Examining Britain: Peter Cape's report to the Imperial Relations Trust

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 is the third and final episode of his report. The Scottish Office of Information (SOI) was far more affable than its English equivalent.

Report to the Imperial Relations Trust
by Peter Cape, Religious Broadcasts, NZBC
We spent the last week of the Festival in Edinburgh, fitting in a number of appointments arranged for us by the SOI and then drove north to Braemar, Inverness, and John O'Groats. On this part of our tour we concentrated on seeing the country, and talking, wherever the opportunity offered, to farmers and crofters.

We found, particularly in the west, some of the most uneconomical farming practices we have ever come across. While the crofts and small-holdings are farmed (if farmed is the right word) in one sense with meticulous care – we saw men cutting eighth-acre plots of oats with hedge-clippers – the antiquated farming methods, and the man-hours spent in exercising them, together must go to make whatever is produced the most highly priced of its kind in the world. At the same time we could appreciate how difficult any kind of land reform would be. We found a quite fanatical conservatism and resistance to change, coupled with a startlingly clear acceptance of the fact that the small-holding system was uneconomical, which made argument impossible.

From Skye, where the SOI had arranged a visit to Dame Flora MacLeod at Dunvegan, we returned to talk to some craftsmen in Inverness and then went south to Glasgow, where I had an appointment with Ronald Falconer of the BBC Scottish Religious Broadcasts. By this time, we were a week behind the arranged itinerary, so we returned to Edinburgh, and then made our way back to London by the most direct route.

I spent the next five weeks on some very valuable attachments to BBC television departments: religious broadcasts, talks, and outside broadcasts. During this time we made day and weekend trips to Oxford, Cambridge, Brighton, Stratford, and other near-at-hand places of interest. We also saw as much as we could of London and of the set show-pieces – Hampton Court, the Tower, Buckingham Palace and so on – some of the elements in the English myth which many visitors, and indeed many English themselves, accept as being quintessential Englishness.

We then took the car to Boulogne, and spent 10 days on a rapid tour of northern France, Western Germany, and Belgium, travelling to Paris, and thence to Strassbourg, the Schwartzwald, Heidelburg, Mainz, up the Rhine to Bonn and Cologne, and then across by Bruxelles to Ostende. This left us with six days in which to pack and catch our boat.

Although this continental tour was extremely hurried, we were able – by avoiding tourist hotels, and by living as much in the countries we visited as we could – to put Britain into context [as a] European nation. We were particularly interested in the way in which a certain reserve was dropped whenever we pointed out that we were New Zealanders and not English. And yet at the same time, in spite of this reserve, there was a positive feeling about, both in France and Germany, that England belonged in Europe, and that the Common Market was the logical expression of that belonging.

Fishing boats at Ostend in 1962. Photo / Peter Cape

Now, I have written fairly extensively at the beginning of this report about what I have called the English myth. I feel I should point out now that I do not use the term in any derogatory sense. All countries project a self-image, and it is very rarely that self-image and actuality coincide. In fact, the only time that the coincidence can take place, it seems to me, is in moments of great national stress. What did fascinate me, in England, was the ability of the English to accept the myth about themselves, and to imagine they were living it, when in fact they were living something totally different.

As a race, the English have a strongly developed sense of history (in fact, I had the feeling occasionally that in England nothing became real until it was history) which accounts for the innate conservatism, the continual back-reference to what used to be, and a certain carelessness about present happenings, and appearances. Perhaps this sense of history gives rise to the second innate characteristic I noticed; the great respect given to authority exercised from what is conceived to be above, coupled with a strong desire to wield authority over those who may be considered to be beneath. The caste system is unconsciously preserved because it preserves the safety of hierarchy. It is of immense value to know who may give you orders, and who you may give orders to.

The concept of authority is absolute. If a man chooses to act as a policeman in a traffic jam, he will be obeyed as if he were a policeman. On the other hand, if he puts himself in a subordinate position by asking for information, he will be given only so much as his informant considers necessary for him to know, at that moment. I have many times had the greatest difficulty in eliciting comprehensive information, simply because my informant considered that all that I should be told was what to do next.

With this concept of authority, the English have coupled a rigid sense of its limitations of where one's authority ends. On one occasion when I was in the AA building on Leicester Square, I asked at the general enquiry desk how I could get to Ludgate Hill. I was told, perfectly seriously, that the Tours and Itineraries section could give me the information I wanted. I was given the same answers, even when I pointed out that I was not driving, but wanted to go by Tube. In fact, I received the answer three times. Nobody was prepared to volunteer information about the underground. It was not their job.

I tell this story, not because it was an isolated instance, but because it exemplifies an attitude that I have not found in any other country, an attitude which irritated me beyond any other, and which I found time and time again.
So much, in a very brief compass, for the use I have made of the past six months. It only remains for me to say – or rather to say that I cannot say – how grateful I am to the Trust for the wonderful opportunity they have given me, and my family. I have dwelt rather a lot on a single thesis in this report. I have not mentioned the positive qualities I discovered in England; the far freer intellectual atmosphere, the willingness to experiment with ideas, the unchaining of the imagination, the willingness to express, and accept, heterodox opinion, which make this a country to which I am determined to return at the earliest possible opportunity.