Today being Tuesday we carried on some additional wedding anniversary celebrations by going down to Waitrose and entertaining the rest of 'the granny gang' with the promised cake which we know is always available in the store. The store very kindly gifted us the cake which was very good of them but we are about their oldest and most loyal of customers. Approaching mid September, the weather now has a decided autumnal feel to it and although we do not mind a little light drizzle such as we experienced on Sunday, the wheelchair wheels always require a certain degree of cleaning as we enter our hallway to ensure that we do not make a mess of the carpets by transferring the roadside grit to the inside of the house.
Upon arriving in London to take up my post at the Central Office of Information, I was directed to make initial contact with reception where someone from personnel was detailed to look out for me. Her words sent a chill through my heart as she announced that as I had had library experience, I was going to be detailed to work in the Reference Library of the Reference Division of COI. I tried to indicate to them that I knew nothing about libraries as the National lending Library was staffed by scientists who filled professional librarians with despair by ignoring nearly all of the rules of what was considered good library practice. For example, none of the periodicals was given a classification number but a series of rules were applied to standardise the title for the library records and then everything was filed from A-Z. I had visions of the Reference Library being stuffed full of little old ladies with fingerless gloves on poring over card indexes and the like but the die was already cast and so I was marched upstairs. My worst fears were not to be realised, though. The Library was indeed a library but not in the conventional sense and was nowadays what would be called an 'information centre' Its function was not to lend out books as such but to research and supply relevant information to the rest of the Reference Division who produced each year 'Britain - An Official Handbook' mainly for the use of embassies abroad. It worked with Whitehall departments and public bodies to produce information campaigns on issues that affected the lives of British citizens, from health and education to benefits, rights and welfare. The rest of the Central Office of Information, henceforth COI, was full of departments which again was very unlike the Civil Service. For example, there was a Films and TV division which made official government films such as road safety films and an Exhibition Division that would design and mount the UK's pavilions at overseas trade fairs and the like. As it turned out, my year at the COI was one of the most interesting and productive that it was possible to be. Although we all had our official list of duties, in practice we answered telephone queries from the rest of Whitehall to assist in the marketing and press offices of the various ministries. COI was full therefore of journalists (in the Reference division), TV and media people (in the Films and TV department) and so on. One of my official duties as the office junior was to arrange for the distribution of newspapers across the various parts of the Reference Division and we took every newspaper then produced including 'The Daily Worker' (which was to rebranded as 'The Morning Star' as the official mouthpiece of the Communist party - it was said that the newspaper was excellent on constitutional issues) The library was headed by an emigre Hungarian who treated me kindly and benevolently and it was here that I met Jo, the brilliant young widow who took me under her wing as it were and became a life long friend. She died in her 90's and I devoted the whole of my day's blog to her when I heard the sad news of her demise as our frienship lasted from 1964 to 2024 so we had been life long friends for sixty years. The other staff were very varied, one being a young and I suspect gay man who was passionate about and incredibly well informed about every aspects of the arts and cultural life in Britain. There was one other young person who had performed the office junior role but moved on to make way for me and a friendly older female worker. Most of our work consisted of answering queries from all over the rest of the Whitehall machine and we always kept an ear open to other's conversations in case you happened to have a lead that would help them in their present enquiries. A few days after I joined the Library, it was the date of General Election which the Labour Party won by three seats. Our Hungarian boss had a transistor radio on his desk tuned to the election news which resulted in knife edge win for the Labour Party. The Tory Party had won three general elections in 1951, 1955 and 1959 and by 1964 there was felt to be a need, then as now, for a change. The Labour party had made massive gains in the urban results declared in the early part of the evening but then the results from the Tory shires kept trickling in making a Labour victory seem more and more problematic. For accommodation, I had been offered a place in the London Hostels Association which, as it name suggests, provided hostel accommodation for young impecunious civil servants. My hostel was in Broadhurst gardens and I made the journey every day down the Bakerloo line from Finchley Road to Lambeth North which was a journey of about eight Tube stops. As I made my journey home each evening, the placards of Evening Standard newspapers was full of warnings such as 'Battle for the Pound' as immediately after the election of the Labour Government many international investors (then dubbed by Harold Wilson as the 'Gnomes of Zurich') took fright and withdrew funds from the London capital markets. So the incoming Labour government with a majority of only three had an immediate fight on its hands not to be destabilised as it fought to preserve the parity of the pound vis-a-vis the rest of the world's currencies. My journey across London by Tube took about 20 minutes and I only had a short walk at each end of the journey to reach the appropriate Tube station so travel was not one of my difficulties. We managed to get a cut price season Ticket for the Tube which helped considerably as well as it could be used for out of work activities as well.
© Mike Hart [2024]