Broadcasting House
Ariel and All His Quality. By R. S. Lambert. (Gollancz. 153.)
THIS book reminds me of the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. It is the long pent effusion of one who has spent the last twelve years behind the walls of an exacting and peculiar seminary. It discusses, but without explaining, the mysterious sanctity which adheres to the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Other nations may differ as to whether the radio should be a State monopoly or a competitive public utility ; to the English alone, and not least to Mr. Lambert, it is a cult. Broadcasting House has become a shrine, and the Director- General a high priest ; while Radio Normandie is not a competitor, but an Albigensian heresy. Almost everybody accepts the employees of the B.B.C. at their own estimation as men set apart from their fellows, dedicated to a higher purpose. Yet this distinction must derive from their peculiar faith ; for there is nothing so extraordinary about their works. Their task is selective rather than creative ; and they have all the talents and all the interests in the country upon which to draw. The work is done as well, if not better, by a score of commercial enterprises in America. It is child's-play com- pared with the work of most Government departments.
Mr. Lambert describes most vividly the atmosphere that exists, or used to exist, inside Broadcasting House. The con- ditions of employment were until lately framed with an extra- ordinary contempt for the self-respect of the individual. The late Director-General and his chief lieutenants "seemed to think that it added somehow to their dignity not to recognise
even their senior assistants when they came across them about the place." Mr. Lambert states that a secret dossier was kept containing particulars of the private life and behaviour of every member of the staff. Incredible rules were promul-
gated; for instance, the Corporation "in its printed Staff Regulations forbade its employees even to discuss with one another in private conversation their rates of pay." Inter- ference extended as far as to rules of hygiene and morals:
"A junior official, invited to resign for reasons that seemed justifiable, pointed out a senior colleague who had been quietly divorced some time previously, without the slightest scandal. The latter was immediately called up, asked to resign on the spot, and confined to his room pending his departure, on the ground that he ought not to mix with the rest of the staff."
These absurdities must have militated against the recruit- ment of a proper type of official, but they were not in them- selves disastrous to the B.B.C. Sir John Reith might have insisted upon celibacy, or the tonsure without impairing the efficiency of his organisation. But he adopted other means which in Mr. Lambert's view achieved the same result. The
employees were chosen as a rule among persons who had no alternative livelihood available to them ; they were given short contracts ; they were alarmed by frequent resignations and purges ; there was "a prevailing system of fear in the ad- ministration." Nor did this come about by accident. Mr. Lambert gives actual instances of the way in which har- monious co-operation and the courtesies of life were dis- couraged, jealousy was deliberately created, and suspicions were carefully sown by hints from above. The first essentials of efficiency were not ignored—they were forbidden.
Mr. Lambert is an observant writer, though sometimes given to suspicion and self-pity. There is not the least reason to doubt his account of this astonishing rdgime, though he was himself the victim of its most famous blunder. Nearly half his book is devoted to the story of the celebrated Mon- goose case, beneath whose comic aspect there lay other considerations of grave importance to the employees of every public body.
Mr. Lambert, with the necessary leave of the B.B.C., had taken an interest in educational films. A gentleman remotely connected with such films had slandered him. Mr. Lambert proposed to sue him in the courts for damages. Had he been
a civil servant, a bank clerk, or even a lunatic in an asylum, his superiors would have thought it their duty to aid him in this insistence upon the common rights of the citizen. But since he was an official of the B.B.C., his superiors did every- thing in their power to impede him. A lawsuit appeared in their eyes to be an act of positive indecency, and the role of an injured plaintiff no better than that of a co-respondent. They tied themselves in knots in their endeavour to avert the scandal. Abetted by the author of the slander, they cajoled and threatened Mr. Lambert in a manner so outrageous to the instincts of a British jury that in the end he was awarded by way of damages more than he could have earned in many years of his employment.
It is a shocking story ; and Mr. Lambert, whose sense of injury is abnormally keen, tells it very well. He tells other things that were not in evidence, of colleagues penalised for helping him to finance his action, and of various acts of petty tyranny. One cannot wonder at the sometimes indiscriminate gusto of his criticisms. He fully shares in the general over- estimate of the importance of the B.B.C. He has resigned out of his very dread of the "Leviathan," which he foresees as the destroyer of all cultural individualism. His nightmare seems fantastic to an outsider ; but it must be real indeed to one who has served so long under Sir John Reith.
CHRISTOPHER HOBHOUSE.
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