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papers, and that as a result, we were able to give listeners the latest information the whole time the stations were on air. 8
The London Bureau
    London was a clearing house for world news and news of the worrying events in Europe in the lead up to war. The ABC’s London office and its correspondent, Hugo Jackson, would be a major source of news throughout the war years. Jackson had left London after the First World War to come to Australia, where he became editor of a regional newspaper and then a writer and commentator on foreign affairs for The Age under the by-line of ‘Scrutator’. He returned to London to be closer to events in Europe and to continue his specialist writing on international affairs. When he started work for the ABC, he was on the payroll of AAP, the news agency owned by the Australian newspaper proprietors, and the arrangement was kept secret because of the difficulties between the commission and the newspapers over access to overseas news.
    In 1939 Jackson was reporting to the ABC that events in Europe were moving with such terrible speed that it was not clear where and when the next blow to European security would fall. 9 That year the ABC struck a deal with a small news agency, the Exchange Telegraph news service, and obtained a news tape machine for the London office, giving the ABC an independent source of overseas news. An ABC news bureau under Jackson was then set up in cramped quarters in News Chronicle House at 72–78 Fleet Street, in premises sub-let from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
    On 1 September 1939 an urgent cable from the London office arrived at the ABC, with news heard over German radio.

    ACCORDING BERLIN WIRELESS STATION HITLER THIS MORNING ADDRESSED PROCLAMATION GERMAN ARMY – QUOTE – POLISH STATE REFUSED FRIENDLY OFFER ADDRESS THEM APPEALED FORCE ARMS INSTEAD – GERMANS POLAND BRUTALLY PERSECUTED – INTOLERABLE FRONTIER INCIDENTS – IN ORDER END THIS INTOLERABLE MADNESS I NO OTHER CHOICE THAN ANSWER FORCE WITH FORCE. 10
    Soon afterwards further news came through that Germany had invaded Poland, and two days later on 3 September 1939 Britain and Australia were at war with Germany. With the declaration of war, Hugo Jackson and other staff in the London office were often working at night, to feed news to the ABC’s news bulletins in daytime Australia, and night-time work continued at other times throughout the war. Arthur Mason wrote of the strange world in which the ABC office now worked.

    Blacked-out from the first, London by night is the densest pall of impenetrable gloom ever known . . . Not the tiniest hint of light is allowed to peep from a building, and all of London’s sprawling immensity of mile upon mile of buildings has simply ceased to exist as such by night . . . And a silence as deep as the darkness envelops the city. The roar of London-by-night is lost to us. 11
    During the Blitz, staff in the London office who could not get home slept on camp stretchers. On one occasion, the news office was damaged by a German bomb, but no one was hurt, and an emergency news operation was re-established within a few hours.
    Hugo Jackson was ‘one of the most dependable and wide-awake foreign correspondents’, according to an ABC news bulletin compiler in Sydney, and he worked with little let up for much of the war in order to provide news for the ABC’s bulletins. In 1944 the constant work took its toll – Jackson was struck down by influenza and then pneumonia. He recovered, however, and was out of hospital by the time of the Allied invasion of Europe.
    News reports from London and from elsewhere during the war were communicated over cable, using the undersea cable telegraph service; by wireless telegraph such as the Beam Wireless service carried by radio signals; by radiotelephone that transmitted voice by shortwave for connection with a telephone service; and by airmail.
    In addition to its own news from London, the ABC