“Ring Out, Big Ben!”

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 290, 2 September 1933, Page 20

“Ring Out, Big Ben!”

Z Z UR best salesman—always, of course, excepting the ® ® U Prince of Wales—is Big Ben. The one consistent request x that th® BBC - get> in all its daily thousands oi complaints, suggestions and requests, is this one from all over the Empire: ‘Give us more Big Ben!”’ said Mr. C. W. Stokes, of the Canadian Pacific Railway, addressing the Empire Session at the Advertising Convention, and he added: “In this' request for more Big Ben there is something that the sentimentalists and the realists alike ought really to notice. It means that Big Ben means Britain. “But we here in Britain are the most successful exporters on earth of sentiment, and we do it in our own funny, grumbling, bumbling way that makes all our highly ‘efficient’ competitors wonder when we are going to get busy and do some, and it is this sentiment, and the way it clothes every act and deed here, and every place, that brings the tourists. “When I went to Canada first, over twenty years ago, in the days of . the big emigration boom, it rather hampered you to be too English. There were so many incompetent Englishmen and women going out then, grumbling at everything because ‘they don’t do things like over ’ome,’ that those of us who were any good took on a kind of protective colouring and

pretended we weren’t English. If we were mistaken for Americans we were delighted. . “But the American system has collapsed, and the British has stood. The fact that it has done so, and has pulled through, and is pulling the Empire and the world through, has made many millions of people throughout the world to-day proud to be able to puff out their chests and say, with Mary Ellis in ‘Cavalcade,’ ‘lt’s a great thing these days to be English.’ “Therefore, I suggest, that if we can meet their requirements of utility and price in our goods, If we can package the goods so as to please our customers and to meet competitive articles on equal grounds, that underneath this coat of North Americanism there is still a prepossession in favour of what the Old Country has for sale. “It is sufficiently strong, I think, to form just that one loophole in the vast and .terrifying barricade that confronts our export trade, and frightens our traders. The goods, of course, must be excellent: the service, the advertising and the distribution methods must support them: but over and above all this, which any up-to-date "trading nation can supply, there is just this one extra advantage. So think of this, ladies and gentlemen, the next time you turn on your. radio and hear Big Ben.”