UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Public Relations
By J. B. -BROADBENT (University of Edinburgh) WE are told the novel is in a decline and the poetic drima not yet out of its second childhood. For entertainment some people turn to the cinema, some to the news- papers, others to Debrett. My own choice is Whitaker's Almanack ; so I was flattered, but self-confident, when, asked to act as a Press officer for seven days. True, the function I had to publicise was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—and I, after three years of reading English, remember nothing of science save the phrase " tangent elevation ,plus cross-levelling," a ghost of naval mysteries. But Whitaker would be at my.side. Those opening pages of astrology had always fascinated me ; the agriculture and fishery statistics were at my finger-tips ; and a quick look through the eighteen supplementary pages on " Science, Discovery and Invention, 1950," bolstered my assurance. .
Moreover, my colleagues were men of like ignorance with me. The Association has a permanent London staff of about four ; but the annual meetings, always in a different place, are arranged in their detail by natives of the honoured township. In Edin- burgh the local executive was headed by an academic adminis- trator who is chartered as an accountant and must, therefore, be ablito count ; but his major qualifications are in classics', law and languages. His lieutenant had indeed plumbed the depths of logarithms and radar during the war, but he was really a human geographer. The third man had read English, and just come back Italy, where Michelangelo seems to have im- pressed him more than Galileo. So we made a team of laymen so far as science is concerned, with the arts man's absurd con- fidence that practical affairs are child's play compared with Greek syntax. I don't know about the others, but my own ignorance was a great help. The reporters and I worked on the assumption that anything we could grasp the great. British public would under-_. stand perfectly.; with the result that even such an unpromising subject as Synthetic Polymers yielded headlines to the sub- editor's sickle. .
My work began, of course, a fortnight before I was ready for • it. I soon learned that the reporting of a large event such as this meeting, though arduous, was more a matter of slick routine in the Press bureau than a human ferreting expedition. Press handouts of enormous length were prepared, digested in half an hour ind became newspaper columns the net morning. My own occasional attempts at Personality Items sometimes appeared, five days later, as obscure fill-ups. It was impossible for each of the fifty papers represented at the meeting to have a man at each of the three hundred-odd lectures ; so I wrote a few summaries from texts provided by the speakers, and thus became a contri- butor to The Times. But the majority of the speakers wrote their own summaries—sometimes with disastrous results, for they did not always stick to the book. We found, too, that scientists are shocking bad at precis-writing: most of them wrote too much, too technically, for us. But a few, fancying themselves as jour- nalists, struck off headlines for their own lectures, and wrote summaries too racy for the most shameless publication to use.
However, it was the scientists' affair, and the reporting of their deliberations was always accurate within the limits of experi- mental error. The whole Press (including the Daily Worker) took things seriously, giving balanced and unhysterical cover- age to everything said or done at the meeting that was likely to be of interest to their readers. Personally, I had never heard of the British Association before • but I gathered its meetings have been an important event for the Press since 1831. Even if August were not the close season for news, the meeting would still be given its fair share of publicity—rather more than the proceedings of the British Academy, for instance. Literature is Art ; science is News: so my job was simply to keep the flow' of paper in check and answer questions. There was the American newsman in a quandary : how to address an Aus- tralian knight bachelor who was a professor in medicine and - a dean of faculty? Whitaker gave us the answer, of course. There were scientific young ladies to whom the glamour of the ' Press bureau' was irresistible, and they had to be given a few sheets of paper and a gentle shove. And there were, of course. the hundred and thirty reporters themselves—but they were the least"of my worries. Not one asked a silly question, or—what would have been understandable—spoke a harsh word.
I revised my superior undergraduate opinion of the gentlemen of the Press. On serious occasions like this, at least, they are not all drunk all of the time, nor does their language approach that of a medical student for obscenity. There were, naturally, characters in my bureau : the occasional very young reporter. striving to be transatlantic, licking his lips for a scoop and refusing to take anything at face-value. There was the caricature of an American Pressman, who knew what his head- line had to be, and, say, where's the atomic physicist that'll say it for me, ugh? There were`one or two Very Important Press- men, exceptions to the general rule of humorous humility. And there were the gossip columnists, a kindly, gentle crew who wore funny hats and asked a lot of questions without waiting for the answers. But all " mortal men, Hal, mortal men." able to read and write faster than most, but not ashamed to stumble over the spelling of " mammalian." . With the help of Whitaker, my secretary and the speakers' summaries, they typed, 'phoned and Pitmanned into the papers about a quarter of a million words. But I was surprised to discover that so many public speeches on purely social occasions are reported in the same way. It certainly helps the newspapers to have a copy of what is going to be said before the party starts ; but it rather flattens the flavour of an after- dinner speech to know it's already being printed in Fleet Street five hundred miles away. And it was over the social occasions alone that the reporters revealed their notorious cynicism. I didn't blame them—nor was there anything else to blame them for. So when, on the last day of the meeting, I overheard two scientists slating the Press, I could no longer, as of old, join in the merry Morrison-game. Every day for seven days I had read all the national papers and a good many locals ; I knew that there is at least one paper to suit every taste, and those who condemn their paper condemn themselves. The scientists' (I think geology was their subject, not a very inspiring one) complained that the Press had sensationalised trivialities, and entirely overlooked a fascinating lecture on the probable age of the lower iglooite. I listened, and found they were judging the whole Press by the two papers they had bought—la local daily written mainly for women and a national daily written specifically for one not very enquiring section of the political public.. • I went back again to my Press Bureau, where the slanderous, impertinent, vulgar and unscrupulous reporters were packing up to go. I was sorry indeed to see them leave. Immured behind my desk, defended by the deadly rattle of typewriters and the ceaseless flow of questions, I had seen nothing of the meeting itself or its scientists.. That did not worry me very much, though I understand it was all a great success—or so the, papers said.
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