March 30, 1961, and a reminder to drive carefully during the upcoming holiday weekend, plus a new World War II naval history series was starting on Channel 2.
New Zealand Listener, March 30, 1961
As Easter weekend approaches, the Listener carries an ad on the cover from the Transport Department urging New Zealanders to drive more carefully after the carnage the previous year. “Easter Tragedy: 268 People Killed and Injured”, it reads. From the graphic, it appears in 1960 there were 12 fatalities out of that 268, leaving 256 injured, which is a very large number indeed.
The cover story was “the notable TV series ‘Victory at Sea’, to be seen soon from Channel 2”. The 26-part series was described in a feature inside as “the most ambitious and most successful venture in the history of television”. It was a history of naval operations in World War II “made up wholly from film taken at the time, some of it obtained at considerable cost. For example, nine U.S. Marine Corps cameramen were killed while taking the films in episode 18 which cover the bitter fighting for the Palau Islands.”
In the issue’s editorial, the Listener’s venerable editor Monte Holcroft discussed South Africa’s decision to withdraw from the British Commonwealth. It was “perhaps unavoidable,” wrote Holcroft. “But the decision is tragic … Many people in British countries may feel relieved that a constitutional link with apartheid is broken. Racial segregation is against the temper of these times; it is immoral in principle, and in the long run unworkable in practice.”
In the magazine’s “Shepherd’s Calendar”, Sundowner wrote “It was a great mistake to praise my Cheviots. I should have been silent about them, or deliberately deceitful … I told the truth about them … so when I went to Addington the other day to buy another truckload from the same flock the price was a little more than twice as much as I paid last year for ewes that were a year younger.”
Meanwhile, Aunt Daisy was extolling the virtues of blackberries, definitely not of the phone kind. She had recipes for bottling blackberries, blackberry and apple jelly, blackberry and marrow jam, blackberry surprise and blackberry cobbler.
Listener ad, March 30, 1961
There is a poem, Flight, With Mountains, by Fleur Adcock, which won the poetry prize donated by the Associated Banks in the literary competitions held to mark the Festival of Wellington, 1961, and a diary entry about the fifth week of the Woman’s Hour tour, which would be broadcasting from the Kaikohe Memorial Hall. And, gosh, how about those oranges?