2 APRIL 1954, Page 7

, Those who pursue fame must have been saddened by

the latest Mass Observation experiment, in which 1,000 men and Women were invited to say what they knew about Sir Edmund nillary, Dr. -Kinsey, Senator McCarthy, Mr. Gordon Pirie and the late John Reginald Halliday Christie. 820 correctly identi- ed Christie four months after his trial. Half knew who Dr. ki nsey is (though one, rather touchingly, believed him to have Written The Water Babies). One in four was completely floored 031 Sir Edmund Hillary, and some of those who weren't were a shade imprecise about the nature of his achievement; " he was In the expedition to the top of that high hill with a black tan called Sing-Sing," one lady recalled, perhaps not without thought One can hardly impute arriere-pence to the citizen who wought that Senator McCarthy was " something to do with an ape '; his line of thought—American television, bad taste, Briticisms in British Press, J. Fred Muggs—is fairly easy to follow. Though he was variously described as President of the United States, a boxer, a singer and an aircraft designer, Some Me kind of extra-sensory perception in our race enabled Mass Observation to report that McCarthy falls definitely and easily into the category of an unpopular character."