999 to 849

Last week in the House of Commons Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rose up as expected (TIME, Oct. 9) to announce the downfall of Britain's month-old Ministry of Information. After bitter onslaughts in press and Parliament, Mr. Chamberlain intimated that the Ministry's unwieldy staff had been drastically curtailed, its most vital function transferred to a new Press Censorship and News Distribution Department of the Government.

Next day in the House of Lords Minister of Information Lord Macmillan gave out details. Of the Ministry's famed 999, some 450 staff members remained to write and distribute propaganda. The new department took over 399 censors and press relations officials. By discreetly adding these two figures, the most doddering peer could realize for himself that only about 150 of the Ministry's personnel had actually lost their jobs.

This week, in the great white Bloomsbury building which the Ministry took over from the University of London, the Censorship Department went to work under a new head: Sir Walter Monckton, 48, onetime legal adviser to King Edward VIII. Each Government department now issues its own news as it did before the War, has its own censors, responsible to Sir Walter. From their Whitehall offices bulletins go to Bloomsbury. There newsmen write dispatches, submit them to a second board of censors before they can be released.

Correspondents on their way to the front (see p. 58) also will submit to a double censorship: once in the field, again at the end of their special wire to London. To most newswriters it was clear last week that Britain's official press hierarchy, though changed in form, was little changed in substance, might prove no less muddleheaded than before.

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