236 240 5.

CHAPTER 5.
INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM

The Ministry's meetings policy in the Northern Ireland Region was developed on entirely different lines to the policy followed in all other Regions under the direction of Public Meetings Section of Home Division. In the first place, with a scattered area largely agricultural and a population definitely not “thick on the ground”, the Ministry did not introduce a panel of regular speakers for Northern Ireland and relied entirely on Headquarters speakers. The Region was very selective in its choice of speakers and although only forty tours were arranged in the period from September, 1940, to May, 1945, it is true to say that the excellent quality of the speakers and the range of subjects chosen by these men and women gave the people of Northern Ireland a comprehensive picture, not only of the progress of the war, but of the varied and often terrible experiences of countries labouring under the shadow of the Swastika and all the time keeping alight the torch of freedom.

Another factor which mitigated against the introduction of a panel of speakers here was the fact that some of the subjects which were dealt with in England, and many of the questions asked by English audiences, would not have been applicable to this part of the United Kingdom, and the Ministry always had to bear in mind here the fact that there was no political truce.

The Region had no fulltime Meetings Officer and two of the senior officers of the Ministry jointly arranged all the speaking tours and undertook all the publicity and advance arrangements necessary to ensure their success. A Senior Officer accompanied every speaker on his tour to maintain the personal contact necessary to ensure the smooth working of the arrangements.

The planning of meetings probably also differed from the system adopted in England for from the early days the Regional Officer made full use of the Ministry's non-theatrical film service. This arrangement proved to be extremely popular with audiences, and although in the first instance it was introduced in order to keep waiting crowds interested, experience justified the use of films as an added draw and as a means of publicity for the film service itself. For instance, experience showed that where interesting films, which. had a connection with the talk to follow, were shown the crowded audiences present for the film shows never walked out of the meeting, and it became common, as the years passed by, for members of the public to enquire whether films were to be shown at public meetings when they were first advertised.

With the advantage of selection the Regional Office took the cream of Headquarters speakers and the weight of these speakers was used in winter, as in an agricultural area the public has little time in summer to spend at public meetings however interesting the speaker or his subject may be.

It was with a certain amount of trepidation that the Regional Office embarked on its first meetings tour, because there was no precedent for similar meetings and there was a complete absence of any evidence to show that the Northern Ireland public was meetings conscious or would, in fact, take kindly to this form of dissemination of war information. Happily the Ministry's first speaking tour was a very great success, due mainly to the fact that Bernard Newman was the first speaker and he came to Ulster with a reputation already made through his travel books and spy stories. Newman, who during the war made five tours in Northern Ireland, was first in the Region in September 1940, and during six days he spoke to over 10,000 people. This figure would have been greatly increased had more meetings been crammed into an already heavy programme, and the reception Newman received greatly encouraged the Ministry to bring back further speakers in the hope that succeeding tours would prove as successful.

Newman gave a war commentary at some meetings and spoke on 237 - 2 -the Fifth Column at others, showing interesting slides. The tour was not without touches of humour. On his first day in Belfast he was speaking at the Headquarters of a Northern Ireland Army District to an audience including the then G.O.C., Sir William Thomson. The talk was at 5 p.m. and H.M. the King was to broadcast at 6. It was, therefore, arranged that Newman's talk should end at a few minutes to six and with the usual military flair for precision it was agreed that the large radio in the room in which Newman was speaking should be switched on at three minutes to six to allow the set time to warm up. Newman arranged his timing perfectly and finished, just after the set had been switched on, with the words “.......and that will be the end of Hitler”. There was a momentary silence and then from the radio came a very reverent “Amen”. This story was recounted in Newman's book “One Man's Year”.

About this time everybody was security conscious, careless talk was a crime and Northern Ireland roads, in common with those in Britain, were dotted with security patrols. On the Wednesday of Newman's tour he spoke at Ballymena, about thirty miles from Belfast, and returned to Belfast by car after the meeting. His subject was the Mediterranean war theatre and to illustrate his talk he made use of a large wall map. This could not be accommodated in the car except by opening the sunshine roof with half the map pointing skyward through it. On the main road back to Belfast road patrols could not understand this weird looking projection and the car was stopped on three occasions for Newman to prove that the offending projectile was nothing more potent than a map.

The meetings record of the Region is most remarkable for the diversity of the speakers. Early in the war several speakers explained the horrors of Nazi domination and among these Dr. Franz Berger (this was not his real name) gave a moving story of life in Dachau concentration camp. Many of the things that Dr. Berger described to crowded audiences in Belfast (there were over 2,000 people in the Grosvenor Hall) were absolutely proved at the end of the war. In the early days of the war it was difficult to make the public realise that the stories our speakers told were the truth. Only the actual films of German concentration camp horrors shown at the end of the war really proved what life in concentration camps had been like for the unfortunate victims. Dr. Berger described his own experiences as a barrister whose only crime was apparently that he had some Jewish blood in his veins. His business in Vienna was confiscated. He spent three years in various concentration camps and was, therefore, an eyewitness of the horrible treatment of his fellow prisoners. Dr. Berger was always violently anti-Nazi and he had a great mission to fortify him in the presentation of his case. And what a story he could have told if he had been prepared to colour it! He did, however, stick to facts and proved the war slogan that the truth would prevail.

The plight of Poland was the subject of Mr. F.B. Czarnomski, who visited the Region in 1942, while in the same year Mr. J.J. Van der Laan, a Dutch editor who spent 24 hours in an open boat in the channel after a miraculous escape from his own country, talked of the Nazi occupation of Holland. Mr. Van der Laan saw the bombing of Rotterdam. He was not united with his wife and family for some time and it was a great relief to him to be able to fly to Lisbon to see them before they left for a safe country.

Although it may seem strange to British ears it was given to a German lady to create the biggest stir in the public meetings field in this Region. She was Frau Irmgard Litten, who visited the Region in the early part of 1943. No other speaker filled the halls to the same extent as Mrs. Litten. In fact, she captured the imagination and interest of audiences in remote towns where other speakers with great reputations had not had successful meetings. The reason was that Frau Litten told a horror story. She was the “mother who fought Hitler” and her son died at the hands of Nazi torturers. Frau Litten was a most likeable person and although she 238 3.repeated word for word her talks on each occasion the great interest of her audiences made the meetings extremely interesting for her escort who would normally have been bored by hearing a repetition of the same speech. Hundreds of people were turned away from Mrs. Litten's meetings as they could not gain admission, and it was the biggest surprise of the Ministry's history that at Armagh, where meetings were always difficult, the same thing should happen. At Portadown and at Ballymena, where great audiences heard Mrs. Litten, fellow Germans and some Austrians, refugees from their own unhappy countries, had interviews with her.

Of the other foreign speakers who addressed Ulster audiences the most romantic and thrilling figures were undoubtedly two young members of a Polish fighter squadron which was posted to Northern Ireland in 1942 for a rest after their strenuous activities in the Battle of Britain. The Ministry throughout the war, at least in this Region, never had an operational R.A.F. pilot as a speaker, but thanks to the good offices of the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland the Ministry of Information secured the “loan” of Flight Lieut. H. Stefankiewicz and Flying Officer Zielonka. It was the Prime Minister's suggestion that members of this squadron should be taken to factories to recount their experiences. Sir Basil Brooke had entertained them at his home and had been enthralled by their experiences. It was a question of getting their release in their off duty hours and, thanks to the co-operation of their Commanding Officer, on only one occasion, and that for a night-shift meeting at a big factory, were these two officers unable to fulfil their engagements. Both spoke very good English with an accent which appealed very much to the factory audiences - especially the girls. Zielonka was quite a young fellow and both he and his colleague were mobbed by factory girls and on one occasion Flying Officer Zielonka lost most of the buttons off his R.A.F. jacket to admiring girls in a war factory.

Stefankiewicz had fought over Warsaw with the only Polish squadrons that opposed the Luftwaffe, and had escaped as one of the few survivors of that heroic band of men who fought for the survival of their own country. Zielonka joined the squadron later as he was at school when Warsaw fell. They both flew Spitfires and they made their experiences over France live when describing them with accompanying gesticulations which captured the hearts of all their audiences. The pilots spoke to nearly 12,000 people at sixteen meetings in seven days and they obviously had a tonic effect on the workers. The chief feature of their tour was a meeting for war workers only in the Ritz Cinema, Belfast, on a Sunday evening. Group Captain K.S. Brake, Chief of Staff at R.A.F. Headquarters, Northern Ireland, introduced the speakers and a special film show was put on afterwards.

For some of the meetings the Ministry had Flying Officer Jim Cornish, a South African who was on crutches, speaking with the Poles. He already had a reputation as a speaker for M.A. P.

Nothing like the enthusiasm shown for these Polish fighter pilots had ever been seen in Northern Ireland factories before. Although they had great charm their stories were so simply told that they carried with them the real spirit of a Poland that was down and almost out but would never die. When the Poles left they took with them memories of a great speaking tour. They had never done anything of the kind before and as “innocents” they broke all records.

The United Kingdom and Empire speakers, service and civilian, all had a vitally interesting story to tell about different phases of total war. Of the Service speakers the most impressive and perhaps the most popular was Lieut. Commander John Irving, who seemed to bring the atmosphere of the North Atlantic crossing to Russia and the difficult Mediterranean runs into the factories where he spoke. Irving, in his naval uniform and rather ample figure, with a heavy beard, had a fund of humour which his 239 4.twinkling eyes betrayed, and he put over his talks in a racy, straight-from-the-shoulder style that was perfectly suitable to Northern Ireland audiences. He was most effective with war workers who always seemed to have a soft spot for men in uniform, and when he addressed a night shift meeting at a big Belfast factory the audience sang a famous naval song after their continued rounds of applause.

Lieutenant, later Captain, Howard Coulter, of the Canadian Army, made two tours and spoke about Canada, and Colonel Rhys Davies, D.S.O. , was one of the most successful speakers ever to visit Northern Ireland. He spoke about the Far East and his own experiences as a stand-in gunner on a merchant ship crossing during the bad times from the new world to the old.

Some speakers had amazing experiences to relate. Major H. G. Buck, a young officer in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, described how his watch in his breast pocket saved his life when he was shot by a German sniper in North Africa.

Later in the war Captain Collett, M.C., brought a great picture of the fighting in Burma, at Imphal and on the Tiddim Road, to Belfast audiences. At his suggestion a mass meeting sent a message to General Sir William Slim congratulating the 14th Army in which many Ulstermen served. Collett did more to create interest in the Far East war than any other speaker who visited the Region.

Ulster people always showed a deep interest in naval affairs and the Merchant Navy had a special place in their affection. The story of the Merchant Navy at war was dealt with by several speakers, chief of them being Mr. Kenneth Cooke, George Medallist, whose experiences in the South Atlantic on a raft with his colleagues dying around him moved audiences all over the United Kingdom. Lieutenant Thompson, R.N., also spoke of the work of the Merchant Navy and all our Royal Navy speakers included in their talks well deserved tributes to that service.

There were several more academic speakers, including Sir Ronald Storrs, Harold Gibson, Chester Williams, who spoke on aspects of American life, Brian Goddard and Professor Arthur Newell, whose work for Anglo-American relations is known to a far wider field than Northern Ireland.

A very successful tour of a special nature was undertaken by Mayor Earl Riley of Portland, Oregon, who met representatives of local authorities and interested them all with his accounts of American home life and civic affairs.

A vivid picture of the trials of Malta, the George Cross Island, was given by Lt. General Sir William Dobbie, who visited Ulster accompanied by his wife, and addressed crowded meetings, the largest of which was at the Assembly Hall, Belfast.

Our youngest speakers were King's Scouts, John Bethel and Hugh Bright, who came to talk of their experiences in America.

This sketchy survey by no means covers the extent of meetings work in this Region and it does not capture even in a small measure the enthusiasm with which most of the speakers were received by a deeply interested public. Throughout the war the Ministry has very great assistance from the officers of local authorities who helped the Ministry by displaying posters and in most cases lent the Ministry halls free of charge. The Ministry was always well supported by members of the local councils and particularly at Londonderry there was always a distinguished platform party to receive our speakers. Londonderry started as one of the weakest places for public meetings but ended the war in a blaze of glory with a minimum attendance at meetings far above that in most other places.

One of the great developments of the meetings service was the introduction of war workers’ meetings in the Ritz Cinema, Belfast, on Sundays. The Ministry learned from experience to admit war workers by ticket only. Our first meeting, open to all war workers on production of works passes, was almost a fiasco for about 6,000 people turned up to hear Bernard Newman in a cinema that has a maximum capacity of just over 2,000. Nothing more serious happened than one broken glass panel in the door. Audiences everywhere were well behaved and this particular one was no exception. Voluntary stewards on that occasion had a really difficult job controlling the crowds.

Looking back it can be said that the Ministry's meetings achieved their obvious purpose in presenting the many-sided war activities of the free nations in a clear and admirable form that the man-in-the-street could easily understand. Allied to films the meetings filled a real need in this Region where at first the Regional staff thought the public were not meetings conscious.

The success that was attained in the speaking tours was due to astute advance publicity and planning and most of all to the willing and generous co-operation of the local authorities. The vast majority of the local authorities lent their town halls. The Mayors and chairmen of councils presided and voluntary stewards were always forthcoming. Any Ministry of Information speaker will always remember that at Portadown he could never get away without first being very hospitably entertained by the Council, and at other towns, too, the Ministry visitors were always the happy victims of traditional Ulster hospitality.