15 - British Public opinion and the Korean War: A preliminary survey

Summary

There are a number of books on the subject of the effects of the two great wars of this century on British memory, and other books have dealt with subjects such as propaganda on and deception as they concerned both the enemy and the home front. No such studies exist on the Korean war, though later conflicts involving Britain, especially Suez in 1956 and the Falklands incident of 1982, have attracted a lot of attention. This paper, while by no means the definitive study of British public opinion and the Korean war, can serve as a preliminary look at the subject, especially in the early part of the conflict.

It is a subject which has long held an interest for me. I can remember as a small child becoming aware of the world outside my immediate family on two occasions. The first was a radio report of the death of Tommy Handley, a well-known British comedian, who had come to prominence during the Second World War. This was in 1949. The next was an account, again on the radio, of a refugee column in Korea, probably in late 1950 or early 1951. I can now no longer be sure who the reporter was but, having read his accounts of the war and heard extracts from some of his broadcasts, I suspect that it was René Cutforth, who went to Korea in late 1950 as the BBC's special reporter. Interestingly enough, in the light of some of the evidence below, I have no memory of any newspaper coverage of the Korean war, though I do remember the Daily Mirror headline “Whose finger on the trigger?” used in the 1951 general election campaign.

That radio broadcast sank into my subconscious, only to be revived by going to Korea and beginning to take an interest in Korean-British relations. However, there seems to be a general lack of material to help trace British public attitudes to the Korean war. There have always been a number of assertions about what the British people thought about Korea, some of which are mentioned below, but there seems to be nothing which records private views rather than public claims. Then almost by chance, I came across a useful source of original material which, so far as I know, has never been used for Korea. This material forms part of the Mass-observation Archive at the university of Sussex.