The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 13

THE OBSERVER, FEBRUARY 24, 1963 Pendennis 1 3 baby Keeping Co-ops out of the Red THHE hand that rocked the cradle is turning to the air-conditioned baby box. Invented by the American psychologist Professor B. F. Skinner, of Harvard, the pimeer of teaching machines, and now used by some of his disciples, the baby box sounds like the modern equivalent of Che eighteenth-century baby cage. You just pop your baby, dressed only jn a nappy, into a nice, warm glass case, and there it can stay, with a mesh mattress lo cope with leaks, until it's two years old.

We tried the idea on some pediatricians and psychologists in this country. At Cambridge they've never heard of it they said they were more concerned with animal behaviour than with children. Nor had they heard of it at Nottingham, though they've just done a big survey into British babies. What exactly, they want to know, is their attitude to their mothers, and vice versa? Finally we ran to ground a pediatrician who knew about it. Disgusting," he said, disgusting.

Over here mothers enjoy looking after their babies," T2ATTLE has been joined 3 between rival forces in the London Co-operative Society which could have a crucial influence on the future of the whole Co-operative Movement Hostilities broke out last week in rather bizarre circumstances Johv Storehouse, 37 car old left-wing Labour and President of the Society, with three of h.s colleagues, alleged that the majority group. ng on the board, the 1960 Group, had come under ommumst influence Up spoke Riivm Ledger, another, less and lcl'l-wtng, Labour promptly denied the charge. As it happens. Ledger wrong the Communists was have Ian Allan with map of vanishing railway COLIN 'ONES secured a dominant influence. But the dispute is not so much political as commercial whether or not the London Society, the largest in the world, should fade into a grey decline, or whether it should use modern methods to counter the aggressive competition from the supermarket chains The dory began last year, when Sionehouse narrowly won the presidency and the London Cooperative Members' Organisation, a caucus group of members grown Russian for 7-year-olds? dose of night-life and a platitudinous report at the end But this time the finance committee gave the board a great shock.

It produced a report recommending far-reaching changes and economies. It even suggested dispensing with the society hallowed subcommittees, calling the committee members directors and giving them specific responsibilities and. most shocking of all lo the fundamentalist, vtting up a joint company with private property developers to redevelop the society's sites Kicks and screams Faced with this radical report, the Communists, playing on the vested interest in the status quo enjoyed by, at any rate, the employees, secured a majority against the proposals They tried to gel the whole matter shelved without discussion But at a private weekend conference in the Ambassadors Hotel in Bloomsbury on January 2f 27 everything was thrashed out, and the reformers went down to defeat by 10 votes to four This was the signal for revolt. Three members of the Board promptly resigned from the I960 Group, to be in a position to back rival candidates in the elections which are due in nine weeks' time. Meanwhile, the reforms already implemented are being dismantled.

Next week the sixpenny guaranteed dividend will be withdrawn and in 60 shops prices are to be increased. The advertising drive has been cut back And. of course, there is no question of the society under its present control doing a Clore on its valuable property sites. Last week Mr. David Ainlev.

one of the board members, wrote a Communist Party pamphlet on the o-ops called Class War in the High Street." This is not at all how Stonehouse and his friends see the struggle for trade. If the five candidates of the Democratic Co-operative Alliance they are backing, four of them under 35. succeed the way-will be wide open for radical reform. As one of them said the other day. We aim to drag the Co-operative Movement, kicking and screaming if need be, from the 1930s into the 1960s." office at Shepperton.

Personally, however, he stands to make quite a pile out of the latest Beeching axe strokes, as he's bringing out a definitive new book on the decline and fall of steam locomotives in Western Europe. Zebra v. ant "VIT'HICH way should the stripes of the zebra run? At a recent conference in Cologne a doctor produced the alarming theory that all the zebra crossings in the city had been painted with their stripes running in the wrong direction. Like our zebras they're painted so that they run across the path of pedestrians. This, he said, psychologically encourages the motorist to drive on and deters the walker from crossing.

To prove his theory he's experimented with animals. If the stripes go their way. ants, too, cross far more willingly. LAST WEEK, strange candle-tit rituals took place all over the country when the members of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs a kind of latter-day suffragettes began celebrating their Silver Jubilee year. Twenty thousand strong, they fight discrimination against women with these odd ceremonies.

Nobody knows their origin, as the federation's history is lost in the mists of the thirties, when the movement spread from 'America. At Guildford (see above) there was a sort of altar on the platform. At Carton Hall foreign girls paraded In national costume, and lit candles for their country. AST week, the Labour Party's spokesmen on education became alarmed about the effects of the Government's impending new deal for primary schools. For the news began to leak out that Sm Edward Boyle, the chubby, donnish Minister of Education, intends to set up a full-scale inquiry into the primary school system.

The Labour Party thought it already knew what was wrong thousands of children in slum schools (no proper heating, no piped water, outside lavatories), hundreds of thousands in sub-standard schools. Teachers are still desperately short. The latest official report shows that, at the rate we're going, we still shan't get all primary school classes down to the bare minimum of 40 children 40 years after the Butler Act in 1984. On Thursday, Tom Driberg tabled a sharp question to Boyle in the House. Could he give assurances that the inquiry would not hold up the building programme? Boyle said he could, but the Labour Party still wails anxiously for the official announcement of the inquiry next month.

In fact, it ought to be delighted with Boyle's plans when they are published. Apparently he intends to launch the most ambitious educational inquiry ever set in hand. Unlike its predecessor, the Crowther Committee on secondary education, the new committee won't have lo rely on guesswork on vital issues. For it will have a massive full-lime secretariat of teachers, dons and local education authority men engaged in promoting research projects. No more nature study High-powered research teams will try to find out how to turn the essentially unscientific nature-study class to serious biology how to convert rule-of-thumb arithmetic into modern maths and how to teach foreign languages perhaps even Russian to children at this tender and receptive age.

If the schools co-operate as they surely will these projects can then be tested and refined in practice. This could revolutionise teaching, not only in primary schools but also in nursery and secondary schools. Gibbon of the railways "lyEXT mon-th when Dr. Beeching reveals his Master Plan for dismembering the railways, one railway enthusiasit will breathe a sigh of relief a quiet young railway clerk turned publisher called Ian Allan. He does the handbooks for the million-odd train spotters in this country Late! he's been in a terrible state over an atlas because of Beechmg's cuts.

As fast as I work he closes a line and I have to scratch it out." Allan, whose office at Hampton Court has a red telephone, and deer outside the window, has had to use an old railway atlas showing routes as they were in 1923. Beechmg's regional colours have given him a good deal of trouble: he took chunks off the Southern Region and tacked them on to the Western and so on. By temperament a steam man. he's all for the zealots who've saved the Bluebell Line (recently refitted with Victorian waitresses). He's about to move himself into a Pullman coach once used by royalty and now turned into an TAKE A LETTER ABOUT CENTRAL HEATING Sex guide born in a women's club John Stonehouse old in the movement, which had controlled the Board for more than 20 years, were defeated the I960 Group, which contains Communists, Co-operative employees and others.

For years the London Co-operative Society bad displayed all the defects of the movement as a whole amateur management, petty intrigues, drab, depressing shops, low standards of merchandising. Since 1957 sales have fallen, and with them, dividends. Erid of the 'divi' Stonehouse determined to win over a majority of the management committee to the cause of reform. He succeeded and last September the new policy was announced A cut-price drive to outdo the rival supermarkets took the place of the traditional "divi in all bc socictv's self-service food shops. A guaranteed 6d.

dividend was promised on every thing bought in its other shops B.D.O.. the advertising agency, was hired to project the society's new image. The new moves paid off The declining trend was reversed And last month the society's finance committee, headed by Stonehouse himself, went to Sweden to study the thriving progressive policy of the Co-operative Movement there. Visits of this kind are usually treated as nice sprees, perks for the board members, with a generous Sir: iSvfj TODAY, at many of their 400 meeting-houses up and down the country, Quakers will break their silence to talk over the outspoken new pamphlet on sex produced last week by a group of Friends. Already letters have been pouring into Friends' House in the Euston Road some of them worried that it seems to condone permissiveness, others profoundly impressed by its humanity.

Dr Anna Bidder, the Cambridge Friend who started up the group six years ago and organised its meetings every Sunday in a London women's club, is undeterred by the tremors she has caused. A Cambridge malacologist, specialising in the giant squid, she has the traditional Quaker virtues- desire for frank speaking and a distaste is for marvellous maintenance with 4 Is Even the best of things need some maintaining; like motor cars, points of view and central heating. The great thing about oil fired centra! heating through Shell-Mex and B.P. Ltd is that this service is so well arranged. SAME MAN.

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All this commits you to nothing: Is a wise precaution to take. May we suggest you take it-now. OIL FIRED central heating life for fanaticism. In fact her only regret now is that the pamphlet is a bit woolly in places. ought to have been more explicit about the triangular As a university teacher, Anna Bidder is typical of the leading Quakers of this generation.

The dynasties of chocolate tycoons (Frvs, Cadburvs and so on) and the bankers Gurneys, Tukes) have ceded their dominance to scholars and intellectuals. Today the most famous English Friend is a woman scientist Dame Kathlffn Lonsdale, the crystal-lographer Professor Charles Carifr the new university of lncaster's first Vice-ChanceUor. is a Friend, and so is Professor Roger Wii.som. the Professor of Education at Bristol, who advised the United Nations on social affairs in the Congo. Dr.

Bidder also typifies the present generation of Quakers by her complete lack of puritanjsm. There can be as much aesthetic pleasure in a glass of wine as in a beautiful flower." she says, and serves wine in her pleasant Cambridge flat, though she does not hand round drinks at a friends' meeting for fear of distressing the teetotallers, still numerous in the movement. How fast are Quaker traditions changing? A big break with the past came just over a year ago when they started an American-type advertising campaign to boost the membership from its present 21,000 Advertising in such papers as the Sew Statesman and Guardian brought in 1.500 inquiries in two short campaigns. Beamed on teachers They have been helped by the fact that, though you can find Quakers in any walk of life, so many are professional men. They have experts in publicity such people as Charles Hadiield, who used to be deputy -controller of the Central Office of Information and they can project their image with a nice clear focus on professional groups such as teachers.

Of course I hose brassy new advertisements fWnv Do Quakers Make Chocolaie? in big. black type I have offended the more conservative sort of Friends, but the movement continues to adapt itself to changing conventions. Nowadays the society finds itself in a much less radical position than in the old days when tie great J. J. Gurney kept his hat on in the presence of the Bishop of Norwich as an act of Quaker Witness." Officially, it is committed to very few specific radical reforms capital punishmenl is an exception But individual Friends continue lo turn up in sorts of radical movements I he Secretary of the tnentls' ommjltee, Kf'-seih I r.

happens to be ihe Kent Organiser for D. And in the lasi war nearly 120 Friends went to too short to read The Guardian? The tempo of life is increasing daily. Satellites are orbiting around all over the space. New nations are popping up as quickly as revolutions can pull them down again. How can we find time to keep up with the changing world Read The Guardian.

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