Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsHacks and Dons - Teaching at the London University Journalism School 1919-1939: Its origin,development and influence.Letter to Independent Monday January 13th 1992Obituary: Professor G. B. Harrison by Mark A. BloomfieldFurther to Fred Hunter’s obituary 25 November and Joan Galwey’s note 2December, I would add that Professor G.B. Harrison took pleasure in writing tostrangers who sought his aid, writes Mark A. Bloomfield.In 1980, I enquired about a paper, attributed to him, read at the LeedsConference of the Library Association in 1927 and about the role he played in theaffairs of the National Home-Reading Union (NHRU): an organisation that wasfounded by liberal academics and worthies to promote public libraries as ’people’suniversities’ at no cost to the State.Professor (later Sir Ernest) Barker, of King’s College, London, and John CannBailey wangled Harrison a place on the Executive Committee and secured for himthe editorship of The Reader- ’a guide for lonely souls’ (he guessed) at a salary ofpounds 50 a year - a needful supplement to the pounds 285, net, earned bylecturing. This appointment displeased Clarissa Graves, sister of Robert Gravesand Hon Sec of the NHRU. She was ’a prim lady in her late forties, very much oneof the literary ladies’ establishment who ran the magazine, assisted by a youngerwoman of enormous bulk named he believed- ’Rynd’.Harrison admitted taking so little interest in that ’lifeless venture’ that he neverre-read the magazine; but more trouble threatened when he passed for publicationan article on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land by a Miss Ricard, a student at King’sCollege, who asserted that the seduction of the typist (1.1.249-57) was an accuratedescription of the behaviour and sensations of a young woman having a casualaffair. This outraged the Hon Rev Dr Edward Lyttelton, ex-Headmaster of Eton,who was ’ffu’ious that anything abhorrent should be mentioned in the pure pages ofthe magazine of the NHRU and wrote to Barker that he would denounce it (andme)’.Harrison stood his ground; but he resigned as editor when his earnings from hisown writings, including Shakespeare, the Craftsman, on the NHRU’s list for 1927,increased. However, his liberal tendencies did not commend him to those whosenarrow vision prevented them from appreciating the humanising effect ofcontemporary literature, and he lamented the stultifying influence of thoseacademics for whom post-Chaucerian literature held no interest.255MOD100051426