MEETINGS

In April of 1940 a questionnaire was sent to 390 factories in the Region, in preparation for a campaign of outdoor meetings. Favourable replies were received from employers and the advice and assistance of T.U.C. officials were sought. During the following month, forty meetings were arranged and held. During the same month the first meetings to organisations such as Rotary Clubs were organised.

The first large-scale public meeting was held in April at the Corn Exchange, Leicester, and was addressed by the Rt. Hon. Walter Elliott.

In addition to speakers sent down from Headquarters, a panel of suitable persons in the Region was formed and were used by the Department.

Before a Meetings Officer was appointed much of the organisation of speakers’ programmes fell to the R.I.O. and Committee Officer. Very quickly it was discovered that some parts of the Region were more “meetings conscious” than others, and a great problem was to find a suitable hall vacant. Highly successful meetings were held in Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln and Peterborough, and amongst the first visiting speakers to the Region were M. Saurat, Sir Paul Dukes, Mr. Bernard Newman, Mr. John Hilton and M. Andre Maurois.

From the first, personal contact was made with factory managements and arrangements were made for the addresses of speakers to be heard by some members of the Regional Staff.

When a Meetings Officer was appointed the Department began expanding its activities to cover the whole of the Region more adequately - steps were taken to circularise all societies in the district which held meetings, asking whether they were prepared to take speakers from the M.O.I. An immediate response was received.

An early scheme undertaken in Nottingham was to organise meetings in local parish halls for women living in the poorer districts. Speakers were provided to talk on self-help in air-raids and discussion was encouraged.

By mid-summer, 1940, Local Information Committees were meeting in the larger towns of the Region. These Committees formed Meetings Sub-Committees which undertook to circularise organisations and factories in their areas to ascertain where Ministry speakers would be welcomed.

During the summer months a loud-speaker tour of Nottinghamshire covered colliery and agricultural areas. Three meetings a day were averaged and audiences varied from 100 to 1200. A fair estimate of the total number of direct listeners was 15,000 and in mining districts, particularly, almost every inhabitant, whether at the meeting or not, would be aware of some point made by the speakers. Similar tours were organised for other Counties in the Region.

In September, 1940, there was begun an Autumn series of M.O.I. talks for Notts. villages run in conjunction with film shows organised by the Notts. Rural Community Council. Requests were received at this time from organisations, many of them women's societies, for informative talks on Coal, Food and Salvage. The requests were satisfactorily met with the help of local speakers who were authorities on their subject. Distinguished speakers visited public schools in the Region during the winter months.

Meetings during the winter of 1940 were seriously handicapped by air raid alerts which frequently sounded at about 6 p.m. and continued for as long as nine hours. A public meeting, for instance, arranged for Mr. Kenneth Lindsay, M.P., in Nottingham on December 13th, was badly attended because of an alert. The audience present, however, was obviously stimulated by Mr. Lindsay's provocative address. Where possible meetings were arranged to take place during the hours of daylight. It was for instance, possible to hold a highly successful women's meeting in Leicester during a December afternoon, addressed by Miss Margaret Bondfield. On this occasion the hall was crowded.

By April, 1941, large audiences were again attracted by meetings arranged by the M.O.I. On April 6th Mr. Herbert Morrison addressed 2,000 people at the Albert Hall, Nottingham. The audience was representative of all classes of the community and it was clearly 137 -3-evident that the Home Secretary's matter-of-fact style and undramatic delivery was popular.

From this time onwards until the end of 1944 the Meetings Department steadily expanded and the number of all types of meeting, public, factory, voluntary societies, etc., continued to increase. After the arrival of American troops in the area an additional branch of the work, which was treated as priority, was the provision of speakers to American camps, hospitals and Red Cross clubs.

Distinguished speakers who visited the Region during these years included;-Rt.Hon. A.V. Alexander, Mr. Ernest Bevin, Lord Elton, Mr. Anthony Eden, Sir Gervaise Rentoul, Mr. Arthur Bryant, and Brigadier Irwin, Chief of Staff to General Slim. All aspects of the war were covered by speakers who visited the Region. There were fighting men of all the Services, merchant seamen, refugees from allied nations, fighters of the Resistance Movements, Americans, and prominent lecturers regarded as authorities on countries engaged directly or indirectly in the struggle for Freedom.

Sir Gervais Rentoul and Mr. Arthur Bryant conducted a series of War Commentaries. This type of meeting was very popular and the speakers attracted large regular audiences. Disappointment was expressed when the series came to an end and the speakers were no longer available.

During 1945, the policy of the Ministry having changed, speakers are less numerous than in the past which means that the demand far exceeds the supply and many voluntary organisations can no longer be given the service they received in the past. During the summer of 1945, after the cessation of hostilities in Europe, a most successful type of meeting was those addressed by SEAC speakers. Their work was particularly valuable and widely appreciated when they followed the address by private interviews to relations of men who were serving in the Far East. Many unnecessary fears were allayed by this means.

One of the most spectacular functions organised by the Ministry was Red Army Day, 1943. The parade and concert held in Leicester 138 -4-was the biggest celebration of the Day in the British Isles outside the show staged at the Albert Hall, London. Russian Embassy representatives visited Leicester for the occasion; the military sub-area assisted with the composition and marshalling of the procession and organised the attendance of Service personnel for the pageant inside the hall; the programme items included the Dagenham Girls Pipers, Mary Jarred and Robert Easton, Esmond Knight, and the famous speech of Alexander Nevsky was declaimed by Robert Donat. The Day was an unqualified success.

The Meetings Department has always played an important part in campaigns organised by various Government Departments, particularly in the recruitment of women workers for munitions and in the “Battle for Fuel” Campaign.