Word: reith
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week, the Government thought they had found the right man to bring Imperial Airways up to snuff. That man was starchy, six-foot-six Sir John Charles Walsham Reith, a dour, egg-headed, ascetic Aberdonian who since 1922 has had his puritanical thumb on the destinies of the British Broadcasting Corp. Son of a preacher, trained as a Clydeside engineer, he got his job with B.B.C. by the improbable method of answering a want ad for a general manager...
...change in the character of Sunday programs. . . . The B.B.C. has never attempted to give the public what it wants. It gives the public what it ought to have." While Edward VIII was Prince of Wales, an observer remarked: "Every year the Prince gets more democratic, and Sir John Reith more regal...
...this sort of rule at B.B.C., Sir John's salary has been about $35,000 annually. As director of Imperial Airways, he will get $50,000. To Imperial, organization under Sir John Reith may well mean the installation top-to-bottom of the rigid quarter-deck punctilio he commanded at B.B.C. As if in anticipation of Sir John's coming, the company last week had in strict training a corps of "flight clerks" for the jobs stewardesses do on U. S. airlines. In trim-cut uniforms they must work 18 hours a day for $25-$30 a week...
...days later Sir John Reith, chief of British Broadcasting Corp., decided that he, too, would give the Basque children a treat. To the tent-city near Southampton where 2,000 of the refugees are being housed, he went with a radio van. When news came that Bilbao had fallen (see p. 20), Sir John, against the advice of the camp's Basque officials, decided to broadcast the bad news...
Head of this rich, state-protected bureaucracy since its inception has been a shambling, pugnacious, 6-ft. 4-in. Scot named John Charles Walsham Reith. Knighted in 1927, Sir John is monarch of all he surveys in Broadcasting House, the big white B. B. C. building which dominates Portland Place and, in the interests of acoustics, is sealed like a tomb and ventilated like a submarine. So obnoxious to many of B. B. C.'s 3,000 employes was the "Army" atmosphere of Broadcasting House (e. g., B. B. C.-ers were fired when they got divorced), that...