Second Scot

To find its first general manager, British Broadcasting Co. Ltd. inserted a want ad in a technical paper. That was in 1922 and John Charles Walsham Reith answered the ad, got the job. Since then the company has become The British Broadcasting Corp., has grown to overwhelming imperial importance. Director-General Reith got a knighthood and now a new $50,000 post as director of Imperial Airways.

BBC is Britain's radio voice, sole dispenser of programs to some 8,500,000 licensed radio sets in the British Isles, broadcaster of short-wave service to the distant outposts of Empire, operator of the world's first schedule of television broadcasts for public entertainment. Therefore, last month when Sir John Reith's new appointment left BBC without a director-general, the choice of his successor was a matter of prime public interest. Britishers had come to believe that dour, resourceful Sir John was the BBC. For he had never hesitated to take on his own broad, stooped Scottish shoulders direct and total responsibility for BBC policies and moral tone.

Out of a ruck of possible candidates discussed by the London press, BBC's board of governors last week chose another Scot, Frederick Wolff Ogilvie, to succeed Scot Reith. Dark-horse candidate for the $37,500 job, Professor Ogilvie is a celebrated economist. The board wanted a thoroughgoing educator, and the new 45-year-old D. G. fills the bill perfectly. He taught at Oxford and Edinburgh before becoming president and vice-chancellor of Queen's University, Belfast.

BBC is also getting a vigorous new chief. Despite the loss of his left arm in the War, Professor Ogilvie drives an automobile, flies a plane, plays a fair golf game. He has never broadcast, but the twelve-year-old eldest of his three sons recently wrote a play which was aired on a Northern Ireland children's program. BBC knows him as the man who persuaded it to broadcast pop concerts for his Belfast students during lunch time. But Director-General Ogilvie comes to BBC at a time when there is talk of spending -L-1,000,000 to double Broadcasting House facilities, when the daring television venture needs careful nursing, when BBC's critics are calling for a return of the human element to their efficient but relatively austere radio machine.

When Vice-Chancellor Ogilvie accepted the BBC appointment, he told the press: "I am not director-general until October and I hope to be in cold storage until then." Jumping to the conclusion that this meant that he would continue the Reith tradition of aloof frigidity, the Daily Mail snapped: ''We do not want any more Sphinxes at Broadcasting House. The BBC is an organization paid for and designed for the ordinary listener and is not an Egyptian desert."

But at Belfast the new D. G. has a very unsphinxlike reputation. Soon after 80 plasterers, painters, bricklayers had prepared the elegant vice-chancellor's residence for his occupancy, he gave them and their wives a party. He knows all his professors, assistants and researchers by their first names, provides good dance music at his frequent receptions, cheers the exploits of the university's Gaelic football team. Two years ago he demonstrated the strength of his pacifist convictions, refused to allow the university's officers' training corps to take part in the Armistice Day celebration.

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