Telling Britain’s Allies About Empire

Northern Advocate, 19 November 1941, Page 9

Telling Britain’s Allies About Empire

“Conjurors can produce rabbits out of bats. It is more difficult to produce a hat out of a rabbit; yet this is done every day by hat manufacturers.” So London’s Imperial Institute wittily announces a display showing how New Zealand turns its rabbit pest into a national asset—one of many vivid exhibits by which the Institute eacli day pictures the Empire’s vast resources to parties including many Poles. Czechs, Belgians, Free French, Dutch and Norwegians now fighting alongside Britain. In the galleries, where dioramas and story exhibits bring together under a single roof the remotest corners of the Empire, director Sir Harry Lindsay and his staff have evolved a technique of their own for displaying the Empire’s resources. Practical Lessons In normal times their visitors arc mainly school children, parties of whom come to the institute, even in wartime, to wander among the goldfields of the Rand, the frozen uplands of the Falkland Islands and the sugar plantations of Jamaica. In the cinema they may see films of salmon catching and canning in British Columbia or the life and scenery of India. Now that thousands of them are evacuated to the country, institute lecturers, each with a district of his own. are taking the tale of Empire to the schools. Since the war. 4500 films have been loaned out to the countryside free of charge.

The institute’s latest venture is to show hy poster Ihc processing of such Empire products as Ceylon coconuts, Uganda cotton seed. Trinidad lake asphalt. West Indian cane sugar (“From Cane to Candy”) and Sea Island Cotton (“The Story’ of a Shirt”).