A lament to lost freedom
QUESTION Does anyone recall a short film from the Fifties about a Yorkshireman’s reminiscences of home as he is escorted to prison? It was quite moving. This was song Of The Valley, made for the BBC’s topical magazine Tonight in 1957. Running for four minutes, it was set to singer Dorothy squires’s song Of The Valley, a nostalgic song about a Welsh valley ‘where the mountains seem to kiss the sky above’.
in the film, the action is transposed to Yorkshire and the protagonist is a convict reminiscing about his home: ‘Although I had to wander from this valley / My love is there no matter where I roam.’
halifax was the setting, and though it features little more than a montage of tall chimneys, scrapheaps and terrace houses, the film’s portrayal of a working-class Yorkshire community, set to squires’s soaring voice, makes it highly evocative. indeed, it’s an early testament to the skill of director John schlesinger, who used northern landscapes to great effect in A Kind Of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) and won an Oscar for Midnight Cowboy (1969).
song Of The Valley is on a BFi two-disc DVD Visions Of Change Volume 1: BBC 1951-1967, a series of documentaries made by directors such as Denis Mitchell, Philip Donnellan, Ken Russell and Dennis Potter.
Peter Grainger, Hull.
QUESTION Who coined the term ‘multiculturalism’? The term is first recorded in print in 1957 in hispania, a journal concerned with the teaching of spanish and Portuguese, based at Johns hopkins University, Baltimore, U.s., in an article called The Modern Language Association Foreign Language Program, written by Robert Meade Jr.
This is an extract: ‘The section of the country (U.s.A.) which i represent is a land, as lands all over the world should be, where good will, understanding and co-operation are not only desirable but essential.
‘For here its indians, its Americans of spanish descent, and its “Anglos” meet in daily contact. They must not only co-exist but contribute to each other’s lives. The key to successful living here, as in switzerland, is multilingualism, which can carry with it multiculturalism.’
This passage presents multiculturalism as a valuing of individuals’ cultural affiliations and as a compromise between the maintenance of distinct cultural groups and peaceful cohabitation within a single jurisdiction. in 1965, the Canadian Preliminary Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, invoked the term to clarify ‘mosaic’, here used to signify the ethnic diversity of a post-war Canada supposedly dominated by French and english speakers.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced multiculturalism legislation in 1971 and enshrined it in section 27 of the Charter Of Rights And Freedoms in 1982.
his aim was to instil a sense of Canadian nationalism, transcending the rivalry between the French and english. Despite this, many Quebecois felt the policy reduced their status. in 1988, Canada introduced a Multiculturalism Act to enshrine the concept in law.
Caroline Tremblay, London, E5.
QUESTION In a recent Italian head-on train crash, the stationmaster authorised a service into a single-line section by a phone call. Haven’t safer methods of regulation been devised? eARLY systems allowing trains onto a section of line on a time-interval basis resulted in some disastrous accidents.
One of the worst was on the London-toBrighton line involving three Londonbound trains squashed together in a tunnel. The resultant fire took days to extinguish.
With the introduction of signals and electricity, signal boxes along a line communicated by bell codes, as well as mechanical locking systems, to prevent signals being set for conflicting train movements.
several systems were developed, but the best was the sykes Lock And Block system, devised by W.R. sykes, under which a one-track section of line, known as a block, was uniquely controlled by dedicated equipment. Telegraph and later telephone communication was brought into use and track circuits introduced to allow train positions to be shown on a route display in the signal box.
sykes joined the London, Chatham & Dover Railway at 22. With an interest in telegraph, clocks and electricity, he developed a system, patented in early 1875, linking signal settings and train presence to indicators in the signal box and shown on devices in the next box.
Added to his existing designs for train detection and signal control, this made a system so successful that from 1875 the Board of Trade urged all railways to adopt it. After sykes’s death in 1917, his 1899 company became part of the Westinghouse Brake & signal Company.
A simpler method was the ‘token’ system, under which a ‘key’ or ‘token’ was taken from an instrument in the signal box and given to the train driver. The mechanism automatically locked after one token was issued from either end of the section controlled by the token system, ensuring that only one train could be in the section at one time.
Another system, on lines such as the st ives line in Cornwall, work on a ‘one train in operation’ system, where only one train is dedicated to the line for all workings.
From the early 20th century, the Great Western Railway used ‘automatic train control’ — ATC — on its engines. When passing a signal at danger, ATC would sound a siren and apply the brakes.
This has been developed for use with modern traction and remains a great help when the signals are obscured by fog.
Modern methods, with train radio communication, use track circuits and a range of systems that control trains electronically over far greater distances than the old signal boxes.
There has tended to be a convergence around the world to generally similar systems. however, traffic density and finance do have an impact on train control expenditure, since it is costly to install.
Alan Bowden, Bristol.