Documentary News Letter (1940)

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DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER DECEMBER 1940 11 complexions have been created by downright exercise and simple living in the A.T.S., W.R.E.N.S., and W.A.A.F.'s than by all the soap ever sold to a punch-drunk and gullible public. No need to go on with the long string of advertising fables and abuses. You don't need to be reminded of the toffee which was so energising that it enabled the lifeboatmen to battle with the wildest of storms and rescue the crew of a distressed vessel, or of the famous cigarette which you were asked to smoke "for your throat's sake." Now, in the brave new world, towards which our thoughts and hopes are bent, shall we be again bull-dosed by such arrant nonsense or such dishonest quackery? I hope not. This war has already produced an awakening. We now know that things were not as they seemed. The lifting of the veil will not merely disclose chicanery in public life, party jobbery, unequal social gradings and business manipulations. It will give us a clearer view of personal rights and public duty. And advertising will not escape the process of disclosure. Unless this is a completely hopeless world — which I do not believe it to be — the organization of human affairs will surely bring a state more honest and straightforward than the last. I am not among those who expect to see a resumption of the old order when hostilities cease. The millions of intelligent young people who have been jerked out of a lethargic existence of futility and the hopelessness of forced inequality are going to emerge with their eyes skinned, determined to correct the myriad social corruptions imposed on humanity. They are going to ask a lot of pertinent questions and demand a squarer deal from life. There have been times in the last few years when I had begun to think that a square deal must be either an obtuse angle, an isosceles triangle or a double cross. Whenever a square deal ceases to be what its words imply, you may depend that it takes on the shape of a wedge, to be driven into the body politic. And it is probably superfluous to inform you that when any wedge is driven into any body it hurts the body more than it hurts the wedge. The complaisance, inefficiency and incompetence which have, in many cases, characterised the approach to and the conduct of this war on our side is proof enough that a National shake-up was due. The odd thing about it all is that the' country is full of practical brains, packed with untried efficiency and inventiveness. They are shrieking to be used. And why, you may ask, are brains and efficiency debarred from functioning to the full in this, the greatest trial in our history? There are several reasons. The chief resistance comes from the existence of a system which has got completely out of hand. That system is bureaucracy. Its flower and fruit never flourished so abundantly than today. It has no relationship with the natural order of things. It is a negation of progress and a monumental barrier to performance. I refer to the system which has created a Civil Service which, in its higher reaches, denies the claim of the citizen to his inalienable rights. It has made its own tempo and its movement is adagio. It is for the most part tortuous in its divertings, and dictatorial under its thick skin. It is all too powerful and all too aloof from realities. With some notable exceptions, the hierarchy of the Civil Service has two ends in view — a pension and an honour. With those two things it can retire to its suburban cabbage patch and browse, free of the trammels of buff forms, circumlocution and its overgrowth of smoke-screen phraseology. It feeds on a steady diet of ad hoc, ancillary, de novo, adumbrate, per se, abrogate and seconded. As a vehicle, its wheels have reached the postcreaking era. But, and here's the rub, it has been running this country for years, baffiing the ordinarily intelligent citizen with a labyrinth of jargon, woven into meaningless patterns — like warp without a weft. The Civil Service is cluttered up with men and women who believe they possess, among many other things, literary ability. They not only know how to write better than the professional writer, but scores of them try to cut into the literary game to add to their incomes, but always under the guise of a nom-de-gitene. They all have their personal — but autocratic — ideas about advertising and they blandly take publicity in their stride. They know how to make better films than the professional director, and their positive conceptions of commercial art as an aid to publicity make them better judges than the experienced artists themselves. In fact, there is no form of publicity and propaganda in which they are not experts. Do not be surprised if you hear of one of them re-writing Shakespeare and another reconstructing the Differential Calculus. It is because executive Civil Servants are so abundantly equipped with a knowledge of how little the professional or business man knows about his profession or business that they resent in their midst the presence of specialists who have spent their lives learning their jobs. They know better what is best for any occasion than all the specialists. In times of stress they and their political friends get the executive positions, and then use the advice of the experts to hold them down. I have said that Civil Servants have two ambitions— a pension and an honour. I have this to add : They must be careful not to make mistakes. Mistakes, quite rightly, are set against possible promotion. The easiest way not to make mistakes is to be non-committal. In other words do nothing. Someone once called the heads of the Civil Service "The Better-Notters". It is better not to do something than to be found out as having done something which it would have been better not to have done. If the risk of a mistake is taken, in a very ebullient moment, you must be certain, in the Civil Service, to make the mistake in such a way that it will be difficult to trace. If you don't take that precaution you may be put on the carpet three years later — when the subject matter has passed into the limbo of the forgotten. You will recall that it took several years of toilsome parliamentary pressure to assure for the workers of this country the concession of holidays with pay. During that struggle and, indeed, in the normal course of events, officers with £350 a year salary and more were automatically in receipt of 18 days holidays per year on pay and an additional compulsory sick-leave, on pay, of seven days per year. Thus most officials got a minimum of 25 days total leave on full pay. The sick leave was automatic and not on the strength of a doctor's certificate. You may wonder why I have devoted so much of my address to the Civil Service. I have two reasons. My twelve months' experience as Honorary Publicity Adviser to the National Savings Movement has given me an insight into a new world, as divorced from practical and progressive business methods as a bastion is from a baby's rattle. I have been told, and I am prepared to believe it, that we in the National Savings Movement have the most go-ahead, highly geared coterie of all the Government Departments. Results seem to bear out this contention. Nearly £400,000,000 from the two restricted issuesSavings Certificates and Defence Bonds and P.O. Savings and Trustee Savings Bank Deposits — has been subscribed to date by the small investor. That figure of £400,000,000 was what Professor Keynes set as the necessary amount to be got from the small investor by compulsory savings. We shall beat £400,000,000 easily. There must be something in planned advertising and organisation after all. Our newspaper and journal advertising has cost less than one per cent of the money subscribed. Any expert will tell you that never in the history of advertising have such results been attained. The actual percentage is .0827. Now what about "the Shape of Ads. to Come"? I have tried to indicate that great changes will come in the years which immediately follow the cessation of present hostilities. I think those changes will come chiefly from public attitude of mind, sane legislation, a re-organisation of production and consumption, the re-shaping of wholesale and retail distribution, and the elimination of those marketing schemes which do not provide for the full protection of the consumer. The pseudo-governing body of advertising will have to suffer complete reform, for the abundant reason that, in future, advertising organisations will be accountable not merely to the advertiser but to the customer as well. And when the new Advertising Parliament, or whatever it may be called, comes through its searching examination, it will have to be the representative mouthpiece of the whole selling and buying elements of the country and not merely a metropolitan coterie of interested parties, protecting vested interests, as at present. The Civil Service type of hide and seek protective blab-blab which has permeated the councils and printed productions of the chief Advertising Organisation must go. Advertising, if it is to survive the coming test of public opinion, must submit willingly and helpfully to the operation. If it doesn't it will croak.