CRAZE FOR BRAINS TRUSTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 376, 6 September 1946, Page 14

CRAZE FOR BRAINS TRUSTS

(From a talk by

JOHN

PUDNEY

in the BBC Overseas Service)

| FTER having spent five years | in uniform, mainly outside | England, not the least of the pleasures of civilian life is the rediscovery of the old country. As a writer before the war, I used to travel arourid Britain a good deal and I had a good general idea of what went on. During the war I saw glimpses, I suppose, of about forty other countries. Now, in this first spring of peace and civilian life, I am rediscovering my own place with some relish. _. I am reminded of the old Music Hall crack "How the old place has cnenye’, everything seems the same." The way of life here in England is fundamentally the same, but superficially there are many changes, most of them directly due to war conditions. You have heard all about them-the food rationing, housing shortage, the austerities and the discomforts. With all those war time rigours, however, I notice certain changes in the mental outlook and I will just describe one of them because I think it is characteristic of something which has happened to the credit of the old country. Change of Outlook All British Broadcasting Corporation listeners are familiar with the Brains Trust; and its star turns, such as Joad and Campbell, have become. household

words in the way which formerly only music hall acts could become. There is nothing particularly novel about a brains trust in itself and nothing characteristically British, but what strikes me is the number of brains trusts one encounters up and down the country and in civilian life. There are political brains trusts, farmers’ brains trusts, literary brains trusts. One of the most popular things any section of the community can do for its own entertainment, instruction and propaganda is to have a brains trust. I have not been seeking them out-they just happen all round me. Recently I was myself serving on a trust got up by our Literary Society in Sevenoaks in Kent. The distinguished woman preacher, Dr. Maud Roydon, confessed to a packed house her preferences for detective stories. We argued about the amount of reading which anybody should do in any one day; we discussed the effect of the cinema upon the upbringing of children. This was a small town show: I make no claims for our performance. I mention it simply because the hall was packed and because the audience entered into the affair with such attention and with so many questions. Such an event, I believe, would have been most unlikely in the ’thirties, Another event which now takes place regularly amongst us would, I hazard, (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) have been inconceivable in the ’thirties. In the long low saloon bar of that Georgian hostelry the "White Hart," standing on the edge of the wooded demesne of the Palace of Knowle, a brains trust meets once a fortnight. A brains trust in a pub. Now I have the honour to be the .Questionmaster at this saloon bar entertainment, so you must not think I am blowing my own trumpet if I say hat I can speak of it with some authrity. The idea of having it arose from faose traditional friendly arguments held among the customers. My old friend, Mr. Hazel the landlord, is by no means an intellectual, but he’s travelled widely in his youth and likes to hear a good argument. When he and the customers put up the proposition of an organised trust I will confess that I had my doubts, because we as a nation are very much against organised activities within the very bastions of freedom which is the bar of the local. I wondered if the customers would not resent organised discussion. I feared that the proceedings would be mostly frivolous. But now I must report that we have gat there in the tobacco hazé and fug of Mr. Hazel’s bar with pints before us, discussing the atomic age, co-education, United Nations Organisation, the shape of the world to come, the shape of women’s hats, health, food-anything in fact which is not party politics or religion. The trust varies slightly from time to time. Very often I have sitting beside Mr. Evans of the Waterworks, Mr. Richards, a baker, Mr, Liversedge, a farmer, and the Scots doctor who, of course, must be anonymous. They have two minutes each. Then the audience has a go. Then somebody on the trust replies. I see to it that the questions vary between solemnity and humour, Significant Audience The audience is significant; local men and women; young men back from the Forces, farming people, casual customers who have come in for a’ drink and who stop to argue. The trust doesn’t hold up the business of the house, but everybody in thet audience participates and

these typical English people have lost all their shyness, Women as well as men join in the discussion cogently and naturally. There is plenty of humour, but the point I must emphasise is that they are also earnest. They are no. longer shy of talking seriously in public. I believe that the people at home have lived through about twenty years of life in those five or six years which have just passed. They may have suffered greatly while so many of us have been away, but the ordinary people in their minds are more vital, more intelligent, less afraid of speaking up for themselves. And these qualities in people give me more pleasure a anything I | have seen as a civilian in England.