VITRIOLIC REBUKE TO NOEL COWARD

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 39, 12 January 1945, Page 5

VITRIOLIC REBUKE TO NOEL COWARD

CRITICISM ANSWERED BY BRITISH PRESS Noel Coward "bought" the severest. drubbing of his career at the hands of John Gordon Editor of the * • "Sunday Express," by gratuitously charging the British Press in a broadeast with the responsibility of leaving unrecognised the 14th British Army, now nicknamed the* "Forgotten Army J" "If Coward instead of blathering about his own travels had set himself to tell the deeds of that great army," he declared ■ "lie would have found as every newspaper editor has found, that there is a censorship in India which would very quickly have gagged his mouth. "He would also have found that the. reason why the world regards the Far Eastern war as an American war, although the 14th Army has met and killed more Japs than, al": the American forces put together, is that the Americans know their business of publicising.

"He would have found that the reason lor Britain's failure is because Coward's powerful friends— the pre-war Blimps in India, the same type that cost us Malay and Burma and may, if not eventually cost us India as well—regard the war there as their private business." , Altogether Gordon gave Coward I four columns of bittingly vitriolic ' castigation which set Fleet Street | chuckling for Final touch was I the injunction to Coward to take his own advise—turn over and try to sleep ! Incidentally the appointment - of Brigadier Desmond Young former Editor of the Pioneer India as Di•3 J rector of Public Relations in India, may effect an improvement. He has a close knowledge of Press requirements and will definitely co-operate. Already he has had a picturesque career in this. war. Brigadier Young was in the Ethiopian and Syrian campaigns and was captured by the French, but was I suesequently freed only to he recaptured in 1942, by German tanks in the western desert. After escaping from an Italian prison, he entered Switzerland and conducted a weekly newspaper entitled Marking Time 5 for prisoners of war.