From the days of the Bugle...

Even 50 years later, the freshness, the innocence and the ‘can do’ enthusiasm still bounce off the pages of the Tuebrook Bugle. The slogan said ‘Written by the people, for the people’.

Based in a poor area of the city, the Tuebrook Bugle began to criticise the establishment and the many other organisations blighting this community. The newspaper promoted ideas about social justice, educational opportunities and fairness for ordinary people. Anyone who was not doing their job properly or who took advantage of this part of Liverpool was fiercely criticised.

These were some of the headlines in the first edition.

·  Our homes are in the balance

·  Phew! What a stink

·  It pays to protest

‘Who owns the Tuebrook Bugle?’ was another headline. Under it there was a description of the editorial team. The team held weekly meetings to discuss local events and to choose stories and photographs for the next edition. During their work on the newspaper, the team found a lot of problems were caused by misunderstanding and a lack of communication. The need for plain English was obvious even then.

A look back on the earlier days of jargon and gibberish

The date at the top of the Tuebrook Bugle’s front page, shown below, is May 1971.

The main story in this issue of The Bugle was ‘A Conspiracy of Silence on Benefits?’ This story was one of my first campaigns for the use of plain English. Liverpool City Council at that time had voted against publishing a leaflet which would have clearly told the people what benefits they were entitled to. The council were using jargon, gobbledygook and gibberish to betray the people. The Bugle never let them forget that. Nor, many years later, did Plain English Campaign let any authority get away with any gobbledygook.

Filling in forms is difficult even if you can find time to answer complicated questions. When you have four kids pulling at your arms at a council office’s counter, the task becomes almost impossible. As a young mum, in the days before the Tuebrook Bugle, I found that filling in forms made me want to scream.

A few years later I went on, as part of another group called ‘Impact’, to simplify and redesign the first attempt at a multi-purpose benefit form for the council.

We produced the form with the co-operation of Area ‘D’, then part of the city council’s housing department. This area management office was based in Victoria Street in Liverpool city centre. The city council had come to realise that easier forms could save them time and money. Less time was spent by the people filling in the forms and also by the council staff who were processing them.

Since those early days, Plain English Campaign has worked with the council on many occasions to help them improve the clarity of their documents.

And these days it’s not just paper documents. Increasingly, organisations are using their websites as a way of communicating with the public, and Liverpool City Council is no exception. From the start they have been determined that their website should be as clear as possible. So they asked us to run a series of courses for council employees who contribute to the website.

Plain English Campaign trainer John Wild, who had been running these courses for the council, said: ‘It’s a sign of the times that our “Writing for Websites” courses are becoming increasingly popular. And it’s good to see that a large, forward-looking council like Liverpool is committed to making their website as clear and accessible as possible.’

Chrissie Maher