A History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-46
SURVEY OP M.O.I. ACTIVITIES in MIDLAND REGION (No. 9) during the WAR OF 1939 - 1945
16th November 1945
SURVEY OF M.O.I. ACTIVITIES IN MIDLAND REGION (No. 9) DURING THE WAR OF 1939 - 1945
I. PURPOSE
We have now found that the purpose of propaganda is to produce action.
II. METHOD
(a) “Religious” propaganda (sometimes called indirect) does not name any action, but working by the use of the arts, produces an emotional climate favourable to actions.
Ministry performance in religious propaganda
The Ministry found itself junior to several other and greater autonomous agencies of propaganda, which disposed more force. These were:
(1) The Prime Minister
(2) Other Members of the Government and their Departments
(3) The Houses of Parliament
(4) The B.B.C.
(5) The Press
(6) The Commercial Cinema
The Ministry's special contribution to the religion of the war took the shape of certain films, exhibitions, and functions, i.e. pieces of work in the media in which the Ministry specialised. Of the exhibitions, we may instance The Evil We Fight, America Marches, U.S.S.R. at War, Army Equipment, R.A.F. on the Target. Of the films, we may instance London Can Take It, Dover Front Line, Silent Village, Western Approaches, Target for Tonight. Of the miscellaneous functions (they were very few) we may instance Red Army Day, Stalingrad Celebrations, The Sword of Honour, United Nations Day.
General Assessment
When such productions came upon the hour it is probable that they made their effect, but when they were delayed until events in the field had put them out of date, it is difficult to ascribe success to them.
The Ministry's special contributions, however, were very small compared with the total output of religious propaganda produced by the six agencies named above. The work was done, by other means rather than ours.
(b) Operational propaganda (sometimes called direct) does or should name specific actions (joining organisations, getting inoculated, and so forth) and working by either or both of two techniques further analysed below produces or fails to produce definite action. The result of operational propaganda is things done: e.g. lives saved, forces mobilised, salvage collected.
Technique of operational propaganda
1. Injunctive
This, the oldest technique, merely tells people to do things, without explanation.
2. Educative
This, the more modern technique, combines the injunction with a background of information. Educative material which does not, actually or by implication, carry an injunction, is not propaganda at all, but education .
General assessment
Our Ministry was organised by media, i.e. as a production Ministry rather than as a propaganda Ministry. Only one Division was devoted to operational propaganda throughout the war, and that was Campaigns Division.
All the Ministry campaigns practically without exception, were strictly operational ventures. Had the Ministry been entirely an operational Ministry it would probably have required to be organised as one big Campaigns Ministry.
It is therefore the record of our Campaigns which will furnish an accurate measure of our successes and failures as an operational Ministry. Without prejudice to this enquiry (it is proper to headquarters and I write as a Regional Officer) I should hazard a guess that our early failures (e.g. recruitment of women) belong to the period when the country was still working out the theory of voluntary compulsion, and thus was apparently trying to achieve by persuasion alone results which demanded the combination of persuasion and compulsion. I should further guess that compulsion is necessary to back up persuasion in all campaigns in which people are required to make serious sacrifices in liberty and welfare and persuasion alone will suffice in all campaigns (e.g. safety, health, immunisation, etc. ) in which compliance either will not threaten or will positively advance personal liberty and welfare.
[No.]
III. DIVORCE OF EDUCATION FROM PROPAGANDA
At the beginning of the war this Ministry, seeing itself as an operational Ministry, earnestly desired to undertake a big programme of operational propaganda.
The operations, however, were in the hands of other Ministries. The operations did not develop quickly or uniformly, but sporadically and intensively - not in a flow, but in bursts.
Our own Ministry being organised by media, had built up several separate machines for producing propaganda material of all kinds. We had, in addition to a Campaigns Division, a Films Division, a Speakers Division, an Exhibitions Division, a Publications Division, each with a life to lead, each needing a continuous flow of work to do.
[No. [illegible] section]
The use of this type of organisation, in the circumstances, had two main effects:
(a) A negative effect:
The Ministry never at any time found itself able to deploy all its forces effectively for any single purpose. No campaign used any more than a small proportion of the available resources of the Ministry.
(b) A positive effect:
Operational projects from other Ministries failing to develop in sufficient volume and constancy, the main creative divisions of the Ministry turned over to general educative work.
As a result of (b), according to my estimate, about 90%, or anyhow our main output, of films, press articles, lectures and exhibitions, were not closely related to home operations, and did not carry an injunction expressed or implied, and thus fall positively into the category of education.
Our work in this field was of excellent and constantly improving quality, and was greatly appreciated by the public.
Comparative performance :
The work of the Ministry in education of the civil population bulks much larger in relation to that of other agencies working, than its work in propaganda. For while we must acknowledge that as the high priest of the country's emotional life, Mr. Churchill in his single person towered above all other agencies, and they in turn completely overshadowed ourselves, when we come to educative work and review the position we can see that in the midst of the restrictions of war, no other agency was carrying out adult education, principally by non-literary means, right to the people at their places of work, on anything like the same scale.
This can be summed up by saying that the Ministry, which started life in the midst of opposition from those senior agencies of propaganda we have already mentioned, won its place in the country's life by tackling a job which it was never set up to do.
[misleading]
IV. RESULTS OF THE DIVORCE OF EDUCATION AND PROPAGANDA
But two unfortunate results arose at the end of the war.
(1) Having received, as it were, financial sanction for propaganda in war operations, we used the money, as it were, for general educative purposes. The deception (a noble one, admittedly) brought a terrible penalty to the country, for with the end of the war the Ministry was assailed by those forces which maintained that our job was finished, whereas we knew that it had only begun.
(2) Possibly as a result of bad conscience, the propagandists in all Ministries including our own tended to assume and even to maintain that educative material, without injunction, directly assisted war operations at home.
This assumption I believe to be wrong and dangerous. Most of my colleagues still hold that pit-head lectures, and shipyard discussions, for instance, improved performance of the workers.
[I [illegible].]
The assumption can be demolished by simply pointing out the fact that factories which regularly received Ministry services cannot be said to have performed any better than the factories which did not.
[He has no evidence of this.]
The difference between good factories and bad factories is one of technical management or administration. The two biggest factories in this region were both regular users of our services, and one factory had constant labour troubles, the other none. The Ministry services as a contribution in the operational field, take their place as one of the factory amenities along with ENSA and CEMA concerts, and were so regarded by management and men. It cannot be argued that amenities are irrelevant to performance, but managerial efficiency is such an overwhelmingly important factor in factory performance that all other elements are comparatively insignificant.
We should not argue from this that Ministry educative services have no greater long term value than ENSA and CEMA shows: we can only say that they have no greater operational value.
I believe indeed that education is the greatest of reforming forces and moreover that the Government's excursion into the field represents a most hopeful beginning. But I feel quite sure that anyone who argues that its results can be immediate misunderstands the whole position.
Thus, in the course of the war, our Ministry turned itself, apparently unconsciously, from propaganda work to work in general education. The development ( as perhaps befits our national habit) was not clearly thought out, but was the result of the blind up-thrust of creative forces in our staffs. For the future, I think it is necessary to see clearly what has been going on, to discount our own false claims, and to learn where our real strength has lain.
[Misleading All the time “Campaigns” [illegible] going on. They all have a [illegible] heavy element of injunction [illegible] salvage: [illegible]]
This general review has been undertaken in the hope of assisting the stocktaking process, and its conclusion is that our Ministry's most important contribution to the life of the country, by bulk as well as by value, has been its work in education. To the negative conclusion, on which I insist, that this educative work has had no immediate operational value, we can add the positive corollary that its long term potentialities are very great indeed.
V. REGIONAL HERESIES
The justification of regional work is as follows: It is a convenience so great as to amount to a necessity, to have regional organisers who will negotiate with local interests, find local assistance, and do the local work which is the national work.
No further justification is necessary, but in the course of the war two separate heresies were developed, which in the interests of clarification should be briefly mentioned and dismissed now. (They will emerge again in the detailed reports which follow):
(a) Work of Regional origin
It was widely suggested that quantities of operations developed locally - local administrative problems for which special propaganda had to be provided.
[Cf. Region NE, NW, Where the [illegible] was different.]
As far as I am concerned (and I do not think my region can have been exceptional) this was not the case. The local problems (labour troubles, redundancy, transport difficulties, evacuation, and so on) were merely the local instances of national problems which the headquarters of the various operational Ministries were tackling all the time, transmitting their decisions for action to the respective regional officers.
(b) Adaptation of London material
It was widely suggested that most of the material which came from London had to be specially re-written or adapted to meet local needs.
Here again I can say that this was not the case in my region. My meetings, films, and press officers had their hands so full with their ordinary agency work that they could not possibly have edited the material on its way out - nor was it necessary or desirable that they should do so.
[It was before he became No.]
These two heresies have their origin, I think, in a desire for autonomy. In support of them, a mystique was built up, which should now, I think, be discounted.
A miniature ethnography of Britain came into being, founded certainly on fact but much exaggerated by unconscious motives. A regional officer tended to conceive it as being desirable, and therefore true, that the people of his area differed so much and in such important respects from the people of other areas that their problems would be different and the means of solving them would have to be specially created.
This theory is a false one when it is applied to Government. For while it is undeniable that temperamental and other differences exist between one community and another, it is equally undeniable that the fundamental resemblances of 106 -6-human needs and problems are overwhelmingly great, and it is worth some emphasis that Government deals necessarily in what is common to all communities and must neglect (particularly in war) what is peculiar to each. In plainer terms, food, clothing, shelter and transport, are the essential human needs.
It is worth noticing that one heard less of this false theory of regionalisation as the war went on. The regions became more closely integrated with headquarters in much the same way as the Ministry as a whole became integrated with other Government Departments.
My work in this region was that of an agent of headquarters. I shall review it in the following pages, department by department, showing how and why the development of Regional activity followed the same general course as that of the Ministry's work as a whole.
I. REGIONAL REVIEW (BY DEPARTMENTS)
PRESS DEPARTMENT
By the end of the war with Germany the Press Department had settled down to two main functions: the circulation of selected features of an educational kind and publicity material about M.O.I. fixtures, and secondly, cutting the newspapers (a) for the M.O.I. and (b) for other Government Departments.
The features and special articles were one of the main channels from the Ministry to the public, principally via the weeklies, and an enormous amount of interesting well written educative material was sent out in this way and welcomed by short-staffed local newspapers. The co-ordination of the work of headquarters feature writers with the policies and practices of the Ministry as a whole improved greatly throughout the war and the general service to the press has latterly been excellent.
Of course, something like ten times the amount of stuff reaches the regional office than it can possibly place. This is a very good fault. It gives flexibility to the regional work and unused articles are useful for reference.
All that remained of the Ministry's operational functions in press work were telephone enquiries from the press, and in this class of work the M.O.I. just acted as a post office, relaying enquiries to other departments; often holding one line while getting the answer on another.
So much for the latter stage. At the outset it was thought that the Regional Press Officer would act for all the Government Departments represented regionally and would be creating material on their behalf, by means of press conferences and otherwise, and sending out to the newspapers a stream of material local in origin.
The reasons why operational and educative work of regional origin never got going may be summarised as follows:
(1) Security regulations prevented us from telling the story of the war region by region (production, civil defence, training, evacuation). This curtailed the field severely.
(2) Action and policy in all the other departments was created in London, and the Regional Controllers were merely local agents. Statements, estimates, regulations, orders in council, reports, came from London; in short, all the ammunition was fired off by Ministers to the Press in Whitehall, and the Press agencies took the place of a regional distribution machine.
(3) The residue of purely regional action was small. It included regional versions of certain national campaigns, e.g. recruitment in industry, agriculture, transport, and later, evacuation.
(4) In this region the manpower situation in the newspaper offices was acute, so that a full press conference of all the Midland papers who could send representatives, amounted to five persons. One of these was a local agent serving weeklies. The weeklies cut from the dailies. All were so busy that one did not call them out of their offices to hear carbon copies of London decisions.
(5) The press office was always too lightly staffed to allow for a man on the road looking for regional work.
(6) In any case, (an important point) apart altogether from security, a Government machine cannot publicise private firms, which cut us off from a great source of interesting material. Managements are not anxious to give stories if they get nothing in return.
I should repeat, however, that the positive work done by the regions in feeding out to the weeklies educative material of London origin was in my opinion very good and important work.
[No mention [illegible] great service [illegible] up where[illegible] Provincial papers some [illegible] schemes, especially in [illegible] meetings, [illegible] shown etc.]
MEETINGS DEPARTMENT
The Meetings Department of this region acts almost entirely as the local agency for touring headquarters speakers carrying out a programme of public education on matters of war and Empire. Our local panel was small when I came, and is now vestigial.
The work is exacting and calls for great attention to detail, and for the qualities of common sense, tact and sense of policy. The achievement has been considerable, and I shall add my views below as to some of the main lessons we have learned.
Before I do so, let us again look back upon the original conception of regional meetings work. It was to be operational. The Regional Officer was to find the right persons to go and address workers or public on matters of local concern. This, like the equivalent work contemplated for the press department, never got going, and again I offer a list of reasons:
(1) Industrial relations are outside our terms of reference. Therefore there could be no chance of a Ministry speaker discussing the point at issue in any local trade dispute. All he could do would be to talk about the war, and I have dealt with this technique at length earlier.
(2) In any case, our speakers were lecturers able to talk of their own experiences, usually in foreign countries. For a particular job of the operational type, a list of this kind is of little use. Our available educative material was not suitable for operational work, because
(3) where Government regulations are in question, the speaker has to be an official of the Department concerned, (i.e. an operational person) or he does not know the answers to the questions. It was in view of this that the P.A.Y.E. elucidation campaign was run by the Inland Revenue Department themselves, and very properly. For explanation of Government matters, one of our original purposes, we really must have in any future war, a supply of Government speakers from the other Departments.
(4) Workers are not disposed to set aside matters of personal interest (wages, conditions of work) in response to patriotic appeals. So that early “religious” appeals failed. This point has been illustrated again and again. It was not the M.O.I. who put the women into industry, it was the Ministry of Labour.
[?]
For all these reasons, meetings work turned very wholesomely in the direction of general education, and the scale of effort, small though it is in relation to the task, is a big advance on nothing at all, which is apparently what the Government was doing in official adult education on current affairs before the war. But I would again stress that it is a dangerous error to impute operational value to general education.
Some lessons :
1. So far as my experience is concerned I am willing to maintain that public meetings (real public meetings where the town turns out to hear the word) are a thing of the past. We have found that the field is the factory, the voluntary society, and the organisation. In other words, when people are getting together anyhow, they will listen to a speaker with pleasure and with interest, but they will not turn out specially to hear him in any great numbers.
[The experiment is unique]
The reasons for this lie in the general development of our social life. We are not living in the days of Gladstone. The illustrations from regional work abound. Meetings Department has a full history of them.
2. Factory meetings are our real field, for there we have people in the mass. It is unfortunate but inevitable that in this, the greatest field of all, we have not the inestimable advantage of questions, as a measure of result, for they are quite impracticable under factory conditions. But when a thousand people have heard a stimulating talk and laughed at all the right places, one can be sure that a good deal of it has got home.
3. The voluntary societies are not to be despised in spite of their small numbers. The danger is that of preaching to the converted, but I believe that this puts ammunition, in the form of information, in their hands.
4. The monthly small town meeting I should describe as pseudo public, because the audiences consist every week or month of much the same people. This work I would consider to be just as valuable as voluntary society or rotary club work. The big towns, as I have said, will only turn out for the Churchills and Montgomerys of this world. I think we soon recognised this fact, and stopped trying to sell Cabinet Ministers. The result of an attempt to convene people to hear a Cabinet Minister who could be heard in Parliament and on the radio, and on the films, was always the same: an audience in various uniforms ordered to attend.
5. For explanation of Government policy, a supply of operational speakers from the interest Departments is indispensable.
6. The general record of meetings turns out to be an excellent tribute to the good sense and sense of fair play of the British people. No department of our work occasioned more nervousness in high quarters, and yet the headaches were very very few.
FILMS DEPARTMENT
Films work has always differed from meetings work and press work, our two other main output departments, in that from the out set there could never be any question of films being produced locally, as speakers and press material could theoretically be produced locally. Thus, the regional Films Office has always known itself to be an agency of a central production and distribution point, whereas the other output departments were at first thought to be originating points of propaganda. This was a considerable advantage. But the Films Department enjoyed other advantages. Broadly speaking, and neglecting exceptions, the M.O.I. enjoyed a considerable hegemony in the production of Government films. At the beginning of the war, this kind of work was new to Government Departments, and the advantages of the medium had begun to be widely known and appreciated in Whitehall, with the result that the various departments began fairly early to press for films on all sorts of subjects in a way in which (having their own press sections, and later developing speaker services) they did not press for speakers and press stories. In a general review I think we can say that the picture is one of almost intolerable pressure upon our Films people to do far too many things at once. By the later stages of the war they were trying to cope with the task of doing general educative propaganda by film on such subjects as Conditions in Europe and Fighting Conditions in the Far East, tactical histories of the campaigns, and so on: at the same time, under some inner compulsion they were working in the face of very great difficulties to produce religious propaganda such as “Western Approaches”, and all the time they were being pressed to increase our operational output of films on health, Empire, social services, labour problems, reconstruction, bomb damage, and other aspects of Government work immediate and remote, specific and general.
Before we leave it, it is worth meditating a little on this picture. I have already pointed out, in the original conception the Ministry was to be general agent for the other Departments, and I have shown why this ambition, so to call it, could not be realised in a few years. In the case of our headquarters Films Department, we find them forced by circumstances into the position which the Regional Officers tried to arrogate unto themselves. Let us just reflect on what would have happened if the Ministry as a whole had been forced by similar circumstances to take upon itself, by all media of propaganda, the range of work which the Ministry Films Department was obliged to undertake. We should have had to have about fifty times as much money as we had at the height of our activities. I think we have reason to be grateful that the work which we thought we were going to do when the war- broke out was never divorced from the six senior agencies listed at the beginning of this paper.
Anyhow, I have to deal with the distribution picture in the regions. When Film Officers were appointed, it was thought that the main part of their work would be specialised film shows - i.e. operational propaganda. In a remarkably short space of time this conception collapsed completely, for lack of operational propaganda projects, and we became local booking agents for Ministry films tels quels. The job of creating a clientele for film shows and a rota for operators, and of satisfying the demands created, absorbed, I think it is fair to say, a very great deal of the energies of the Films Department in this region. Only latterly was 111 -11-it possible, once the machine had settled down to more or less automatic working, for the Films Officer to give attention to some small portion of his work as originally planned and to visit Directors of Education, Public Health Authorities, School Inspectors, and other collaborators in the ad hoc propaganda which our small but growing supply of specialist films were intended to advance.
One could almost hear from this distance the sigh of relief with which the Films Department in London greeted the end of the military operations in Europe, a sigh repeated with interest when Japan was defeated. It will now be possible for our films work to conform, as time goes on, more and more to our original intentions. This is only possible because the pressure of general war films has been removed.
I should like, as in the case of meetings, to add notes upon certain lessons which I think we ought to have learned.
(1) The H.Q. administrators of non-theatrical distribution ought to be freed from any duties which would prevent them from studying actual audience reactions and projection conditions. This is more necessary in the case of films than in any other medium. In particular,
(2) the whole of the technical side needs to receive more attention than our harassed head-quarters staff have so far been able to give it. We are still issuing too many films in which the sound, picture, and general construction, or all three, are obscure. The fact is that many a film is quite effective in the Ministry theatre, which in a works canteen is inaudible, invisible, and/or unintelligible. Once an officer has seen and understood a film, in good conditions, he or she will never appreciate its impact, or lack of it, in the field, because the film can only be seen once for the first time. In respect of each non-theatrical film there should perhaps be one senior officer of the Ministry who is instructed to know nothing at all of the film until he sees it in normal non-theatrical projection conditions.
(3) Production policy should now be rationalised and systemised, and the client Ministries encouraged to plan films in suites to cover subjects analytically. This recommendation pushes an open door, for this reform is now under way.
(4) The distribution field for non-theatrical films has to be systematically mapped. During the war we have shown “any” films to “any” audiences, and the transition to a policy of showing the right films to the right audiences is going to be long and laborious.
Ideally, non-theatrical films should be accompanied as often as possible by official 112 -12-spokesmen of the interested Department. The agricultural discussion shows promoted by War Agricultural Executive Committees are an excellent example of the beginnings already made in this work.
(6) The production organisers, as well as the technicians, should be frequently in touch with audiences.
CAMPAIGNS
For the reasons already set out, very few Government campaigns have been of local origin. Occasionally a local authority will ask for publicity material in the form of posters, flags, or picture sets, and assistance of this kind has been given on several occasions, but in the main, campaigns work in the regions has been agency work on behalf of headquarters. Nor need I give any report on the success or failure of our different campaigns, for all the relevant figures are enshrined in H.Q. files.
EXHIBITIONS
No exhibitions have been of local origin and none have been designed to solve local problems, so that here again we in the regions are merely the agents of headquarters, and never had any ambitions to be anything else.
The measure of success or failure has hitherto been the audience figures but I think such a criterion is deceptive anyhow, judging not from figures but from general regional comment, the biggest exhibitions have been the least successful,
1. because of their peculiar irrational timing,
2. and because of their (consequent) lack of relation to other publicity work going forward, nationally, regionally, or locally.
The best result of Ministry Exhibitions has been a vague, but valuable, enhancement of Government prestige. Not one of them can be called to mind which did not come too late to have any formative effect on the public mind.
In my view, big exhibitions in the post-war period should be handed over to the newspapers.
Failure of attempts to tie-in other media in Exhibitions
Exhibition instructions generally bore suggestions that films, speakers and visits of school children or workers should be organised in connection with the exhibition. Wherever possible, this was done, but too often it was found that
(a) no films either general or specific having any direct bearing on the subject of the exhibition were available.
(b) no speakers were obtainable who were competent to talk on the subject
(c) the section of the regional staff which dealt with visits was full up with Jobson's work.
As a result, the most that could be done was the incorporation of a general film show in the exhibition, which did not advance the purpose of the exhibition at all (but commendably enough capitalised the existence of the readymade audience) and the issue of invitation to firms to send parties, if they were able to organise it.
The general picture bears out what has been said in the preamble: namely that since the Ministry as a whole was working on the production of general educative material, and was busy with that task all the time, it could not at a moment's notice produce the films, the speakers, the special audiences required for a definite project.
We have now come to the end of the output departments and what follows concerns intake departments and functional departments. Perhaps we might here make a general observation, namely that seen from the regional standpoint the work of the Ministry in its four main output sections appears to have pursued throughout the war four quite separate policies. Perhaps this was inevitable, but at times it was very puzzling. Our meetings policy, so far as themes was concerned, has on the whole been timid but systematic. Our films policy, so far as subjects are concerned, has been bold, but apparently unsystematic, (one welcomes the boldness, and finds some excuse for the lack of system). Our exhibitions policy has apparently been quite formless: some of our biggest exhibitions such as “R.A.F. on the Target” appear to have been planned without the slightest inkling of what the purpose was. Our press policy has perhaps been best, in that it has been most closely related to the passing events of the war, and most systematic in its handling of them of all, partly because press handouts can be, indeed must be, topical, and partly because as a mechanical medium press work is the oldest and the simplest and the technique is widely known and appreciated and the supply of technicians is large.
The four media being different, it is perhaps too much to hope that a common policy could be found to cover them all, but it is noteworthy that aside from the question of policy altogether there has been very little attempt, if 114 -14-any, to focus all these media at any time on any given object, in the field. The failure of our Ministry to make a simultaneous drive on any single subject by means of all its weapons can scarcely be laid at the door either of headquarters or of the regional offices. It simply has not been physically possible, with our present resources and with our organisation by media, so to arrange matters.
I feel that in the post-war era it may be possible to encourage the local authority to be the focal point for successive publicity drives.
COMMITTEES
The purpose of Ministry of Information committees was from the outset strictly operational. As originally planned it was two-fold: they were to serve simultaneously as intake and output devices. It will be convenient to take these in turn.
Output :
On this side, committees have been a failure. I think we must face the fact that committees have been comparatively useless for conveying information to the public by word of mouth. We might take the following points, in explanation:
(1) Happily, conditions never developed in which the local committee was the only safe channel to the public. All the other channels, listed at the beginning of this paper, remained open. Consequently the Ministry had no inner information to give. It should be emphasised that almost universally committees felt let down over this matter. Having been formed in the first place as repositories of confidential information which they were to relay to their associates, they were disappointed again and again when they found that Committee Officers were never able to tell them anything which they could not read in the morning paper. A fair part of the Committee Officer's work consisted of smoothing over the bad feelings which resulted, and the collapse of many committees was due to this single factor.
(2) Aside from general questions, answers to specific questions relating to individual cases, obtained from local official sources, and transmitted to the committee on a month to month basis do in fact represent a certain degree of output of information. Such output, moreover, is undeniably operational - it is specific background information applied to a specific problem. But the amount of ground covered in this way was so limited as to be almost negligible, because a committee could only be expected to raise and discuss perhaps three such individual cases per month.
(3) It was difficult for an impartial observer attending committee meetings to believe that the answer to any question raised went any further than the man who raised it: at furthest it would go to some individual person who had brought a case to his notice. 115 - 15 -Time after time the pattern was as follows: a member raises a question brought to his notice by some friend: an answer is given either immediately or after some correspondence: the answer, at best, is accepted:
the member nods his head and says he will tell his friend. It is not too pessimistic to say that the end result of this process, over a period of a year, is that a few dozen individuals in the area, at most, have had questions answered. If we reflect on the meaning of the original terms of reference “conveying information to the public by word of mouth through committees”, thinking of the amount of information the public does not know, and the number of people whose individual problems are concerned, we cannot but admit that the committee system of dissemination is bound to be comically inadequate in comparison with, for example, the technique of the C.A.Bx with their queues of anxious enquirers. Many committee members had the common sense to see this, and naturally gave up the work.
(4) The most hopeful experiment in output was the practice developed by one committee of inviting a representative from the regional office of another Department to come and address them. I have no doubt at all that this technique, theoretically, could have been extended, in spite of grave difficulties, and might in time have resulted in a considerable increase of civic knowledge. Space does not permit a full examination of the difficulties and possibilities, but I must say that I feel that in this particular matter we had come upon something which could be very good. But the recipients of this word of mouth explanation ought to be, not the M.O.I. Committee alone, but groups of representatives, summoned ad hoc, of the interests affected by the information.
Intake :
On this side committees were, on the whole, very successful, and in this region they were a mainstay of the intelligence system. What committee intake did was to corroborate evidence of public feeling received from other sources. Certain lessons which I shall outline presently were learned from this side of the work.
The limiting factors on the side of intake were the following:
(a) Smallness of scale. The same factors which limited output (infrequency of meeting, and brevity of available time) naturally limited intake.
(b) Some of the associations which were represented on information committees, notably the political ones, were in abeyance during the war.
(c) In any case, there was a peculiar and insoluble confusion of mind as to the precise terms of reference of an L.I.C. Were the proceedings secret, or were they not ? In the case of many difficulties which beset us, it was not possible for us to encourage representatives even of such associations as were meeting, to consider themselves as liaison officers, and to have public questions openly discussed at their lodges or branches before and after discussion at the L.I.C., thus bringing up matters which were really live among their associates.
(d) Probably the greatest limiting factor, was the strong tendency of members to live and work as individuals. What they brought to the table was an individual problem of their own or of some other person's, and knowing that they were supposed to be in some way representative of public opinion, they generally prefaced their remarks with the phrase “I meet a good number of people who think that....” Any observer with normal insight could detect at once that the speaker himself was the person who “thinks that....”
These limitations, however, were offset in large measure by the fact that we had a great number of local information committees in the country, and the people sitting on them were average persons, so that the whole system worked as a kind of balanced sample, and the reactions of the committee to public and private questions was a representative reaction, and, seen on a national scale, did give a fairly good measure of what the public were thinking and feeling.
Lessons :
(1) The most important lesson learned from committee work is that people are interested primarily in what affects their personal lives: in food, fuel, housing, conditions of work, transport. Committees would argue for long periods about the position of a tram stop, while the affairs of Europe fell in ruins about their ears. This irritated me at first vary greatly, but I soon realised that I was the one who had to learn. The fact is that people live their lives at the tram stop level, and all our propaganda should take account of this fact. It means that operational propaganda is not only needed by the people - it is earnestly desired.
(2) Committee work has taught us also that the people of this country are possessed of a sense of fair play and a spirit of forbearance, coupled with a natural courtesy, which is most impressive. In Committees we had the spectacle of individuals of every social class and of every personal interest meeting together to discuss questions of common interest which gave ample opportunities for disagreement. Yet, by the exercise of the qualities noted, members practically always avoided friction. The standard of chairmanship, in this region, was high. Perhaps, after all, what we witnessed in our committee work was, in fact, the real strength of this nation.
INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT
H.Q. records show how the weekly Intelligence Report developed from its first beginnings as an independent and original essay by individual Regional Officers upon the state of public feeling in general to a much more systematised document showing specific reactions to specific topics.
Sources :
In this region the sources were as follows:
(a) Correspondents trained over a period to write a monthly letter. At the peak we have had about 200 of these correspondents, and letters were arranged to come in at the rate of about 50 per week.
(b) Committee deliberations which were combed for relevance to the topics under review each week.
(c) Questions asked at meetings. These were similarly examined.
(d) Regional press comment and letters to editors.
(e) Personal contacts and pub people. In this last connection it is worth noticing that a female Intelligence Officer suffers certain disadvantages.
Uses of Intelligence Report
Ideally, if our regional organisation could have developed along the lines originally contemplated a process which as I have already said would have entailed completely different method of working; the Regional Intelligence Report would have been the basis of regional propaganda action. This failing, the main value of the report, so far as the region was concerned, was to give the Regional Information Officer a sense of the public's attitude. Secondly, the regional report's value lay in the contribution it made to the national intelligence report, thus its usefulness varied as the usefulness of the latter.
Resistance to Intelligence Work
The national value of our intelligence efforts theoretically lay in the guidance which it afforded to other Government Departments which had propaganda problems to face. The use made of our intelligence material nationally appears to have varied considerably as between Department and Department, according to the attitude of the Public Relations Officer concerned. To take extreme examples, one recollects on the one hand the bitter and stupid criticisms constantly offered by the P.R.O. of the Ministry of Labour, and the intelligent appreciation accorded throughout by the P.R.O. of the Ministry of Health.
Although there was a general improvement as the years of the war rolled on, I think it must be confessed that our intelligence system was never fully accepted as an instrument of Government operated in the interests of the Government as a whole and thereby entitled to the fullest assistance from 118 -18-the constituent Ministries. Indeed, our intelligence system furnishes an outstanding example of a function of the Ministry assumed and maintained rather in spite of the Government than at the Government's request.
General appraisal
The qualitative intelligence system built up by regional work (as distinct from the wartime social survey) is open to many criticisms of a technical nature, and I for one have long been aware of its deficiencies. At the same time I confess that my opinion of the value of our intelligence work has undergone a change in the course of the last year. Now that this service has been withdrawn from us, I find I miss it rather badly. In spite of all its deficiencies, I firmly believe that our Intelligence Report was a good, if rough, measure of public feeling on public topics. Moreover, it was a most convenient and readable collation. Admittedly, all the material it contained was available from other sources, of which the most notable (and perhaps the most widely neglected) is the columns of Hansard, but the fact is that there is all the difference in the world between keeping up to date by ploughing through Parliamentary reports or newspaper columns, and reading a weekly digest.
It was a compendium of genuine public feeling, and the country as a whole is not so well served with sampling instruments of this kind that we can afford to dispense with any of them.
EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT
In this case, also, and rather more obviously, and with even more unfortunate results, this Ministry took unto itself functions in despite of other Departments. This is not a region in which the formal emergency system has been tested by heavy blitz, and one has to confess, after entertaining E.I.Os from Hull and Exeter, that in some parts of the country the emergency system when it was tested did very good work. I am convinced, however, that these successes represent a triumph of local improvisation over an arrangement which, as I shall show, was fundamentally unsound in theory, and could not but result in very patchy results.
Theory of our emergency work .
Information service was separated from operational work, by an agreement with the Ministry of Home Security and the Military about which the headquarters of those Departments appear almost always to have been uneasy. Thus while it was the duty of the civic authorities to provide various forms of relief to the public after heavy raiding, it nevertheless was conceived as the duty of the Ministry of Information to make those arrangements public knowledge. For this purpose the M.O.I. set up a complete system of voluntary workers. These workers were distinguished from the public by passes carried in the pocket, but at the same time they were outside the main body of Civil Defence workers, who wear uniforms and draw a salary.
How were these voluntary people to do their work under operational conditions or at preparatory exercises? Operational Civil Defence information has its genesis in the operations room, and the information people could only do their work by getting into the control rooms.
Practice of emergency
Here then is the position: information is taken away from operations by London action, and a separate body set up to deal with it. This body can only work by reuniting with the operational forces at the level of action.
A good deal of the work of the regional people, the Group E.I.Os and the E.I.Os consisted in attempts to effect entry into Control Rooms. Some of these attempts succeeded, others failed.
The onus of liaison was placed upon the E.I.Os. As (presumably) it was not the Ministry of Home Security which asked the Ministry of Information to undertake all this emergency work in the first place but rather the Ministry of Information which arrogated the function unto itself, so also right down the line to the smallest borough it was not the Controller who asked the E.I.O. to undertake emergency duties, it was the E.I.O. who approached the Controller and placed our services at his disposal.
Again the Ministry of Information was placed in a false position, as so often in the course of the war. Once again, instead of being asked to undertake work we were knocking at doors, cap in hand, full of pathetic pretensions, and asking for work to do.
But the situation was not hopeless. Many of the E.I.Os (in this region, the majority by virtue of the fact that in small communities all civic functions are naturally carried out by just a few public spirited persons who tend to do everything), were themselves either civic persons or persons with strong civic connections.
The emergency system worked well where this was the case, and worked badly where this was not the case. Thus we had quite good M.O.I. preparations in about two thirds of our centres, and very bad M.O.I. preparations in the remainder. Unhappily, the remainder included the cities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, the largest in the region.
I can point by analysis of the situation precisely by describing in a few words what happened when I called upon the Town Clerk and Chief Controller of Birmingham two years ago to discuss emergency arrangements. It was precisely what had happened the year before, when I called similarly upon the Town Clerk and Controller of the City of Westminster. In each case I was told by the Town Clerk, with whom I was and later remained on good terms, that he had no intentions of allowing any Ministry of Information personnel into his Control Room, was quite capable of making his own emergency arrangements himself, and would send for M.O.I. help when he required it, and not before. Any system which lays a Regional Information Officer open to a rebuff of this kind cannot possibly be regarded as well conceived.
Lesson :
I should say quite simply that the lesson which we ought to have learned from our emergency work is that the Ministry of Information, in any future war, ought to leave operational information work in the hands of the operational people. Loudspeaker cars, posters, and other apparatus ought to be under the control of the people who are going to use them, and the people who are going to use them for operational purposes are the people who create the operations.
In practice one found that in many Boroughs this actually happened.
I well remember one Regional Information Officer at an early R.I.Os conference explaining how he had found the perfect method of conveying information to the people: the perfect method was the use of the wardens’ service. In this case, as in many others, the wheel had come full circle, and the function of conveying information to the public had gone back quite naturally into the hands of the appropriate people.
TOURS AND FACILITIES :
The work of the Tours Division is of obvious value. The question of amalgamation of this work with similar efforts done by the British Council need not concern us here, but it is clearly desirable that work of this kind, whoever does it, should continue and expand. Whatever the agency, the following positive suggestions, based upon our regional experience, will probably be valuable.
(1) The people who arrange these tours should be made to go on them. Only if the work is directed by somebody with personal experience can one hope for imaginative and sensitive planning.
(2) Programmes must not be overloaded. At present they are. A former Minister referred in the House jocularly to one of our Officers as “Killer Jobson” as if it were a good fault to overload timetables. In my view it is a bad fault.
Time after time, the visitors beg for the opportunity to take an hour or two off and see the people of Britain, to walk the streets and look at the shops, to be free of supervision.
It did not very often happen that feeling ran so high that a party took it upon themselves to make a formal request that the tour be lightened, but every party complained with reason, though very politely, of the continual driving which is necessary in order to keep them up to their timetable. The Director of this work should regard it as essential to provide free mornings or free afternoons liberally, even if this means extending the period of the tour by as much as a week. If we reflect for a moment upon the verdicts of visitors to pre-war Soviet Russia, we must at once be struck with the danger, so easily overlooked, that over-zealous supervision may be open to misunderstanding dictated by political bias.
(3) Programmes should not be stereotyped. There has always been a strong tendency at headquarters to run this department on tram lines. This practice is objectionable, partly because it tends to exhaust the goodwill at certain points of call but mainly because it represents a waste of opportunity, for if the tours are stereotyped, neither the customers nor headquarters staff nor regional staff gets the opportunity of understanding the field. I am aware that modifications in this stereo pattern are introduced from time to time, but it is to be hoped that with peacetime improvement in travelling facilities, and particularly if longer periods are available, a really imaginative attempt will be made to find aspects of British life in each region which are really illuminating and rewarding. In this way, one should hope to give some kind of picture of our real national life, instead of conveying a picture of hundreds of thousands of people working at lathes.
It will be seen that success in following suggestions 2 and 3 depend largely upon success in following suggestion (1). This point is merely a specific case of the general principle that in all regional Government work headquarters direction should be in the hands of people who have had experience of regional conditions, and continually keep renewing it.
ANGLO-AMERICAN WORK
Our Anglo-American work began with an almost completely unsuccessful attempt to organise voluntary hospitality, and ended quite satisfactorily as a service which provided M.O.I. facilities, parties, tours, civic dinners, and other amenities to American personnel, and involved also a constant purvey of small services.
Early difficulties
The Ministry at first found itself in a false position. It seems that neither the Americans on the one hand nor the many voluntary bodies on the other, wanted the Ministry of Information to do anything about Anglo-American relations, and for a long time this Ministry beat the air and ploughed the sand.
Solution
This situation was completely altered as soon as we got a grant of money to spend via the voluntary organisations, upon Anglo-American work.
At once we became the Controllers, in the technical sense of the word, of many of the country's Anglo-American activities. It was only when we became, as a Government body, responsible for the granting of public money for Anglo-American purposes that we acquired our proper locus standi.
This admirable arrangement solved the internal, the British Problem. In this Region, for instance, our relations with all municipalities and voluntary bodies were immediately clarified when we were in a position not only to call the tune, but also to pay the piper.
The unsolved problem
This arrangement did not solve the essential Anglo-American problem, which remained right to the very end. This problem was a larger version or macrocosm of the internal problem which we have just been discussing. I mean that, just as the M.O.I. was originally the self-appointed prime agent in Anglo-American relations, so this country as a whole was throughout the war the self appointed prime agent in Anglo-American relations. It was not the Americans who asked for our help, our facilities, it was we who offered them, and here the entire country put itself in a false position. The Americans came to this country self-sufficing, fully equipped, and prepared to regard Britain in much the same light as they regarded North Africa, namely, as the base from which they happened to be fighting at the moment. I think all of us in our Anglo-American work felt this most strongly and indeed were made to feel it. I think events have shown that this feeling of ours was well founded.
[No!]
I think we must face the conclusion that all our efforts down to the humblest were hampered very greatly by the complete lack of a joint policy on domestic Anglo-American relations agreed by the two Governments, implemented by parallel guidance right down the hierarchy military and civil on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the midst of a war in which everybody was harassed with more immediate practical problems, to advise a joint policy is no doubt to give counsel of perfection. It is to the credit of the comparatively humble Ministry of Information that we did make an attack upon the vicious circle and did try, and with some success, to give individual American serving men pleasant memories of their stay in this country. The good results we can hope for are long term results, for if, as democratic theory holds, the peoples make the Governments, then rapprochements between individuals ultimately result in better understanding between governing bodies. I feel that the hope is reasonably good, for it is not necessary to convert the whole of the American continent to a sympathetic attitude to this country. Public opinion is made by comparatively few people, and who knows but that some of these, and perhaps even some of the more influential of them, may have had seminal experiences as our guests?
INDUSTRIAL PUBLICITY
The effects of the assumptions (noted on page 3), made by all propagandists in all Ministries namely that educative material without injunction assists war operations, can be studied in the case of the industrial project which produced in the course of the war the works Relations Centres and the Regional Industrial Publicity Committees.
Purpose
The purpose of industrial publicity was to increase output.
Methods
(a) Operational Propaganda
Throughout the war, the Production Ministries, with our help, were producing and issuing to managements supplies of purely operational propaganda material bearing injunctions to save fuel, avoid scrap, keep good time, and so on.
The results of this work were very difficult to isolate, nor could I discover that any serious attempt was ever made by the Production Ministries to isolate and measure them, but there is in my view quite good reason to suppose that within the limitations already mentioned they made their effect in certain directions.
(b) Educative work
But over and above this operational work, which was not sufficient to keep them fully employed, the Production Ministries and ourselves built up a general educative service of films, speakers, photographs, and even small exhibitions, which represented the main body of the propaganda resources on the factory front.
Special Machinery for increasing output by means of Education
The assumption that this educational force could be harnessed for the purpose of increasing production was given pointed form by the establishment of Regional Committees to advise the Regional Production Board on questions of industrial morale, to take any relevant action, and to co-ordinate approach to factories by the various Ministries as it went along.
Results
(a) Success of Works Relations Centre
As an exchange point for visual material, and even as a kind of (unnecessary) booking centre for educational services, the Works Relations Centre in this region worked well.
(b) Failure of Works Relations Centre
But as an instrument for improving industrial output, I am afraid it was never effective, and for the following reasons:
Rationale
The causes of bad output may admittedly be psychological as well as technical, but the psychological difficulties as much a matter of government and management as the technical.
The causes of industrial friction, in other words, lie in the field of administration.
In this field, the link between Government and management was the Regional Production Board. Consequently, this Board was, in so far as it worked at all, the regional body which was responsible for industrial morale, administration, output, and all the rest of it. And its attempts to correct bad feeling and push up output were along the lines of technical advice, skill in operating the essential Works Order, tact in dealing with managements, and all the other apparatus of administration. It certainly could not hope to do any effective work by sending speakers or films to disaffected factories.
Late in the war, a Regional Industrial Publicity Committee was set up to advise the Regional Board on the work which it had been doing since long before the publicity experts came on the scene. Of course this situation was too unreal to eventuate, and the Committee was never actually asked by the Board to give any advice at all.
Moreover, the Publicity Committee could not even act effectively, as the publicity instrument of factory administration, because the propaganda agencies available for this purpose were in full working order. They were the managements, and the Trade Union organisations. There is in fact a complete system of linkage in every factory, from the manager's office to the meanest work bench, a system more complete and more sensitive than exists in any other type of organisation. I shall return to this point later.
Final Assessment
The Industrial Publicity Committee was therefore ineffective, as an agent for the improvement of Industrial performance. Its co-ordinative function remained, but here, in this region, it had been ante-dated by liaison between the production Ministries and ourselves so close that we had no real co-ordination problem to face.
As a result, the Industrial Publicity Committee in this region after a few meetings never met.
The Managerial Revolution
The result of all this experience ought to be to convince us all that the improvement of output depends upon managerial efficiency, which should be taken to include human as well as technical management.
The grapevine of the factory, as I have said earlier, is a most sensitive one. It does not follow, of course, that the managerial decisions and the workers’ emotional reactions are everywhere in a state of perfect balance.
The managerial revolution is the name sometimes given to the modern tendency to bring workers and management into closer consultation and produce greater harmony of interest. Great faith is expressed in the Production Committee, as an instrument of this revolution, and the study of such committees will no doubt be undertaken realistically. I cannot pursue this theme without entering a field in which I am not competent to express opinions, but, with this caveat, I will give as my view 125 -25-that collaboration between workers and men must be genuine factual, effective co-operation in the actual management of the factory. The workers are not to be deceived - they known when they have a voice and when they have no voice. The distinction between the two factories mentioned earlier lies largely in this, that in the one case the workers have a real voice, and are now co-operating, for instance, in a large programme of reduction of labour, with complete harmony. In the other factory, the workers have none and constant bickering is the result.
The improvement of output (industrial efficiency) is an end, therefore, which is to be sought by administrative means. The point would not be worth stressing, were it not for the fact that many people still seem to believe that general educative material can be effective in improving output, without relation to changes in administrative practices. I think that this belief is unfounded, and indeed is disproved by war experience.
Output will be improved by attention to such matters as industrial relations, hours, wages, conditions of work, canteen facilities, holidays, welfare, health services. In all these matters propaganda is of great importance: but it must be real propaganda carrying injunctions expressed or implied: health talks must be about health, not about the war at sea, or my escape from the Nazis.
General Adult Education
One point remains to be emphasised -
In the factories during the war, we operated what was in fact a long-term policy of adult education under the pretext that it was a short-term policy of war production. The failure of our efforts to produce results which they could never be expected to produce ought not to discourage us, or cause us to lose faith in the efficacy of education as such.
Now that the war is over, it is doubtful whether factories will willingly yield us mass audiences talks (film prospects are more hopeful). Nor can they be blamed. Our talks work will possibly revert to the smaller groups of citizens convened for the purpose of learning, not producing: some of these may even be in factories.
I feel that such a development would be a good thing, for, aside altogether from the failure of Educative talks, films and photographs to increase production, I have found something very distasteful in whole process of attempting to educate people for the sake of the goods which they are engaged in producing. We should be trying, not to make them more efficient servants, but to enrich lives and their general civic value, for the sake of the people themselves.
FINAL CONCLUSION : THE FUTURE OF CIVIC EDUCATION
In this huge field, I offer only one recommendation based upon our experience in the war just concluded. Reduced to its simplest terms, and shorn of all justification and elaborations, it may be expressed thus:
Education of the citizens is a main responsibility of Government. (Propaganda-by-education and education-pure are but two aspects of the same thing, the first being education for immediate purposes, the second being education for ultimate purposes.)
The responsibility for educating the people should devolve upon all the Departments of Government .
In the course of the war, we saw the result of the attempt to set up an adult education department which should be separate and distinct from the operational departments. We found that the resulting Ministry of Information could only work by becoming, as it were, a part of each in turn of the operational Departments, whose work it was designed to advance - and this has been as true of our general educational work as of our campaigns. In short, we were separated from our colleagues only to reunite with them after many days, and in certain instances after much sorrow.
Let us then profit by our experience. Let us hope that in the future, to take a random instance, Civic education on Colonial affairs shall be the firm responsibility of the Colonial Secretary; and, at that, an important part of his duty. And similarly in all Departments, from the Foreign Office, yes, from the Treasury itself, to the County Palatine of Durham. And let the Ministry of Information, or its successor departments, operate always in an ancillary capacity. Let us place the responsibilities for operational work where they belong - on the shoulders of the operational departments.
It is not that their colleagues in Government are assisting the Ministry of Information to improve road - safety, to get nurses into hospitals, to govern the people. It is the Ministry of Information which is assisting their colleagues in Government to do these jobs.
PRACTICAL EFFECT OF THIS POLICY
It may be argued that the change the course of orientation just defined has come about spontaneously in the course of the war but it seems to me that this change is by no means complete, particularly in certain departments, and in any case has not been formally recognised in theory. The theoretical aspect of the matter need not concern us, did it not affect the practice. But, unhappily, theory always affects practice.
The following are the some of the practical effects, which one would hope to see as a result of the assumption of full responsibility for public address by the operational Department, as a change from the vesting of that responsibility in a single Department extraneous to the strictly operational fields:
1. Operational Departments instead of having to be prodded officiously from without would themselves be forced to adopt a forward be policy in all matter of propaganda and education.
2. This forward policy would have practical results in all the various media: In particular
(a) Departments would themselves be concerned in finding department speaker from their own ranks to explain the working of their regulations, and also in collaborating with each other in finding speaker from without their own ranks for general educative talks bearing upon the work they are doing.
(b) In exhibitions work, press work, and particularly perhaps film work, in work a lot of research is concerned, the interested Department would themselves take responsibility for doing as much as possible of the research work, or spade work as it might be called, which at presents usurps a lot of the time of the creative artists.
The research workers within a Department, or selected officer detailed to do research for propaganda purposes, ought to be able to prepare briefs for propaganda purposes much more readily, and thus more economically, than visiting specialists from outside.
(c) The resulting product would stand a better chance of being accurate. We should be spared the spectacle (of which the best example is perhaps the Canadian film on Works Committees) of propaganda products being unusable because they were prepared without expert knowledge of the field.
(d) Research costs, which at present at least in the case of films, figure as film costs, would be put back where they belong, i.e. into the vote of the Department. I think this would be fair because such research is valuable, not only for its immediate purpose, but also for the internal purposes of the Department. In other words, Departments learn when they seek to teach, and they are surely as much entitled to pay for reports prepared for handing over to propagandists as for reports prepared for submission to their own administrative people.
(e) Very likely, there would be additional savings in time arising out of the centralisation of research in the responsible Departments. No longer would approach separate sections of a Department for different information, sometimes indeed for the same information, make it up into separate parcels, and keep it separately. A propagandist approaching, say, the Ministry of Labour, would be put in touch with an officer who could lay hands upon all that had previously been written on the subject and, indeed, would have done so in preparing the brief.
3. More generally, one would expect a much better atmosphere in Government propaganda facts on the one hand, and presentation of facts on the other, would stand a better 128 -28-chance of being drawn. Up till the present, we have had operational Departments starting with research and finishing up with layouts for exhibitions, drafts of publications and film scripts, which were no use, and then resisting passionately the alteration of them. On the other hand, we have had professional propagandists starting out to make publications, exhibitions and films, and finishing up with false pictures of the work they are trying to describe, and then resisting, in their turn, the alteration of the product. We should hope that in time, given a recognition of the principle enunciated above, this conflict would be amicably resolved with much greater speed than if it is merely left to the process of muddling through.
4. Above all, we should hope for a bigger outflow of better, more accurate, more imaginative, more positive propaganda material by all media, aimed, more systematically than ever before, at the creation of an educated, and thus fully free and responsible, electorate.
[Russell Ferguson]
16th November 1945.