SIR EDWARD PLOWDEN’S NEW AUSTRALIAN VOICE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25247, 28 July 1947, Page 6

SIR EDWARD PLOWDEN’S NEW AUSTRALIAN VOICE

PLANNING

[By a “Sydney Morning Herald” Staff Correspondent in London.) (Published by Arrangement.)

It is the fashion in England to-day for the Government to employ “master planners." The latest master planner assuming Whitehall duties at £37sCla year is Australian-born Samuel Clement Leslie with the title of Chief Economic Information Officer. He is responsible for explaining to the public the activity of that new Government establishment, the “Central Planning Organisation, of whicn its own master planner is Sir Edward Plowden. v Sweetening the bitter pill to the public of further cuts in tobacco, newsprint. clothing coupons and the petrol ration is the task of master publicity planner Leslie. His duties include also the inoculation of the public against further bad news and, one trusts, will one day include planning the celebrations of good news. Publicity experts are by the nature of their work rarely men who believe in hiding their lights under a bushel, but Leslie has always carried the bushel as well as the torch for himself. This stubby, swarthy, greying man shuns publicity as a plague on which he is an expert. He contends that sufficient is known about his career already. Commenting on the fact that no hobbies are listed for Leslie in “Who s Who,” an acquaintance remarked: His hobbies are planning publicity planning—his one ideal is thinking up more ideas.” " Politically he is Labour, but he belongs to the Reform Club and has been known to wince when called a Socialist. “Liberal" describes him more ■accurately, although Socialist planning appeals to the authoritarianism in his mental making. Born in Perth in 1898, he was educated at Melbourne Grammar School. He went on to Melbourne University, gained an M.A. degree, went to Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. After taking a Ph.D. he had a term at the University College of North Wales. AVith Bruce to London He returned to Australia in 1924 as senior lecturer in philosophy at Melbourne University. In 1926 he accompanied Lord Bruce, then Australian Prime Minister, to England for an Imperial conference. That was the turning point in his career. He met Mr Herbert Morrison, who even then was one of the leading brains of the Labour Party. They became firm friends and students of mass politico-economic publicity, which-Leslie saw could be turned with profit to the commercial

world in which he had journalistic and publicity contacts. He studied American publicity ideas, and twisted them to meet British contemporary opinion. He swiftly became advertising consultant to publicity businesses, remaining in the background and apparently indifferent to personal publicity, which for him has always been of less importance than the “private lunch party-bridge table diplomacy” of higher realms of big business at which Leslie was adept. He hit the headlines of the London publicity world in 1936 when he was appointed publicity manager of the Gas Light and Coke Company, creating that amusing publicity figure, “Mr Therm,” a little man-like flams which still flares through Gas Company advertisements calling now for decreased consumption as cleverly as it did for increased burning in. prewar days. In one of his few public speeches Leslie once described himself as a “new style Barnum,” using psychoanalytical subtlety instead oi blaring, brassy emotional appeals to the public. When war broke .out, Leslie was 41, with a lovely house on Hampstead

Heights and a son and daughter (he married Doris Frances Falk in 1924) about to go to Oxford. Leslie was then at the peak of his commercial publicity career. He combined education and art with wisecracking, smooth sales talk on the American pattern. In club and pub he was inclined to hold forth to his cronies on the necessity for the creation of a “Ministry for Public Enlightenment.” He delighted to develop the Freudian theory ns applied to mass psychology that people en masse could be swayed and persuaded not only by political eloquence but by publicity based on the assumption that most people suffered from boredom, insecurity, ignorance, loneliness and frustration, all of which could be played upon by a publicity virtuoso.

Morrison’s P.R.O. In 1940 he was “a natural” for the post of Director of Public Relations at the Ministry of Supply under Mr Morrison, after which he moved with Morrison and with the same powers to the Home Office and Ministry for Home Security. Leslie wrote an informative booklet, “Front Line 1940-1941,” of how the country carried on during the blitz, reviewing production troubles and boosting morale. It is believed that Leslie was the leading light among those publicity men who collated reports on the reaction of the public to air raids, shortages, controls and home and enemy propaganda. In 1946 Leslie was the obvious choice as director of the newly-created Council of Industrial Design, one of those semi-Government institution! nominally run by a group of industrialists, but assisted openly and otherwise by State funds. In this capacity Leslie was the brains behind the very successful “Britain Can Make It” campaign. In his new job, Leslie is once again working with his old chief, Herbert Morrison. His new office is in the same building as that of the Lord President, whose duties include the conduct of the Government’s economic recovery drive. If. as is widely tipped, Morrison eventually moves up Whitehall to No. 10 Downing Street, will Leslie move in with him? Questions in House Leslie could probably earn muSh more than his £3750 salary as a temporary civil servant if he stayed in commerce, but he would not have the same sense of national power which the Central Planning Organisation job confers upon him. Previously the highest paid public relations officer with the Government was that eminent journalist and former editor of the “Daily Herald,” Francis Williams, who as Mr Attlee’s personal press officer gets £2OOO a year. But £75 a week looks a lot to senior civil servants. Hence questions* in the House of Commons on this appointment which brought Mr Morrison’s reply that Leslie could have earned much more outside the Civil Service, in which in any case he was only a temporary employee with no rights to a pension. At a time when the Government Is trying to peg industrial wages, the payment of fat salaries to new temporary civil servants grates in the ears of coal miners and railwaymen, who are critical of the first results of Leslie’s appointment—the “work or want” posters. It has been persistently whispered that Leslie wrote Mr Morrison's outstanding patriotic speeches in 1941 and 194? I: he did he made a very good jcL of thor for they sometimes challenged Churchill's eloquence. If Leslie a political career the road would ap.»etv to be wide open to him.