A Night Owl At The BBC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 361, 24 May 1946, Page 33

A Night Owl At The BBC

the best-known BBC news reviewers and commentators, is tall, clean-shaven and dark, and twinkles at you through horn-rimmed glasses. Although he has been talking regularly about world events for over four years (except for his Canadian-born colleague, J. B. McGeachy, he has the longest record of service as a commentator in the North American News Service), it is difficult to get him to talk about himself. Hard probing, however, reveals that before he came into broadcasting Lacey did important work in journalism.’ After leaving Oxford he was for some years on the staffs*of the two leading English provincial newspapers — the Yorkshire Post and the Manchester Guardian. Then, in 1929, he went to India as an assistant-editor of the Statesman, where he remained for eight years. During that period he acted for a time as correspondent with the Government of India for The Times, of London, and other leading English newspapers. Once, when campaigning in his paper for reform of Hindu marriage customs, he enlisted the support of res LACEY (right), one of

Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Returning to ‘Eng: land in 1937, he was for some time in the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, and contributed te most of the London reviews largely on Indian affairs. He was rejected for the Services on medical grounds, and spent the first eighteen months of the war in censorship. He was no stranger to the microphone when he joined the BBC in May, 1941, as he had already broadcast as a freelancey Since then

Patrick Lacey has lived a largely nocturnal existence. Time differences between Britain and the North American Continent have meant that he starts work in the evening and goes on through the night, preparing his news analyses for broadcasting to North America at midnight and to Australia and. New Zealand in the eariy hours of the morning. One of his mest vivid

memories is of being the first BBC commentator to broadcast about the Pearl Harbour disaster, His pretty and talented wife, Beryl Denman Lacey, is making a name for herself as a writer of scripts for instructional films on surgery, which are used extensively in the training of medical students. Lacey himself is still being heard in broadcasts from Britain.