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Indoctrination by the 13 T C.

30th September 1949
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Page 50, 30th September 1949 — Indoctrination by the 13 T C.
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

The First Annual Report, the Charing Cross Exhibition and the New House Organ for Employees are Propaganda Works of Consummate Skill

By JAN US

MANY critics of the British Transport Commission expected that the first annual. report would be a sitting target. It has turned out to be an almost impregnable strong-point. The would-be attackers have had difficulty in finding a chink in the armour.

The report practically disarms the critics by doing most of their work for them. It provides a flood of information that sweeps them away. Everything is put in—nothing omitted. If any conclusion be reached that appears to ignore certain facts, one can depend upon it that attention will be drawn to these facts in the next paragraph or so.

, The Critics' Guns Spiked The adverse balance on net revenue account is calculated as £4,700,000. Before one has time to describe this as "unsatisfactory," the report is ready with that very word. It immediately goes on to say that, if one felt sufficiently strongly about it, one might easily add £8,500,000 that should have been set aside to meet replacement costs, and even a further £5,000,000 as a contribution to general reserve. At this point, the B.T.C. somewhat deprecatingly marshals a few arguments in its own defence, and winds up with the unpalatable news that "a further marked deterioration of the working results is inevitable in 1949." Which is what the critics have said all along, but did not expect to have quite so blandly repeated in the pages of the report itself. s The report is a tactical triumph. Its production was a compulsory task out of which the B.T.C. has forged a weapon for its own advantage. The Commission's policy throughout seems to have been to impress by its sheer size, on the principle that the larger the object, the longer it endures. How neatly this policy is carried out by the report! Fact is accumulated upon fact, figure is piled upon figure; charts and tables of statistics succeed one another for page after page, until even the most matter-of-fact reader begins to feel he is gazing upon the Great Pyramid that will last forever.

"Education" for Public and Workers

Nor is this policy confined to the report, which, after all, is primarily intended for Parliament and the experts. Simultaneously with its issue, other steps have been taken to make a similar impression upon the general public and upon the Commission's own employees. An exhibition has been opened at Charing Cross London Transport Station, where various items from the report are shown pictorially or graphically The emphasis here is on the evolution from the small to the large, and from the large to the gigantic, this evolution being equated with progress from bad to good, and from good to marvellous, by, for example, using the more primitive forms of transport, such as horsed-wagons, to illustrate the smaller unit. The piece de resistance is a recorded talk explaining a series of maps that shows at the beginning the course of the first horsed-railway, and ends with the present rail network plus the other assorted services offered by the B.T.C.

To deal with the not inconsiderable task of bringing home its message to the transport worker, the Commission •has distributed a lively, illustrated eight-page newspaper to all its 900,000 employees. -"Transport News" is written in a simple, chatty, slightly school masterly style that some of its recipients may resent. On the other band, they will all find something in the newspaper to interest them.

It continues the work of indoctrination, and does it with consummate skill. Many publicists, faced with the task of interpreting the Commission to the staff, might have been tempted to attack the old dispensation in order to prove the superiority of the new. A little reflection shows the disadvantages of doing the job in this way. It would have, the effect of stimulating old loyalties, and would invite a counter-attack. The better method—adopted in "Transport News "—is to take the superiority of nationalization for granted, and nowhere state it explicitly.

In Search: of Broader Vision The change of mind that the newspaper is meant to bring about in transport workers is shown clearly in the following passage:— Perhaps we still think of ourselves as "railwaymen "; perhaps some of us think of ourselves as " L.M.S. men," or even "L. and Y. men." These traditions of service are most valuable. The Commission is not seeking for one moment to destroy them, but it can't succeed in its big task unless every worker on the railways and on the road services, every man on the steamships and at the docks, and the man in the butty-boat, winding his way through the Midlands, begins to think in terms of transport as a whole, and not merely of his part in it.

This must puzzle many people. Does "thinking in terms of transport as a whole" make a lorry driver or a platelayer or' a hotel waiter any better at his job?

That is presumably not the point. What this kind of thinking will do is to make these people better employees of the B.T.C., which may be a failure judged solely in terms of efficiency, but will be in a very powerful position politically and socially if it has the complete loyalty of the 900,000 men and women working for it.

"Transport News" must play an important part in the campaign to win that loyalty. It assumes throughout that conditions and opportunities are better than they were. There is one significant passage following a description of the difficulties facing the Commission:— What are we going to do about it ? The Commission say

—in effect—that it's a job for everyone. It depends on our work; it also depends on making the big sweeping plans that will cut costs and make transport attractive to the customer.

Anything done in 1948 to put this into practice over British railways, canals, docks and roadways could be only a beginning.

To most readers this must mean that the railway companies, -road hauliers and the rest,have never done anything to cut costs and "make transport attractive to the customer." The same impression is given in other parts

of the newspaper by deceptively casual comparisons with "the old method," without explaining whether that method was discarded years ago, or whether it was changed as a direct result of nationalization.

The theme is carried into the adventures of Pro and Con, described by means of strip cartoons, the third of which introduces one of the few direct references to nationalization:— CON: Story of 1948, eh? Most of these things would have happened anyway, nationalization or not

Pao: In my business, if one department gets a good idea we try to pass it on to all the others. Now that transport's one team is nearly a million people, their ideas and improvements can be planned on a national scale.

Cox: (thinks) Something in that.

The point to notice here is that the retort does not dispose of the original statement, but at a hasty reading gives the impression of doing so.

Take the following extrftet from an item headed "Careers for Boys and Girls":—

Now that transport has been nationalized, one of the Transport Commission's main jobs is to see that everyone • who works for it has the best possible opportunity of learning about his (or her) particular part of the industry. This seems a perfectly straightforward statement, but there is an underlying implication that opportunities were not available before nationalization.

Anybody who gets a copy of the'newspaper may care to make his own selection of examples of the same

sort of thing. My own favourite is the note about the "Spotters' Clubs," members of which spend their spare time watching trains. "Extra interest," says "Transport News "—" and all the thrill of surprise—has been added to spotting by British Railways' new system of interchanging locos."

This, of course, is the final justification for the Transport Act—the spotters see More trains. Let integration go a little further, and the patient watcher by the side of the railway may hope to see, on the same line, the Flying Scotsman, the Devon Belle, a Carter Paterson van, three canal barges, the "Queen Mary," and one of the old buses used in the Eastern Division as mobile • offices. That would be real progress,

It is impossible to please everybody, and there are certain to be some members of. the Commission's staff who do not like "Transport News," Its appeal, one may guess, will be most marked in the case of the railway and London Transport workers, who together make up more than three-quarters of the total. They have been used to a large organization, and may be disposed to take kindly to the idea of one that is even larger. The road transport employees are less likely to be impressed. Most of them worked in the .past for comparatively small firms and were happy to do so. The thought of being just one. out of a million does not always appeal to them.


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