VERNON BARTLETT
KNOWS HIS POLITICAL BACKGROUND SPENDS MUCH TIME IN " PRESS ROOM " The voice of Vernon Bartlett, one of Britain’s best-known writers and speakers on foreign affairs, is now becoming ns familiar to listeners in the United States and Canada as it has long been to British listeners. For some time he has been contributing twice a week to the news commentary broadcast to North America each day. Years of experience as a newspaper correspondent in France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Italy, and 10 years as London Director of the League of Nations, have given Vernon Bartlett an immense knowledge of the political background of Europe since the last war. As a member of the British House of Commons, and diplomatic correspondent of a London newspaper, he is in a unique position to comment knowledgeably on the news of the day.
To be able to devote sufficient time to the preparation of his broadcasts to North America, Bartlett has cut down his other writing by 50 per cent. Most of the scripts of the talks his listeners
hear are written in either the House of Commons or the Press Room of the Ministry of Information. He used to write some of his material in the library of the House of Commons, but recent “secret sessions ” have made this difficult. Ordinarily, an indicator in the library announces who is speaking in the House, but during a secret session this warning is not given, and Mr Bartlett has grown tired of dashing backwards and forwards between the library and the House in order not to miss an important speech. He now finds it easier to remain in the House.
He gathers much of his information in the Press Room of the Ministry of Information, where he is surrounded by neutral journalists, who are most anxious to help him in supplying and checking his facts. They are, he finds, as anxious as he is to put forward the British case. He is usually to be found in the Press Room about half an hour before his broadcasts, studying the first editions of the morning papers. With his script in a fairly complete state, he arrives at Broadcasting House in time to hear one of the 8.8.p.’s overseas news bulletins and make any altertions that may be necessary before going to the" microphone. He invariably alters his scripts considerably'in the last five minutes before his broadcast.
Bartlett has broadcast in a dozen countries In four languages, but he confesses he finds his present series of broadcasts, in his native language, the mot difficult of all. For now he is broadcasting commentaries, not on the niceties of peacetime diplomacy, but on shattering events affecting the future of civilisation.
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Evening Star, Issue 23693, 28 September 1940, Page 4
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453VERNON BARTLETT Evening Star, Issue 23693, 28 September 1940, Page 4
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