JOHN HILTON’S TECHNIQUE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 412, 16 May 1947, Page 5

JOHN HILTON’S TECHNIQUE

Sir,-It was my good fortune to know John Hilton when he took up his professorship at Cambridge. The galaxy of academics, Keynes, Pigou, D. H. Robertson, and half-a-dozen others who had climbed the heavens by the intellectual ladder did not then accept this new planet, former government servant, worker, and human being set up in their midst by the endowment from the profits from chéap mass-tailoring. Hilton lectured, or rather talked, about Industrial Relations, and what rang through his broadcasts permeated his lecturessincerity. As a theoretical economist he was too modest and undogmatic to be convincing; but as a man who, through his own experience as a worker and as an official had learnt well, he was able to describe the relations between emplayer, worker, and machine in terms which were alive, real, and humble. Hilton seemed to efhjoy talking with us students at his home over a cup of tea, as much as he should have enjoyed sipping priceless port with his elders and betters in ‘the Senior Common Room His interests were catholic. He talked of Japariese Noh plays or his own private theory of framing modern French paintings (with engraved lines on the frame tending to a focus at the centre of interest of the picture), just as excitedly as he gave us impressions of the shattering clangour he had known when knocking scale off the inside of a boiler. Some years later I asked him about his technique of broadcasting, for besides the knowledge and conviction stressed in your leading article ( Listener, May 2), he had a cons¢ious technique and one which others might well use. Hilton, whether in private life or public utterance, had what amounted to an impediment with certain consonant combinations and also a hesitation. His broadcasts were not smooth or fluent. He seemed to rope for words, to pause before choosing an adjective, to add as an afterthought an unpremeditated adverb or clause. There were also certain inarticulate soundsnot the irritating "Errr" of the nervous and unpractised speaker, but more the cogitational noises of one who wants to choose exactly the right word or phrase, of a man who gears the pace of> his thoughts to engage with the speech-speed which is most acceptable to the common ear. Radio scripts have to be censored, and speaking from notes will not do, How Ne

did Hilton keep his scripts so natural and alive? He told me he used a dicta« phone and that his secretary in typing back the script‘ put in all the pauses, sounds, and interjections by an undere stood system of dashes and letter coms binations. Thus his script came as from the pliable tip of a tongue rather than from the rigidity of the pen. So much for his technique before broadcastingone which might help all radio talkers, whether they have access to dictaphones or not. When he came to the microphone, another acquired technique came inta play-that of the experienced amateur actor and reader of plays-for in Beaconsfield with G. K. Chesterton and others he had had much experience in theatre work, He did not necessarily follow his script exactly. His ever-alert mind would find a happier paraphrase of what was before him and this increased the impression of freshness and thé absence of slickness and pontification. Too many radio talks are infallible in syntax, too fluent in sentence structure, altogether too accurate and impersonal, and delivered too smoothly (or else with the obvious end-of-line pauses of the un« practised reader) to hold the attention and convince father with his pipe and GO rr are ee,

mother with her knitting, in their own home. Hilton concocted his scripts in the spoken idiom of the kitchen and worke shop, not the oratory of the public hall or the prose of the newspaper article, In delivering them he consciously used a fine acting technique by which he talked as naturally as if he were at @ meal, Just as it is easier to write @ letter to a known person than to writé an essay for the world at large, so a broadcaster should think of simple people whom he knows and the rooms in which they will be listening, instead of trying to envisage the millions in all manner of circumstances who may be listening. Hilton had technique and he knew the way simple minds ‘worked. Ha was unauthoritarian-a virtue ih all wha are in a position to use the power that science has given to the spoken word. It is good to know that a picture of hin has been preserved in print.

PHILIP A.

SMITHELLS

(Wellington).