McCULLOUGH OF THE BRAINS TRUST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 447, 16 January 1948, Page 7

McCULLOUGH OF THE BRAINS TRUST

Will Take Part In NZBS Sessions This Year

A Special "Listener" interview, by airmail from London

ONALD McCULLOUGH, whose voice is already well known in New Zealand through the recordings of the BBC Brains Trust, and who will take part in the same type of session from the four main centres when he visits the Dominion next April, is not yet in Who’s Who, but when the next edition comes out he will. be. Perhaps he will be described there as humorous author, broadcaster, and countryman. It was in the town office of The Countryman (that is to say, in the. offices of Punch, at No. 10 Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street) that I interviewed him for The Listener, but most of the time he is well away from Fleet Street. He lives in Norfolk; I’m not sure exactly how far away he is, but. he is out of range of television (on which he once wrote a book) and nearer to the beauties whose preservation is the aim of the National Council for the Preservation of Rural England (of which he is a member). He comes and goes by train, but he has not forgotten that he was the author (with Fougasse) of You Have Been Warned-A Complete Guide to the Road, which has lately gone into still another edition and is selling in thousands. He gave me a copy of Fancy Meeting You, a little booklet on the same unmistakable (Fougasse) lines which is handed to everyone in Britain who renews his driving licence, by the Royal Society for the Prevention of

Accidents. It’s catchphrase emerges from the door of the receding ambulance at the bottom of every page; "Anyhow, I was in the right!" % * % WE settled down in the sheltered comfort of Mr. McCullough’s Countryman room in the precincts of Bradbury, Agnew & Co. (a room like a rich man’s study-leather chairs, a finely made desk, barquet flooring, and a rich, handsome carpet) and the facts came out in a voice I kept thinking I knew. His father was a Minister of the Church of Scotland in Roxburghshire, and he was educated at Watson’s, and Edinburgh University. He’s been writing, in one way or another, for 15 years (that is, in print), and when I asked him directly how I should describe his connection with the periodica) within whose halls we were conversing, he murmured and demurred in that agreeable marshy croak one always heard when the Brains Trust discussion seemed to be heading for things better left unsaid. After a series of such syllables, he told me it was "just a rather pleasant as-sociation-‘contributor,’ say." But that was on the way out, going down those dignified curving stairs... In his own room, Mr. McCullough told me he was on the National Trust, on the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, is chairman of the British Motor Racing Research Trust (and a great friend of the racing motorist Raymond Mays), author of You Have Been Warned, etc., author (at the request of the BBC) of the first book on

television, entitled And Now; was on the Television Development Commission, has "an exceedingly handsome wife and five very charming children" (their ages being from 12 years to three months); was in the R.A.F. in 1939-40, and later was Public Relations Officer for the Ministry of Agriculture, and has been at No. 10 Bouverie Street (when not in Norfolk) since the war ended. Here I interpolate what I know without going to the mouth of a modest horse for it: his choice by the BBC as the questionmaster of the controversial Brains Trust (which is now being rested for a while) was a brilliant one. He has been an unqualified success in the job, and but for him the session probably would have needed resting much sooner. It was going out in 10 BBC services and had the biggest audience of any spoken word programme except the news. My guess about the secret of his success there would be that it was in the faint dimpled smile that is almost on his face all the time, and the faint trace of humour that is always ready to slip into his speech. A photograph shows it plainly-humour playing like a light breeze through his ideas, quite the opposite of wisecrack humour. There is not one wisecrack in You Have Been Warned as I remember it. It’s just consistently funny, in a tickly sort of were * * OR the last three years he has been throwing himself into a job which he obviously loves telling people about. I had noticed that the only pictures on

the walls of the room we sat in were some attractive maps of English counties, with coloured miniatures of various buildings and places, and short>texts, in the white surrounds that enclosed the irregular shapes of the shires. Mr. McCullough got up and walked to one of them, to show me what they are all about. They are a series, of which 14 have so far been produced (under the care of The Countryman). The profits from their sale goto the Women’s Land Army Benevolent Fund, which Donald McCullough founded, because there were no gratuities for Land Girls. There is to be one for each county, the illustrations in the margins drawing notice to the ways in which the county contributed to the war, and each one having a quotation from Mr. Churchill’s nuggety English prose. Mr. McCullough read one out to me, and told me he was "a Veryegreat admirer" of Mr. Churchill. "Do you feel he’s doing the right thing at the present time?" I asked, and I murmured something about "getting on with his book." Mr. McCullough murmured too, in the wordless voice we all know well, and after some reflection said he thought he would just leave it at that-he was "a very great admirer" of Mr. Churchill. Well, anyhow, he wasn’t in the Left,

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