British Council - History

History

The impetus for what became the British Council arose in the Foreign Office during the late 1920s when the official cultural organisations of the French, Germans and Italians were being quite successful. Together with some like-minded individuals they created the "British Committee for Relations with Other Countries" in 1934. The word "committee" was quickly dropped and it became the "British Council for Relations with Other Countries". Initially the committee's work focused on two areas, support for English education abroad and promulgation of British culture through lecture tours, musical troupes and art exhibitions. The first geographic area to be targeted was the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, followed by the poorer countries in Europe and then Latin America. In 1936, the organisation's name was officially shortened to the "British Council". The council worked out of the various British consulates, but then began opening its own offices in various countries, starting with Egypt in 1938. The overseas associates of the British Council collected information about local conditions, opportunities and openness to British initiates, which information was compiled in London. These "information" functions were transferred to the newly recreated Ministry of Information in 1939 at the start of World War II.

During the war most offices in Europe and the Middle East were closed, except in neutral Sweden, Portugal and Spain. Instead, educational opportunities were provided in the refugee camps within Britain, and for Allied servicemen stationed there. In 1939 the "Resident Foreigners Division" was established to manage those services. By the end of the war there were British Council assistance centres in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Stratford-on-Avon, and Wilton in England, Edinburgh and Leith in Scotland, and Cardiff in Wales, as well as a centre for the Society for Visiting Scientists and an Allied Lawyers' Foyer. In 1940 a Royal Charter was granted to the British Council by King George VI. After the war, the British Council focused on Europe, but due to lack of funds, closed its offices in many other places. In August 1944, after the liberation of Paris, Austin Gill was sent by the council to reestablish the Paris office, which soon had tours by the Old Vic company, Julian Huxley and T. S. Eliot. As refugees returned home, about half of the inland centres were closed, but the rest undertook the new mission of providing support for foreign students and short-term visitors.

After the reconstruction efforts, funding from the Foreign Office declined, and the British Council was forced to pull out of a number of countries for political reasons, including most of Eastern Europe, China, and Persia. Overall the world-wide network deteriorated. The raison d'etre for the British Council came under attack in a series of four government review commissions which produced the Drogheda, Hill, Vosper and Duncan Reports, respectively. The British Council survived, but with a lower profile. In 1943-4, the Bland Report that emerged from a Foreign Office review of postwar intelligence needs and organisation concluded the best prospects of 'cover' for intelligence activity "would come from 'the creation of small businesses which would in fact be solely run in the interests of the SIS'; the recruitment of established British businessmen who ran their own private concerns and would 'have no-one to fear in the shape of a board of directors in London'; and 'the obtaining of cover from semi-national and often non-profit making British institutions with offices in foreign countries.' These could include British railway companies or the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Another possibility was the British Council, though it was somewhat grumpily noted that the Council had 'never been ready in the past to lend the smallest assistance to the SIS.'.

The role of British Council in Burma in 1947 came under scrutiny with release of classified documents to a BBC investigation by journalist Feargal Keane into the role of dissident British colonial officials in the assassination of the then Burmese independence leader Aung San (father of Aung San Su Kyi) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3huRoNnq2A&feature=share . The BBC programme quoted from a 1948 document sent by the Chief of Police in Rangoon to the British Ambassador stating their belief that there had been British involvement in the assassination of Aung San and his Cabinet for which one of his political opponents was hanged and that 'the go-between' had been a British Council official named in the programme.

In August 2011 a journalist from The Irish Times discovered a certificate dated 2007 issued by The British Council in Tripoli to a daughter of President Gadaffi who had previously been said to have been killed in a US raid on Gadaffi's residence in 1986. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8725024/Libya-Hana-Gaddafi-alive-and-well.html