New Zealand’s London: A Colony and Its Metropolis

344 Pages·2013·4.822 MB·English

by  Barnes, Felicity

NEW ZEALAND’S
LONDON
A Colony and its Metropolis
FELICITY BARNES
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
One New Zealand’s London 14
Two At Home in London 41
Three A ‘New’ New Zealand 70
Four London Literate:
New Zealand Writers in London 96
Five London’s Farm 123
Six ‘Produced by Britons for British Homes’ 154
Seven London’s Imaginative Hinterland:
Mass Media and Identity 189
Eight Home Movies: London on Film 221
Nine London’s Legacy:
New Zealand on Television, 1960–1989 247
Epilogue London Revisited 273
Notes 279
Select Bibliography 310
Acknowledgements 327
Index
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is a great pleasure to begin this book by thanking those who made it
possible. There are plenty of them – proof that while writing might be a
solitary pastime, creating a book never is. New Zealand’s London first came
to life as a doctoral thesis in the History Department at the University of
Auckland, so my first thanks are to the staff there who guided and encour-
aged the project, then and now, in various ways: Barry Reay, Caroline Daley,
Deborah Montgomerie and Malcolm Campbell. James Belich deserves
special thanks for supervising the thesis and for his continued interest and
input as it evolved into a book. I am also grateful for the support provided
by a University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship, and the Eric and Myra
McCormick Scholarship in History. Research overseas was made possible
by the University of Auckland Research Grants Committee and by the
History Department’s use of PRBF funding to support graduate research.
Research in general was made easier through the expert assistance
of staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Archives New Zealand, the
Auckland Museum Library, the British Film Institute, the British Library,
the National Archives (UK), the New Zealand Film Archive, the Sir George
Grey Special Collections at Auckland City Libraries and Special Collections
at the University of Auckland. The university’s history librarian, Philip
Abela, happily provided early research assistance, and sorted out some of
my more unusual lending requests. My thanks to the interloan staff who
chased down obscure collections and persuaded other libraries to make
them available. I must also thank Anne Elder and the Feist family for
making personal papers available, and Des Monaghan and John McCready
for sharing their histories of television in New Zealand. Tom Finlayson and
Marcia Russell were also invaluable, not only as sources of information, but
also as generous listeners, readers of drafts and kind critics. Lydia Wevers
and others at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Roger
Blackley, Leah and Nick Lambert, Vaughan Bradley and Kay Lyes, and an
array of friends and family also supported the project in different ways and
I am grateful for their help.
Some of the material in this book has appeared in other forms. Material
in Chapter One began as ‘ “Familiar London”: New Zealand Travel Writing
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
and the Imagined Metropolis, 1890–1940’, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 14,
No. 4, 2010 and appears here with the permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.
Parts of Chapter Seven and the epilogue were developed in ‘War Zones: The
Metropolis and New Zealand, 1940 and 2005’, History Compass, Vol. 1, Issue
3, 2005, and are reproduced here courtesy of John Wiley and Sons Inc.
The images in this book really require their own special set of acknowl-
edgements. A number of archivists and librarians went to great trouble to
find and then allow reproduction of the images in this book. I would like
to thank Paul Johnston, at the National Archives (UK), for tracking down
the Empire Marketing material, then turning those vast posters into images
we could squeeze into a book; Shaun Higgins at the Auckland Museum
Library, for sifting through the Auckland Star negatives to find previously
unpublished images of Howard Morrison and other stars of television’s
opening night, and Anna Cable for making these and a number of other
images available; staff at Archives New Zealand, the National Library
of New Zealand and the University of Canterbury; Owen Manning and
Shara Hudson at the New Zealand Film Archive for allowing me to fossick
through their files; Lissa Mitchell at Te Papa for giving me access to the
wonderful photo albums of Harry Moult; Jo Birks at Special Collections,
University of Auckland; Alison Clarke at the Hocken Library; and especially
the staff of Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland City Libraries.
Elspeth Orwin, Keith Giles and others made complicated image requests
easy. I also need to thank Lesley Mensah at Television New Zealand, James
Branthwaite at Fairfax Media Group, APN Ltd, Fonterra Brands NZ Ltd and
Dover Publishing for giving their permission for some of these pictures to
be reproduced. I am glad they could be, because these pictures are more
than just illustrations. Travellers’ photographs, newspaper images, market-
ing posters and picture postcards construct and convey the relationship
between New Zealand and London. They are part of the story.
That story was finally brought together with the expert (and patient)
guidance of the team at Auckland University Press – Sam Elworthy, Anna
Hodge, Katrina Duncan, Poppy Haynes and their reviewer – and skilfully
edited by Ginny Sullivan. I am very grateful to all of them. Of course, I owe
my greatest thanks to my family: Michael, Hope and Piper Whitehead. But
this book is dedicated to Paul and Judy Barnes: in their own ways, I think
they might have enjoyed it.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
viii
INTRODUCTION
I
n 1840, the same year that New Zealand was formally incorpo-
rated into the British Empire, a mysterious New Zealander appeared
in London’s metaphorical landscape. In a review of a history of
Catholicism, Thomas Macaulay invoked the image of ‘some traveller
from New Zealand’ (in 1840, this meant a Maori traveller) who, at some
undetermined time in the future, might ‘in the midst of a vast solitude,
take his stand upon a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of
St Paul’s’.1 Unwittingly, he spawned a small industry. The New Zealander on
the bridge took on a life of its own as literary cliché, with a variety of uses: as
a prophet of future doom, as a reminder of London’s dystopian aspects, as a
symbol of the inevitable decline of empire and as a disquieting premonition
of who might really inherit the earth.2 Whenever the metropole needed a
symbol of the primitive periphery to contrast with its own civilised state,
the New Zealander could be set upon the bridge. In 1872, Gustave Doré
turned the by then well-worn words into an iconic illustration for the pub-
lication London: A Pilgrimage, and thus granted it a further lease of life.
By this time ‘the New Zealander on the bridge’ had already made it to the
top of Punch magazine’s list of ‘used up, exhausted, threadbare, stale and
hackneyed’ expressions. This was no small achievement given the competi-
tion, which included ‘the bull that is always being taken by the horns . . . the
British Lion . . . the Black Sheep . . . the Dodo . . . the Thin End of the Wedge’.3
The fictive New Zealander on London Bridge was one more expres-
sion worn through in the process of creating the metropole as civilised
centre. Colonial peripheries and their peoples commonly served as
The New Zealander by Gustave Doré. Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, London: A
Pilgrimage, reprinted New York, 1970, n.p.
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NEW ZEALAND’S LONDON
symbols of humankind’s primitive past. Indeed, they could be trapped
within that past: London, and the civilisation it symbolised, might rise and
fall, but the New Zealander viewing the ruins remained a marker of the
past. New Zealand, part of the colonial periphery, was summoned up as
London’s ‘other’, just as ‘one might cite Timbuktu or Furthest Tartary or
the Back of Beyond’.4 When he reached across 12,000 miles5 to antipodean
time and space to forge his metaphor, Macaulay created and reflected the
cultural meanings of both places, fixing them in space and time: London
as the present centre, and New Zealand as distant place and time. Over the
next twenty-five years, the constant presence of the traveller on the bridge
led Punch to plead that ‘the retirement of this veteran is indispensable.
He can no longer be suffered to impede the traffic over London Bridge.
Much wanted at the present time in his own country. May return when
London is in ruins.’6
And there, fixed as a phantom form of otherness, the New Zealander
might have stayed. Yet by the turn of the century, a strange shift in this
convention was occurring. New Zealanders could still be found on London
Bridge, but they were not symbols of ‘otherness’ anymore. Instead, they
took physical, not phantom, form as ‘Britons’ ‘at home’ in their imperial
metropolis. Furthermore, they had left New Zealand, former symbol par
excellence of a distant time, so that they might discover their heritage by
returning to London and England. ‘New Zealand’ took on a new shape in
the metropolis. It was no longer part of the past: old, colonial New Zealand,
with its Maori, myths and pioneering migrants, was metamorphosing into a
dominion, a new and modern member of empire. Space was changing too:
London, ‘home city of empire’, became a joint New Zealand possession
and, by way of exchange, New Zealand considered itself to be a farming
hinterland of the metropolis, and a distant colony no longer.
London, then the biggest city in the world, had become New Zealand’s
cultural capital. But this was no cringing colonialism. It was cultural co-
ownership. The ‘Britons on the bridge’ claimed London’s streets as their
streets, and its history as their heritage too. New Zealand’s literature was
published there, and its news was collected in Fleet Street. New Zealand’s
butter, meat and cheese filled the windows of London chain stores, and
New Zealand’s school children were quizzed on the best routes to send
these products there. Visitors from New Zealand did not beg for invita-
tions to royal garden parties; they went to New Zealand House to demand
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INTRODUCTION
them. They used London as if it really were part of New Zealand. In some
respects they still do. London is no longer the biggest city in the world,
but it remains home to an estimated 100,000 New Zealanders, making it
second only to Australia as the choice for expatriates.7 Many of them are
there on that particular antipodean rite of passage, the long working holi-
day known as the Big OE (overseas experience). This has become so much
a feature of New Zealand’s culture that whenever Britain attempts to
tighten its migration laws, New Zealanders feel they have a special right
to object. In February 2008, for example, when the British government
proposed changes to an ancestry visa permitting some New Zealanders
special access to Britain, New Zealand’s Prime Minister claimed the
government ‘would make a very strong submission in response. Many
New Zealanders greatly value their connection with the UK espe-
cially those whose grandparents were born there.’8 Much is made of
New Zealanders’ ancestral links with England. But you do not need to
have a British grandparent to want to live and work in London. In 2008,
less than two thousand ancestry visas were issued. Five times that number
of New Zealanders enter annually on working-holiday visas.9 Even in the
twenty-first century, New Zealanders can still use London as if it were an
extension of New Zealand.
This long attachment to London has become a familiar part of
New Zealand culture, so natural that it has never been examined. If asked
to explain it, we might see the relationship as an outcome of New Zealand’s
settler past, as a quaintly sentimental colonial habit or as a faintly embar-
rassing echo of empire. However, as reasonable as these explanations
appear, none of them is entirely accurate. The cultural relationship between
London and New Zealand was, of course, a product of the colonial past.
But as the statistics for visas suggest, ties of kinship only partially explain
London’s attractiveness to New Zealanders. Having a direct connection
with London was less important than imagining such a connection, and,
from around the end of the nineteenth century, that was easy to do. From
that time, new communication technologies began working to draw the
former colony and metropolis closer together. In books and in newspapers,
in films and eventually on television, London was a constant presence.
When children got out their Monopoly sets, they fought over who owned
London’s Park Lane and Mayfair, not Atlantic City’s Park Place and the
Boardwalk. Imagined as a familiar New Zealand city, London came to be
3