Dienny King
Page 42
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Can Greater Manchester Transport now expect an all-singing, all-dancing approach to public relations? Maybe not quite in the terms which that phrase conjures up, but the staff and the public can certainly prepare for some bright new ideas from the woman who has just been appointed communications manager — because, apart from anything else, Mrs Henny King is actress, journalist, teacher and songwriter; and she joiris the undertaking from Granada TV.
Challenge and excitement have always been part of her way of life. She speaks five languages (which may come in handy in increasingly cosmopolitan Manchester) and has lived in Canada, Mexico, the USA and Israel. Mrs King admits to not really having travelled a great deal by bus until recently, and told me that in California one never saw a bus; without a car you were marooned.
But she is rapidly making up for this lack of past busmanship, not only by absorbing the technicalities of the job (and she will learn quickly) but by learning to drive a bus — the better, as she says, to understand the points of view at the undertaking's grass roots level. She believes it is the man (or woman) who makes the job and not the job that makes the man. And she expresses a high regard for the drivers and conductors — "our ambassadors".
As the country's only woman communications manager in public transport she will control and co-ordinate internal and external communications. She sees her immediate task as "welding together individual people and personalities within the undertaking into one harmonious unit". She sees the total job as demanding, possibly the most challenging she has ever attempted. But she believes there. are enough men of integrity within passenger transport to make her own efforts worthwhile.
She also brings an integrity of her own to the task, telling me that she believes the essential of public relations is always to tell the truth. "If you tell the truth, next time you don't need to try and remember what you said last time.