HERE IS THE NEWS...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 6

HERE IS THE NEWS...

BBC Division Now Under ; New Zealander (By Air, from "The Listener’s’ London Correspondent )

HE BBC’s News _ Division, which employs 300 men and women and is responsible for 65 news broadcasts in English every day, recently came under the administrative control of a New Zealander when Tahu R. P. Hole was appointed Controlling Editor. Since Mr. Hole took up his new post, the Division has undergone another change -it is now housed entirely in one building for the first time, after working for 16 years in separate places. These changes seemed to provide the occasion for a visit on behalf of The Listener, and I was this week shown over Egton House, a building of four floors and a basement tucked in behind "B.H." (as everyone in the BBC calls the main building), on the corner of All Souls Place. The appointment of a New Zealander to a high level job in the BBC might be called a "departure." It is the first time a man from the Dominions has been in a position of such responsibility. But within the organisation it is regarded as natural and proper nowadays, when a BBC news broadcast is something more than merely the voice of London, and when there is probably just as much sense of ownership towards it in the extremities of the Commonwealth as there is in Kngland itself, that there should be some recognition,

in the administration, of shared responsibility. The consolidation of the whole Division in one building also marks a step forward. Like broadcasting services in all other countries (including New Zealand) the BBC_ grew _ between the two wars at a pace faster than any sound plan of building could attempt to imitate. In the years of trial and discovery, it worked in what premises it could find and adapt. Then the war came, not many years after Broadcasting House had been built, and even

that bold building was found to be only a beginning after all. While home entertainment programmes were being heavily reduced, the BBC’s function as a mouthpiece for addressing the rest of the world suddenly became vastly important. News Division was in the new front-line. Nevertheless it was forced to do its vital work under enormous difficulties. Physical separation between different sections was the chief of these. "It’s like trying to produce a newspaper with your reporters in one build-

ing and your sub-editors in another," Mr. Hole told-me. "Or rather, it was." War-Time Expedients For a time, during the war, both Home and Empire News bulletins were broadcast from Broadcasting House itself; but the celebrated bomb (which went off during a news bulletin) put an end to that. Empire News (which has since become "Overseas News’) went out to Evesham, about 100 miles from London, and worked by landlines from a

country mansion. After 18 months it came in to Aldenham, only a dozen miles away, and then after six months more it came in to Oxford Street, where the large department store of Peter Robinson’s had retrenched and closed its men’s shop. This building, 200 Oxford Street, was far from ideal-for instance, regulations forbade the insertion of complete partitions so that the noise of all the sections that were scattered over the wide floors was free to mix at the ceiling and return-but at least it was an improvement on the "country seat" arrangement. When an announcer was in Evesham and a speaker was engaged in London to give a commentary, anxious moments were inevitable. And Mr. Hole remembers that the only time he missed a broadcast during the war came, not with the bomb, but with a snowstorm, that prevented him from reaching Aldenham. He was stuck, in a car in a snowdrift, and he had the only copy of the script. War brought changes to the big Oxford Street store-counters and carpets went out, and fibre-board partitions went in. Control-rooms and minute stuffy studios were installed in the basement, with microphones and jugs and tumblers, and red lights; and overseas news was written and read there, down /the street and round the corner from B.H. instead of miles away and all but out of ken. It came from there until a few weeks. ago, through the flying-bomb period, and the V2’s. It was one of those changes caused by the war from which there is no return. Now that Overseas News is ‘out of 200, Peter Robinson’s are not going back. It was announced recently that the building has been bought by "the Co-op," and presumably there will be a co-operative store there in several years’ time-a change that will probably’ remind people who remember Oxford Street in other days of the time the first Woolworths moved in. For the BBC News Division the new building, Egton House, is also a sign of new times. More is known now of

the physical requirements of such an Organisation, and the experiment of the *thirties and the makeshift of the war years are finished with. Three hundred men and women are working in shifts 24 hours a day under one: roof, with sets of three and sometimes four coloured telephones on the key desks, corresponding with coloured lights hung above them (see photograph); they have the latest in inter-communication systems, with smert grey loudspeakers that are capable of interrupting a conversation at any moment if a head of one section wants to speak to another withcut going and knocking at his door; editorial conferences, each morning and afternoon, merely involve the climbing of stairs. There is a tunnel connecting the basement with the basement of B.H., so that the staff can cross the street without going outside; and the sleeping quarters which the Corporation provides for its shift workers are next-door-and-round-the-corner. I was shown the windows of its hollow-looking dormitories. from the main newsroom; across the light-well, in what was once a private house, are the 30-odd beds for staff use, with blackout curtains still in place for those who have to sleep in daylight. Night Shift is Popular It is all incredibly efficient and hygienic-looking. Mr. Hole recalls the nights when he slept on old newspaper files at Aldenham, in order to be on hand in the early morning to speak to Pacific listeners at their evening meal. Nowadays, sleeping in a BBC bed is a matter of preference for some of the News Division staff. They work 12-hour shifts, three days on and three days off. For some of them, it is a perfect arrangement. There are volunteers for the night shift (starting work at 10.0 p.m.), since some of the staff are in amateur theatrical companies, and like to have their evenings free in London. For anyone who is doing some outside writing, it means three unbroken days to work at home. And for anyone who likes to live out of London it is ideal-he can sleep two nights in a BBC bed, and four at home. Yet the greater convenience has got made work easier for the news staff. Once, Home and Overseas. News staffs worked to their own patterns, with breathing spaces between bulletins. Now, all those who ate in a common pool

work on either Home or Overseas News, at much greater pressure, because the bulletins are interleaved and come at shorter intervals. The organisation which Mr. Hole controls from his room on the top floor is the largest thing. of its kind anywhere, It has a London reporting staff, a dozen staff correspondents in foreign capitals, and four special correspondents -aviation, diplomatic, parliamentary, and industrial. In Britain, the Division presents eight national bulletins daily and a three-minute summary last thing at night. For overseas, it produces 23 bulletins (all these are in English; foreign-language news comes from a completely separate unit). With Radio Newsreel, (eight editions daily) and "From To-day’s London Papers," news talks, sports reports, weekly summaries of Parliamentary news, and other variants, these add up to 65 broadcasts a day. The responsibility for all that goes out rests with the Controller-Editor, the Deputy Editor, and News Editors. 3 Work Without End The work never ends. When the Home Service announcer says "Good morning" to us here before breakfast, the night staff who have been working on overseas services are thinking about going to bed. Men and women are at the desks of the new newsroom (shown in the photograph opposite) 24 hours a day-some working at cables, or reporters’ copy, others dictating to typists. Every piece of copy for the micro phone is dictated, because the differ-

ence between the spoken and the written word is considerable, and what may look clear on paper may be far from -clear to a listener. The dictation rule ensures the clarity that listeners all over the world associate with .the news from London. In rooms on the same floor or not far away are the reference section (The Times is kept complete, with The Times index; other papers are kept for a month and then dispersed into files in the form of clippings); the teletype room (where machines are tapping out the reports of agencies such as Reuters, UP, AP, and so on); and the telediphone room (where machines record on cylinders for the typists the reports of foreign correspondents, who have regular conversations with News Divisions by telephone or beamed wireless). . _All this complexity now lies unde: the hand of that former New Zealand journalist who so emphatically inscribed his name several times over on the top and the surroundings of the reporters’ bench in the No. 1 Magistrate’s Court in Christchurch. It was there until a few years ago, and when there was talk of building a new courthouse, there were suggestions that the top, at any rate, of the old press desk, with its distinguished and not-so-distinguished names deeply carved al! over its surface, ought to be preserved. If this were done, speculation might go on for years, as it always used to in that courtroom----what does the R.P. stand:for in Tahu R. P. Hole? Perhaps it is time someone christened him, in the American parenthetic style ("Round Peg’’).