A curious bias against the Scots
In this second instalment of my father’s report to the Imperial Relations Trust, he continues his observations of the culture and arts landscape in the British Isles in 1962.
The road trip, from Lands End to John O’Groats, was supported by an Imperial Relations Trust grant. Peter Cape, my father, was head of Religious Broadcasting and senior producer for WNTV1 with the fledgling NZBC. In early 1962 the Cape family sailed to England, where my father trained with the BBC. He brought that knowledge back to the NZBC, and his observations of arts and culture to the Imperial Relations Trust, later that year.
“The first two days of the tour were complicated by the fact that my son developed German measles, and my daughter’s white mouse (which travelled with us) produced seven offspring and then lost herself in a wood in Hertfordshire, leaving us to act as foster parents, but from then on there were no difficulties.
We camped by the roadside every night, and we maintained a regular four to six calls on country workshops or places of historic interest daily, and while I drove, my wife continued the children’s education with the help of sets of work from the New Zealand Education Department’s Correspondence School.
At Reading, we toured a brewery, and spent half a day with the County Education Officer, laying the basis of an understanding of the English education system. This understanding was later filled out in Bristol, where we discussed child welfare; in Newcastle, where we discussed the English probation system, and in Edinburgh where school health was dealt with.
From Bristol we were sent into the Cheddar country to visit a farm where high-grade cheese was made, and where we were also able to learn something of animal husbandry in the area. Later, in Stirling, we spent a day on a Scottish hill farm, comparing agricultural practices there with our own high country techniques.
In Llanelli, in Wales, we paid a brief visit to the National Eisteddfod, and then moved on to see some of the small textile mills and workshops under the tutelage of the Welsh Rural Industries Bureau. From Wales we
The first two days of the tour were complicated by the fact that my son developed German measles, and my daughter’s white mouse (which travelled with us) produced seven offspring and then lost herself in a wood in Hertfordshire, leaving us to act as foster parents.
went to Manchester to see something of youth clubs and youth work generally, and to see over one of the British Calico Printers Association’s Mills, and then on to the Lake District, where we spent three days at the Outward Bound school.
While we were impressed with what the Outward Bound movement does in England, particularly with boys from the cities, who have no other opportunities to come to grips with the outside world and to learn a certain amount of self-sufficiency, we felt that the system would need considerable modification before similar schools were set up (as is proposed) in New Zealand.
In a country where deer-stalking, pig hunting, tramping, skiing, climbing and bush-work are within easy reach of everyone, these activities have no novelty value, and other methods will have to be found to foster teamwork and team spirit in Outward Bound patrols.
From the rain-soaked Lake District we moved into Yorkshire, and up to Newcastle-on-Tyne, where, in addition to interviewing the head of probation services, we spent a day with the mayoress and councillors of Gateshead, seeing over their impressive slum-clearance and rebuilding scheme. We then went north into Scotland.
I must break off here to comment on a curiously shortsighted attitude towards Scotland that a number of English people with whom I discussed plans for this tour, and in particular the Central Office of Information, seem to hold. I was virtually given to believe that there was nothing to be seen in Scotland except Edinburgh and the heather, and the Scots were a primitive race whose main misfortune was that they were born in Britain without enjoying the privilege of being English.
The Central Office of Information put this attitude into practice by allowing us, in our itinerary, something in the vicinity of 10 days in the country, most of which were to be spent in Edinburgh.
We found, in fact, that in visiting Scotland we were visiting, not another part of Britain, but another Commonwealth country. A country with its own national aspirations — more so than Wales, where the preservation of a national language has maintained the Welsh character against English domination in a more subtle way. But I would recommend that future bursars be given a greater opportunity to study Scotland as a separate entity and that the COI allow more time there in its itineraries.
If I am somewhat critical of the COI, I have nothing but the highest praise for the Scottish Office of Information. From the very start, I was treated with expedition and insight — in spite of the fact that I arrived in Edinburgh late on a Saturday afternoon.
I was immediately made a member of the Festival Press Bureau, which meant my wife and I received free tickets to as many festival events as we could take in.
We were also extremely fortunate that, on our second night in Edinburgh, we met, through our interest in folk music, a young architect who offered us a room in his Moray Place flat. This not only solved the problem of babysitters for the children, but also gave us a sample of Scottish hospitality.”
My parents immersed themselves in Edinburgh Festival life. They mixed with well-known folk singers, such as the Corries, whose material echoed the struggles of the working classes.
Songs like Poverty Knock vividly described the living and working conditions out of which the slum clearances and education programmes grew, in an effort to lift those entangled in the clutches of poverty, to a better standard of living.
It’s a repetitive chorus. “Poverty, Poverty knock, my loom is saying all day . . . ” An old story, but it would seem, from current circumstances in New Zealand, such struggles and remedial efforts are still with us.
I don’t think they ever really disappear; the quest for riches is never satisfied, as Janis Joplin pointed out in her 1970 classic Mercedes Benz. “Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porches, I must make amends.”