From The Times Literary Supplement:
Documents now available in the National Archives include this memorandum written in 1918 by Rudyard Kipling for Lord Beaverbrook, the head of the Ministry of Information. It is published here for the first time.
PROPAGANDA FOR MUNITIONS
FACTORIES
As far as I can make out it is more important just now to feed munition-works with steadying propaganda than any other class; because they seem to be the most isolated.
What they need, among other things, is news and description of the actual work done by the material they produce . . . Oratory of some sort or another is the workman’s intellectual excitement – he has a great respect for the gift of the gab – and his education for the past seven or eight years has made him peculiarly accessible to both oratory and the cinema. The two together are the strongest combination.
NEWS FOR AEROPLANE FACTORIES
Take first the case of Aeroplanes. When once a machine is despatched, no word of its performances in the field comes back to the factory. This is as stupid as preventing trainers and ostlers in a racing stable from being told what their horses are doing on the turf. I suggest . . . that arrangements could be made with the Air Service whereby the make and types of the machines employed in any special success should be communicated to the factory that produced them . . . . The form might run something as follows:-
On March 4th four of our B. C. D. biplanes accounted for one German crashed, and two driven out of control. This makes seven crashed and three driven down for this type between – and – (Follow with serial number of machine and date of despatch if advisable)
In Mesopotamia Jan. 18th our R. L. S. scout machine photoed Turkish ammunition dump at El-Arish which Jan. 20th was bombed effectively by two of our B. C. Ds
And so on and so forth . . . .
This in conjunction with cinema work of aerodrome and air stunts. It is not generally realized that a large number of aeroplane workers in factories have the very sketchiest ideas of what an aeroplane does or can do. I should go so far as to say that a lecturer on the development of the aeroplane would find his most interested audience in an aeroplane factory.
Comments