Professor Shelley

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 513, 22 April 1949, Page 5

Professor Shelley

T is our unhappy task in this issue to record the resignation of Professor ‘Shelley, who has been Director of Broadcasting since the Government took control in 1936. Professor Shelley is not only retiring. from the Service, but retiring from New Zealand, and it is no reflection on his successors to say that he leaves a gap which no one now serving with him is likely to see completely filled. His task, when he took charge thirteen years ago, was not so much to direct the Service as to create it, and although the war came before a single major plan could be carried through, his personal influence remained. As clearly as the BBC to-day is what Lord Reith made it, with all his limitations and faults, the NZBS will long remain what Professor Shelley has made it, in spite of everything in him and in it that has gone wrong. While he would be the last to say, suggest, or think, that he has done anything single-handed, it is not "what he has done that will be remembered but what he has been. Those who apply cold efficiency tests would no doubt criticise him

as an administrator. He has been too human, too sensitive, too kind, for any of the ,brutalities that usually go with efficiency, with the result that he has never been free of dead wood or of lame dogs. For that he has paid in personal overwork and in long periods of misunderstanding. But no one else has paid. The strain on him has been overwhelming; but his mark is now on the Service and on New Zealand, and the vulgarity that is in us all will never quite erase it. Nor does anyone know so well as those who have been closest to him how vulgar, by comparison, most of us are-how dull, ignorant, careless, and insensitive; how casual with truth; how blind to form. That is why we began by saying how improbable it is that any of us will see his like again. And that is why we end by repeating that his successors will inherit standards which the Service, whether it always reaches them or not, will always now strive for.