all that happens is that-with careful German precisiona schoolboy’s or a Billingsgate adjective is put with unfailing regularity in front of every noun. For the next station, the "Christian Peace Movement," the Germans turn easily fr6ém Billingsgate to blasphemy, freely quoting the Gospels to buttress Goebbels’s campaign of the moment. The singing of a hymn usually brings the programme to a close. Then there is "Radio Caledonia," which broadcasts supposedly depressing accounts of stocks, shares and savings in Great Britain-clearly with the hope of appealing to the canny Scots mind, Altogether, the day’s vapourings from the Propagandaministerium have become both duller and in worse taste than before. ‘