A Traveller's Tale #31: Through the looking glass

Peter Cape, my father, was senior producer for WNTV1 and head of Religious Broadcasting with the fledgling NZBC. In 1962, our family sailed to England where my father was to train with the BBC. He won a grant from the Imperial Relations Trust to travel the British Isles and observe the culture and art scene as it was developing, and report his observations on our return to New Zealand. This, in the first of three episodes, is his report.

Report to The Imperial Relations Trust
Peter Cape, Religious Broadcasts NZBC
If there is one characteristic that the English race possesses more noticeably than any other, it is (in my judgment at least) the characteristic of myth-making. Certainly, other nations make myths about themselves, but it is the English alone who have the ability to make myths and live them after they are made.

The difficulty the visitor to Britain faces is that, while he is expected to accept the English myth at face value, he can never understand what it is that makes it until he has discarded it – or at least looked underneath it – and this he is not encouraged to do. One can become very unpopular by insisting that the English policeman is no more helpful – or unhelpful – than the gendarme in Paris, or that any colonial motorist with an A to Z and some common sense can find some out-of-the-way streets as easily as a London taxi driver.

The point is, of course, the English are incurable romanticists – and necessarily so. Inhabiting part of a small island, surrounded by tamed but not entirely friendly peoples; France to the east, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to the north and west, they need a strong and positive self-image in order to maintain their national self-respect. There has always been, I imagine, something of a gap between this self-image and the people of the race as they really are. It is possible that the gap was at its narrowest in the late 19th century, under the strong moral, political and religious compulsions of late Victorianism, but there is no doubt that now, with the Empire dissolved, with the play of international politics resting largely between Russia and the United States, and with the step into the Common Market all but taken, there is an element of bitterness in the presentation of the national self-image. Nevertheless, it is still presented, and the Commonwealth visitor is still expected to give credence to it.

This is an expression in very stark black and white of my findings after six and a half months' concentrated looking around Great Britain. A boiling down of my observations to what may well appear to be idiot simplicity. I had not been to England before. I had, admittedly, met English people in New Zealand, and although the English do not generally settle easily to life in Australia and New Zealand, I was not prepared to let any previously acquired likes and dislikes prejudice me on my arrival. I have to admit, too, that I had absorbed my share of the exported image of England – the image presented on film, television, radio, books and magazines – and I landed with the conviction that I should look for whatever was behind and beneath the image, rather than seeking the elements that would confirm it.

I arrived at Southampton at the end of April, with my wife and two children (a son aged eight, a daughter aged five). In spite of the month, it was still winter. (Blackthorn winter, as some friends we made later in Buckinghamshire called it.). We spent three nights in Holland House Youth Hostel, getting a little of the feel of London, and being continually surprised at the smallness of its scale. It was here that we first noticed the gap between myth and actuality; Piccadilly Circus with its photogenic advertisements was more of an irritating traffic hazard than the hub of a city, and the "majestic sweep of Ludgate Hill" as GK Chesterton called it, was a narrowish street ruined by a railway viaduct.

From Holland House we went, for a week, to a flat in a vicarage in Ashley Green. A flat found for us by a friend in BBC religious broadcasts. It was very pleasant, but abominably isolated. However, it gave us our first opportunity to meet non-London English. We met quite a number of them, as I took services for the vicar of the parish, who was ill. We were delighted with what we found, even though the relics of the class (or caste, as I prefer to call it) system inhibited a completely free exchange of ideas. Also, of course, I tended to ask somewhat unorthodox questions.

Our final move, in our first weeks in England, was to a house in Highgate, which we found through New Zealand House. We had barely time to settle here to start the children at a church school, before I began the general television producer's course at the BBC.
The two months I spent on this course were of the greatest possible value. With television barely begun in New Zealand, any contact any New Zealand producer can have with longer-established organisations must be profitable. I was impressed by the highly professional approach of the BBC, though at the same time (having some knowledge of broadcasters), I tried to avoid basing any evaluation of England and the English on the people I met within the corporation.

I completed the course at the end of June, and moved, a few days later, into a much cheaper flat, which was let to me by another broadcaster. We then began to make plans for an extended tour of Great Britain. Because of our interests, which are extremely varied, we felt we should try in our tour to take in a number of aspects of English life. On one hand, we wanted to see what we could of England's history and pre-history; on the other, we wanted to talk to people who were living in England now. We also wanted to see what we could of national industries, and – of importance to us as citizens of a welfare state – the working out of English social legislation in education, penology and housing.

The historical side of the tour was easily planned. We merely selected items of interest from the Ministry of Works Historic Places handbook and plotted them on a map. The selection of people to talk to, however, was a more complex matter. We knew that the Central Office of Information would arrange official contacts, meetings and visits for us, but we wanted to meet people who were independent, without official connections, and articulate. So, being interested in arts and crafts, we selected a number of craftsmen, workshops, and rural industries, and plotted them on our map. From this we built a 5000-mile itinerary into which we asked the Central Office of Information to fit all our official meetings and contacts. We then bought a Ford Anglia for £30, loaded it with the lightweight camping equipment we had brought with us from New Zealand, and took to the road.

The Lorna Doone coach at the Stage Coach Inn, Devon, England, 1962. Photo / Peter Cape

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.

[My father writes candidly. I was 8. Correspondence School set work was a bore. The real life experiences I was immersed in were of far greater interest, as the journey continued.]