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CENTRALISED PUBLICITY

In creating a Ministry of Information the Government must have intended, to some extent at least, to have produced a central organ for the handling of official publicity. That such an intention was never fully realised is plain from the fact that no impediment was placed in the way of each Government Department creating or developing considerable public relations staffs of its own throughout the course of the war. I have already dealt with the arrangements with regard to news, which were in fact the negation of any centralised system, I now come to the arrangements with regard to publicity, in which field a great deal more progress was achieved. I am speaking of publicity inside this country. With regard to overseas publicity, the responsibility for which was attributed from the first to the Ministry of Information - there never should have been any question. Putting aside the failure to form any clear conception of the different functions or range of operation of the British Council and the Ministry of Information the handling of all official publicity overseas, other than the minimum of public relations work, should have been left to the Ministry of Information. So, in effect, it was. The only areas in which any difficulties of principle appeared were America and those territories, such as the Middle East or Western Europe, in which large forces of British troops were located for considerable periods of time.

In America the reason for some manifestations of separate Departmental activity was the fact that for a large part of the war the British Government Departments overflowed into American territory. Their American relationships were so important to their total activity and they themselves were so closely and directly connected with their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic that they found that they were forced into an immediate intimacy with the problems of British publicity in America. This was true not only of the Service Departments but of Departments such as Production, Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Treasury. The result was the appearance in Washington of public relations officers attached to the various Missions and pursuing their own special lines of interest without any proper co-ordination under one directing head. So far as practical results went they did not achieve 71 - 70 -much. They had no means of doing so except by working through the B.I.S. which alone possessed an organisation of sufficient volume and weight to make any sensible impact upon the American public. The trouble with these separate officers was not their presence, which was capable of being turned to useful ends, but their lack of a definite relationship with the B.I.S. or a proper subordination to the head representative of British publicity in that territory. This was not our fault. It was the fault of the Treasury in allowing these posts to be created without fitting them into a proper system. In this, as in other respects, we were victims of the absence of any general theory in the Treasury as to the functions of the Ministry of Information as an organ of central publicity. Since these separate representatives never amounted to more than a handful at any one time no greater harm was done than the generation of a certain amount of unnecessary friction in the U.S.A. So far as the Service Departments went their publicity people grouped themselves for a time into a Committee under the Chairmanship of Major-General Beaumont Nesbitt, ex-Military Attaché , and Beaumont Nesbitt's relations with the B.I.S. Office in the Embassy and with our office in New York were sufficiently harmonious and useful to make this a workable system, Mr. Butler, as Minister, held a nominal suzerainty over the publicity representatives of all British Government Departments in America, but I do not know that this meant much in execution. There is, of course, no objection to representatives of different Departments being attached to the B.I.S. in America for the purpose of aiding and guiding them in publicity operations that concern the special subjects of those Departments, (indeed it would be advantageous) but I have no doubt that nothing but confusion will result if those representatives are allowed to pursue their publicity independently and their incorporation into the B.I.S. machine is allowed to remain nominal rather than real. We came to quite satisfactory arrangements with the India and Burma Offices about their special representatives which gave effect to this principle, and the Supply Council (or Production) P.R.I, ultimately settled down with our people. Not so M.E.W. Beaumont Nesbitt's creation, the Inter-Services Publicity Committee, was disbanded during the time of his successor, Air Marshal McNeece Foster, owing to an indiscretion 72 - 71 -which he committed and a general feeling of misgiving in the War Cabinet whether this Committee was serving any useful or proper function. I think that it well might have been, but the representatives of the Service Departments in Washington were not instructed properly by their Departmental authorities at home to regard themselves for all working purposes as part of the overseas publicity machine and we never got the advantages that we ought to have from their presence.

The Admiralty have a special problem on their hands now in America in trying to establish a branch there to receive process and handle news of the Navy's part in the Pacific War. So far as their relations with our people go we have a satisfactory understanding which is not unreasonable in the special conditions, but I doubt if they have quite realised at this end the immense difficulty of getting worthwhile results from what they are doing.

The other case, which is the case of a local public relations problem forced upon British forces located in foreign territories, is quite a different one and I do not think that by and large there was anything that called for criticism. Egypt and its surroundings were in the nature of things the territory in which the Army and Air Force, albeit inadvertently, took the largest share of local publicity. Not only had they their own local public relations to consider and promote but they had also the problem of providing information and publicity for their forces. The production of papers and magazines for this purpose naturally affected the publicity of the country in which they were situated. A magazine like “Parade”, for instance, was of significance not only to the British troops but to the local inhabitants of the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean. No doubt the Armed Forces, who could always dispose of a luxury of personnel and equipment for publicity purposes that we sighed for in vain, did a good deal of work all over the Middle East that might, at any rate, equally well have been done by the Ministry of Information in the name of overseas publicity. But the causes of this were genuine ones that arose out of the special circumstances and I think that we should always find them reproducing themselves under similar conditions. In the end we profited by it, since as the tide of military interest in the Middle East 73 - 72 -began to recede a number of soldiers who had been engaged in the Army's local publicity services were released or seconded to take up service in our posts and thus provided a welcome reinforcement.

I do not propose in this note to speak of the integrated Anglo- American “Psychological Warfare” organisations that were a product of the Anglo-American Armies in French North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Western Europe. They marked an intermediate stage between the combat period itself and the period when the national information services, such as ourselves and the Office of War Information, could begin to implement our separate duties of publicity in the territories concerned. I have no doubt that they were an unavoidable form of organisation to suit the period that they were designed to fill but I never freed myself of a doubt whether they did not greatly over-organise and over-staff the elaborate activities into which they projected themselves.

I come back, then, to the place of the Ministry of Information as an organ of centralised official publicity at home. First, I will put out of the picture two systems of official publicity with which we had little to do. One was the National Savings movement and the other was the Ministry of Food. In course of time we came to co-ordinate the demands for Press advertising space for these bodies as well as other Government Departments. But apart from this and a rather vague general supervision by us of the “morale” side of National Savings advertisements, those two bodies conducted their publicity throughout the war without control or substantial assistance from ourselves. The National Savings movement's arguments for remaining entirely on its own were probably good. It had had a large pre-war organisation for all forms of publicity built up from voluntary workers over many years: it would need the support of the same sort of organisation when the war was over and the Ministry of Information would have disappeared. To break the links therefore during the war and put itself in the hands of a professional intermediary such as the Ministry might disrupt its whole publicity system. Given therefore the arrangement, which it reluctantly conceded but cordially observed, that its demands on Press advertising space should be co-ordinated through the Ministry, its case for abstention was valid. The Ministry of Food based itself principally on the historical fact 74 - 73 -that in the early days of the war it had developed a fully integrated staff for handling its essential campaigns, that these campaigns were continuous and highly specialised and that neither public advantage nor saving of personnel would result from the Ministry taking over the handling of its campaigns, as we proposed to do in 1941. It had a good practical case because it was doing its job very well and we should probably have done it no better. But the principle of centralised publicity was ignored in this issue for no really sufficient reason. Any Government Department that has any continuous relationship with the public and is much concerned with publicity could have argued the same. The Ministry of Fuel and Power did so argue most vigorously when they saw in 1942 that large publicity campaigns would always be with them but we successfully resisted their efforts to break away and work independently.

These instances apart, it was the Ministry's function to handle the domestic publicity of any Government Department when that publicity reached sufficient intensity and volume to be organised as a campaign. Obviously, Departments that were allowed by the Treasury to accumulate quite considerable public relations staffs of their own would be engaged in the small current exchange of publicity without seeking or needing the Ministry's intervention; but when they wished to go further and employ the organised media of publicity that can only be purchased by money it was the practice that the proposals for such a campaign should be worked out in collaboration with the Ministry and, if the Ministry of Information agreed that the project could usefully be served by a campaign of publicity in a form which it approved, the budget for the money required was submitted by the Ministry to the Treasury to be undertaken as an allied or agency service on behalf of the originating Department. This was a good system so long as the Ministry was strong enough and expert enough to reject or to amend the Departmental schemes. After 1941, with the addition of two practical experts of the quality of Royds and Buxton to the Ministry's staff working in this branch, I think that we were in this position. I do not know whether the Treasury realised the amount of Departmental proposals that we rejected outright or substantially cut down after that time.

To handle this work effectively we created a separate division, the Campaigns Division, out of a nucleus of staff which had previously been attached to the General Production Division. We also created in the Regional Offices special posts for campaigns and exhibition work to ensure that a national campaign was not only organised centrally but also actively promoted through local organisations. But the work of the Campaigns Division was primarily managerial, and our power to attract and retain without complaint the management of other Departments’ publicity depended upon our ability to produce results in the various media employed that would be more successful than if our clients had operated alone. It was our policy therefore to make sure that in the specialised production divisions that the Campaigns Division had to draw upon we should reach a high level of technical excellence. The Divisions principally concerned for this purpose were Exhibitions, Publications, Films, Photographs and General Production.

A modern publicity campaign has many media to operate in and it can organise or stimulate contributions to its purpose in all sorts of ways. The advantage of having an expert central body controlling official publicity is that much experience imparts to it a healthy scepticism about the effectiveness of many forms of publicity display and, if invested with sufficient authority, such a body is a restraining force in the face of impulsive Departmental plans.

The first and most sought-after medium is Press advertising, the process by which the Government purchases at commercial rates a portion of space in the advertising columns of the various newspapers. The general tendency of Government Departments is to want to use advertising for more purposes and for wider coverage of papers than the circumstances really justify. In truth, advertising is still an advertisement even if placed by the Government and it is as such that it will be read and reacted to. A clear understanding of this considerably limits the range of material for which the Government should purchase advertising space. Incidentally, at no time during the war did the Government enjoy any special legal right of obtaining space and it is not inherently a popular customer owing to the fact that its demands are voluminous but short-lived. By 1941 the advertisement managers of the Press were becoming very much dissatisfied both with the kind of material with which the Government wished to fill their precious space and with the impossibility of working out any priority on their own among the competing space claims of 76 - 75 -various Departmental campaigns. If we had not successfully constituted ourselves from that time on as the co-ordinator of all Government campaign demands for advertising and the revising critic of the content of the advertisements and their applicability to the various kinds of papers and periodicals asked for, I think that the system would have broken down and the papers would have insisted on some organised rationing system of their own. The blind buying of space for Government campaigns is the mark of an unskilful technique, since the best organised campaign relying on stimulation of free editorial publicity through the making of news and assistance for “features” has the whole extent of the newspaper to express itself in and not merely the paid advertisement spaces. But it takes an expert body with really good contacts in Fleet Street and among the regional Press to get such results.

There is no point in reviewing in detail the other instruments that we were able to use to implement a campaign. Fashions and conditions change and quite a different set-up might be appropriate a few years hence. There were posters, for which we held several thousand sites on behalf of His Majesty's Government. There was radio, for which we organised a special liaison with the B.B.C. when questions of implementing campaigns arose. The B.B.C. were very ready to help in implementing approved Government campaigns through all their services but they liked to be approached regularly and in good order through one Government channel. There were films, though difficulties of production and timing made us conclude that only the most long term and continuous Government campaigns could be implemented in terms of films, if anything more than trailers or flashes was wanted. There were exhibitions and displays. Exhibitions were an art which we took up and developed to a high pitch in the service of official publicity. They proved particularly well suited to the kind of objective and informative approach that we favoured by policy and we were lucky to have the services of designers of great skill. Finally, though not exhaustively, the Publications Division were able to include a great deal of explanatory campaign material in the service of feature articles that they distributed to the Provincial Press.

One or two points in connection with the technical side of Press advertising require notice. Prior to the outbreak of war Government 77 - 76 -Departments, who had placed their advertising by separate negotiation with the Press, were brought into one scheme by the Treasury so far as related to the fixing of the rates charged. The effect of it was to give the official advertiser a slight beneficial reduction of rate at the expense of the commercial customer, but on condition that the Government Department recognised the advertising agents’ right to full commission at an agreed percentage instead of the varying and reduced percentages which individual Departments had sometimes extracted from the agents in the past.

Secondly, the selection of advertising agents to handle Government campaigns became a crucial matter during the war, since with the pressure of its campaigns the Government patronage became enormous and, apart from that, the right of agencies to have staff reserved from call-up depended according to the Ministry of Labour on the amount of work that the agency could show it had undertaken in Government campaigns. This apparently was the theory, though it seems to me a bad one, The selection of agents to handle business became therefore a valuable piece of patronage and we ourselves had to rely for the control of our work in this field on two men who had left prominent places in the advertising world to join the Ministry and would return to them again. It was obviously unfair to them to leave them with the onus of such a position. Accordingly, the Ministry formed an Advisory Committee drawn originally from leading business firms who were big advertisers and supplemented later by representatives of the National and Provincial Press. This Committee was entrusted with the responsibility of nominating agents for particular campaigns and of renewing or changing agents according to performance and the wishes of the Departments concerned. This arrangement worked happily and successfully and, so far as I know, prevented any substantial discontent in the advertising world.

3. So far I have been dealing with that form of publicity which can be characterised as a campaign. It is obvious, however, that with numerous Government Departments all equipped not only with political heads but with public relations branches of varying size, official publicity as a whole would benefit if co-ordinated control could be applied so that the numerous questions on which more than one Department was directly concerned could be invested with a common publicity policy and those general canons of publicity approach which lie behind all separate expressions could be 78 - 77 -agreed and enforced as a general code of Governmental practice. It would seem that one of the most important tasks of centralised publicity must lie in achieving this and the conception of a Ministry of Information is surely the conception of centralised official publicity?

Yet how was this to be achieved? Was the Minister of Information, though admittedly not a member of the War Cabinet, to be primus inter pares among all other Ministers on all questions of publicity? I could never see any sign that the Prime Minister intended to allot any such status to the Minister of Information except in the small question of broadcasts by Ministers. Where broadcasts by Ministers not in the War Cabinet were concerned the Minister of Information's recommendation to the Prime Minister was a necessary preliminary. Yet if the Minister of Information was not to have this status among his colleagues it is difficult to see how his Department was to obtain it among the officials who were their opposite numbers in other Departments. Such progress as ever was made to achieve a solution of this question took place during the summer of 1941. It resulted partly from inter-Departmental negotiation on an amicable level and partly from those agitations about the Ministry's status to which I have made several allusions elsewhere and which resulted in the Prime Minister's paper that was intended to define the functions of the Ministry.

So far as that Paper went the Prime Minister apparently conceived the public relations officers of other Departments as having a dual relationship, one to their own Minister to whose staff they belonged and another more general relationship to the Minister of Information. They were to act as a “team under the Chairmanship of the Minister of Information furthering the purposes and policy of that Ministry.”

Personally I do not think that this idea of a dual responsibility is capable of being realised in practice. Under the conditions of today the Departmental public relations officer works in very close contact with his Minister and it is difficult for him to vouch the authority of another Minister or another Department in accounting for his work in a field in which his Minister remains directly responsible to Parliament. Most Ministers take a keen personal interest in the publicity of their Department: keener, generally, than that of their chief permanent officials. It is one thing to make all Departmental public relations officers part 79 - 78 -of the staff of the Minister of Information and to regard them as only out posted in the Departments - an arrangement which I have urged before as the only one likely to realise adequately the purposes of a centralised policy control of official publicity. But short of that, I think that it needs more than the “team spirit” to prevent the separate public relations branches working in effect on their own, except when, as in campaigns, control is conferred by the time honoured British device of control of the purse strings.

We did have some large meetings of Directors of Public Relations in the Ministry in 1941 under Ministry chairmanship. But such meetings lacked immediacy and Mr. Bracken took a sceptical view of even their theoretical utility. So we concentrated on sub-Committees on ad hoc issues. But these though useful, were really inter-Departmental meetings to discuss and plan campaigns, which we should have had the determining voice in anyway. Apart from this, there was no atmosphere of hostility between other Departments and the M.O.I. in this field. There were plenty of direct exchanges, formal and informal, and plenty of opportunities for friendly discussion of publicity points. With our expert staff and large scale facilities it was inevitable that D.P.R.'s should resort to us for assistance in work that they lacked the means or the skill to carry out themselves. In this way, it resulted that we acquired influence even though there was no centralised control.

In 1941 there were two separate groups of D.P.R.'s working in committee outside the Ministry. One was a group who met to discuss the publicity problems of home defence under the Chairmanship of Home Security. The other was a group formed from Departments interested in industrial publicity. It seemed to us inconsistent with any ordered system that these questions of inter-Departmental publicity should be discussed in the absence of the M.O.I. and we successfully challenged such arrangements as a matter of principle. It was agreed that M.O.I. representatives should be added to each Committee and that the M.O.I. as the central agency should furnish the secretaries. Existing chairmen were not to be disturbed, but no future groups of this kind should come into existence except under M.O.I. chairmanship. This position we successfully maintained thereafter.

The Home Defence Group had little more left to discuss. But the Industrial Publicity Committee went on for a long time under various forms, never, as it seemed to us, achieving any very useful results. In this case, I think, Departmental jealousies were stultifying, and, as we were dealing with a highly specialised branch of publicity in which two or three supply Departments controlled the outlets, central policy control that was not readily accepted was a waste of time. These difficulties were much less noticeable in the Regions where other Departments were readier to turn to the M.O.I. as the natural centre of official publicity and some quite useful work in the field of industrial publicity was achieved by localised working in this way.

I do not look back on this failure to achieve a central Government publicity as a disaster. It was a failure certainly, and the Ministry of Information did not reach the position which the Prime Minister's Memorandum had intended it to occupy. But to reach it needed a radical change of organisation rather than mandate without new organisation. The give and take system did not work badly after the various publicity branches settled down to an appreciation of the truth that official publicity has an expertise of its own and that to succeed in it a man must forget as much as he remembers of previous publicity training in other and different spheres.