A Spectator's Notebook
I AM INTERESTED in the news of the preparations for the Duke of Edinburgh's Study Conference on the Human Problems of Industrial Communities within the Commonwealth and Empire. The conference, which will bring together a large number of people (and especially young people) prominent in industry, whether as employers or trade unionists, is to be held at Oxford in July of next year. Its programme strikes me, as a layman, as being both full and sensibly planned. The foreword which the Duke of Edinburgh has written to the draft pro- gramme reveals that he is not an inactive or merely nominal patron. It is sensible and forthright in its insistence that this is not a conference for research workers but for people 'actually engaged in industry.' His patronage of this conference is his most notable intervention so far, and recalls the very valuable work which was done by the Prince Consort a century ago. The press seems to me guilty of a gross lack of proportion when it devotes so little space to this side of the Duke of Edinburgh's work and so much to, say, a sale of work.
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