LOSS TO JOURNALISM BUT GAIN TO THE BBC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 237, 7 January 1944, Page 8

LOSS TO JOURNALISM BUT GAIN TO THE BBC

"Profile" OF W. J. Maley. From The | London "Observer"

HEN the BBC announced that William John Haley had been appointed to the new post of Editor-in-Chief, they described him as joint managing director of the Manchester Guardian, and a director of Reuters. Another qualification for the editorship of the BBC they omitted: Haley is a working journalist, the Editor of the Manchester Evening News. For 21 years he has been sensing, observing, and guiding public tastes and opinions throughout an area bounded by the Lake District and mid-Wales, and containing the greatest concentration of people in this country. He is as shrewd a businessman as there is in that region of hard bargainers; but first he is a journalist, and it is his journalistic skill, in the widest sense, that the BBC is to employ. Haley has lived half his life in Manchester, He is a bilingual Jersey man, but some of his ancestors came from Yorkshire, and have bequeathed him the gifts of caution and stubborn will to discipline his Gallic heritage of romanticism and élan. * * * [N the last war he sailed most of the oceans as a wireless operator, and had the usual narrow escapes. Then he read The Street of Adventure, and decided to become a journalist. The best paper, he was told, was The Times, and with the ingenuous boldness of youth he offered to them his services. The Times gave him a near-journalistic job taking

copy over the telephone, and before long he and the gir! he married were in Brussels, running for that newspaper a news receiving and dispatch bureau. As a sideline, he wrote a weekly Brussels letter for the Manchester Evening News and was invited to join their reporting staff. This was his real start in journalism, " and Carl Fallas, a comradely and philosophic reporter who was later to write The Wooden Pillow, was made his mentor. Haley likes to add to the legend that he was not a good reporter. Actually, he had not time to find out. Within a week or two there was an opening in the sub-editors’ room, and he was transferred. He was a brilliant success; during the next few months, a

series of accidents left the chief subeditor’s chair vacant, and Haley was promoted to it. Since then, he has travelled swiftly. He was next made news editor, an athletic job, which he performed from a room that did not contain a chair, but only a breast-high reading-desk. Within a few years, he was managing editor, which meant in that office business manager and editor. His next rewards were the secretaryship of the company and a seat on the board which controls both the evening paper and the Manchester Guardian. Those who worked with Haley in this period will never forget it: He had a desk in each department and a timetable which showed where he was working at any particular hour. It was not long before he had a complete grasp of the working of every department. He even memorised the publisher’s lengthy list of train times. ms * ‘THE editorial staff arrived at 8.0:a.m. They left him working on at 6.0 p.m. His lunch was a glass of milk and a bun. His relaxation was a game of table tennis, which he played with a cunning left hand. Occasionally, he played chess and cricket. In these games, as in everything he did, he went all out to win. All new skills and new (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) learning he seemed to acquire with ease-all except one. He has never been able to conquer golf. Every day of one holiday he submitted himself to the tuition of Percy Alliss, but his drive’ was not much longer at the end than at the beginning. His putting is, however, almost professional. As Haley mastered the technical side of his job and accomplished a series of re-organisations, he found some time to write. Under the Borrovian pseudonym of Joseph Sell he wrote a weekly book article which showed a breadth. of reading rare even in the whole-time critic. All his reading was done ‘before or after long hours at the office. One year he read 252 books, It was typical that to write an article on Norman Douglas he should read 19 books, that he should hide away from publishers and their parties, and that his ohly contact with authors should be by correspondence. For a period he was dramatic critic, and for years he reviewed gramophone records. The chief editor of the BBC has extraordinarily’ wide tastes. One has seen him put down one of the pasteltinted revues that arrived each week from France, deliver a penetrating judg- — ment on Mauriac or Duhamel, then pass to an equally informed criticism of an evening .paper news story. With his wife and four children he would gather round the wireless set and share their enthusiasm for Inspector Hornleigh. He went regularly to the cinema, and would hear no word of criticism of Myrna Loy. Though he kept up a popular display and presentation, and appreciated as keenly as a circulation manager that an evening paper dare not lag behind on one dog racing result, he made his leader page significant and purposeful. From 1936 onwards, he warned his | readers time after time of the dangers in which Czechoslovakia stood. The bombs on Guernica he prophesied might well be the forerunners of our own doom. At the time of Munich he fought — against appeasement’ with a vigour which was not exceeded by any other | editor. Readers cancelled their orders: — the policy was regarded in the city as — commercially disastrous. Yet the result was not only increased prestige but in--creased circulation. The peak of com-_ mercial success was the publication of a paper of 32 full-sized pages, an evening © paper record. Haley drove his staff hard. He was a strict master. But he inspired, too. He was generous with praise and encouragement, and his enthusiasm for a good idea would exceed that of the man who — put it forward. Those who left his staff | left always with regret, no matter how | dazzling the prospect seemed. It was never Haley’s luck to be sent, as he dreamed when he read Philip Gibbs, with a bag of gold to some Balkan war. When he went abroad he travelled as a director of Reuters across dangerous wartime seas to visit America and Australia; and his journeys were not in search of news, but for business purposes. ‘ * % * HE BBC have taken from the news- _ paper world one of its foremost men and a fervent democrat. His idealism and humanity may light up some of the dark places in Broadcasting House. It is a loss to journalism at a time when it stands in need of men of | boldness and principle and the true liberal mind.