John Reith, the founding director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 1922 to 1938, was aptly designated by the New York Times as “the single most dominating influence on British broadcasting.” Reith developed strong ideas about the educational and cultural public-service responsibilities of a national radio service, ideas subsequently pursued by many broadcasting systems around the world.

Reith was born the fifth son of a Scottish minister and trained in Glasgow as an engineer. After service in World War I, where he was severely wounded (his face carried the scars), and a growing boredom with engineering, he answered a 1922 advertisement for a post at the new BBC, then a commercial operation. He knew nothing of radio or broadcasting and did not even own a receiver. He was hired and a year later was promoted to managing director.

Learning on the job, Reith soon defined public-service broadcasting as having four elements, which he described in his book Broadcast over Britain (1924). Such a system, he argued, operated on a public-service rather than commercial motive, offered national coverage, depended upon centralized control and operation rather than local outlets, and developed high-quality standards of programming. He held broadcasting to high moral—almost religious—standards and rather quickly identified the BBC (which became a public corporation early in 1927) with the political establishment, just as he also insisted on BBC operational independence from any political pressures.

Reith directed the expanding BBC operations from Broadcasting House, the downtown London headquarters he initiated, which opened in 1932 and remains a landmark. His primary interest was in radio, however, and the BBC was slow to cooperate with John Logie Baird and other TV experimenters. With the development of effective all-electronic television, Reith’s BBC inaugurated the world’s first regular public schedule of television broadcasts from November 1936 until Britain entered World War II in September 1939.

Reith felt increasingly underutilized at the BBC by the late 1930s; the system he had built and the key people he had selected were all doing their jobs well and the system hummed relatively smoothly. He was both revered and somewhat feared in the organization he had shaped. In a mid-1938 managerial coup, however, Reith was eased out as director general by the BBC’s Board of Governors (acting in consort with the government), which had grown weary with his self-righteous inflexibility within the organization as well as his political stance. He left the BBC after 16 years, with considerable bitterness that remained for the rest of his life.

Reith’s remaining three decades were a disappointment to him and others. After a brief period (1938–40) heading Imperial Airways as it became the British Overseas Airways Corporation (the government-owned predecessor of British Airways), he held a number of minor cabinet posts in wartime and postwar governments and served as chair of several companies. Reith’s strong views, conviction that he was nearly always right, and dour personality made it difficult for him to readily get along in the rapidly changing postwar British scene. He wrote an autobiography, Into the Wind (1949), and complained he had never been “fully stretched.” Indeed, he saw his entire life as one of failure. He argued strongly in the House of Lords against the inception of commercial television in 1954. He felt the BBC had long since given way to social pressures and lowered its standards. It was no longer his child.

Reith was an obsessive keeper of diaries all his life—excerpts published in 1975 showed him to be a man with strong convictions, powerful hatreds, considerable frustration, and an immense ego.