Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  They filmed in Germany and Norway, and then followed the Viking route to Iona.

  It took longer to reach – by ferry, aeroplane, car, steamer, and ultimately a small boat – than any other location in the entire series. It was worth it. . . .

  The sand glowed against the dark sea, the seals came up around the rowing boat on which I had Clark land in the wake of St Columba (characteristically of film-making we had to carry the boat on our shoulders across the island to achieve this sequence). Certain places do seem to generate an aura beyond the explicable combinations of geography and climate; I think of Delphi in Greece and Ise in Japan. Neither for me has quite the power of Iona. Yet even here while we were filming Clark beside the celtic cross, a priest came running out of the cathedral with the news that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. . . .

  Iona was in many ways a culmination of everything I felt about Civilisation. The journey of St Columba was an affirmation of confidence in the Christian message against all the perils of the Dark Ages; it led to Iona becoming a haven of art and scholarship (the Book of Kells was probably written there); as such it was recognised as a founding stone of western civilisation, hence the tombs of many Scottish kings; yet it was totally destroyed by the pagan Vikings early in the tenth century. This seemed proof of the fragility of human aspirations and society, rising and falling and rising again as Iona had done in the teeth of the new barbarian menace of Hitler – the centre of the rebuilt cathedral contained a sculpture by Lipschitz, a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust. But beyond the brevity of human life Iona embodied the effortless continuity of nature. On that speck of sand in the shining light of air and ocean it was as though one were looking straight into the eye of God.

  Though the BBC was confident about the quality of Civilisation, some early reviews were less sure. By the end of the three months of weekly broadcasts, most had been won over, and the day after the final broadcast in May 1969 The Times devoted its main leader to the series under the heading How Like an Angel, a unique recognition for a television series. Clark was made a lord.

  The series had difficulty in finding a home on US television, but the administrator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Howard Adams, put it on at lunchtime in the gallery theatre. This seated three hundred people but on the first day twenty-four thousand turned up. The New York Times printed on its front page a photograph of a long queue, which included Jackie Onassis and half the members of the Nixon administration.

  The most extraordinary scene occurred two years later when the Gallery gave Clark a special award. People were packed throughout the gallery: Clark had to progress slowly from room to room to reach the podium; the dense crowds rose to their feet at his passing so that he was like a surfer borne forward on a rising surge of adulation. I have never experienced such an intensely emotional and adoring crowd except at the appearance of the Pope at St. Peter’s.

  Before the series was completed Michael came to believe that the kind of extended personal essay that Civilisation had become would be a new form of broadcasting. He went to see Huw Wheldon, by then Director of BBC Television, to suggest that they look for possible candidates for further series. Michael decided that the country which had so attracted his family and himself would be his next subject: America.

  Michael described the search for the ideal storyteller for America in an article for The Listener in April 1976.

  The trouble was – I thought to myself for the thousandth time, as I settled down in the tube train on my way to the Television Centre and absently opened my copy of The Listener – the trouble was I needed an impossible combination of talents: someone who knew the whole of the States intimately, and yet had preserved the fresh vision of the immigrant, a brilliant storyteller with a balanced sense of history, a seasoned performer who could write for film, an extrovert who was also a bibliophile, a man generous enough to take the cut and thrust of team work, a pleasant companion, witty as well as clever . . . impossible! My eye fell on an exceptionally wellturned paragraph – funny, it was about America, too: the reprint of a radio talk on the funeral of Eisenhower. Who could have written it? (This is absolutely true.) I turned the page to look for the author.

  That afternoon (it was 8 May 1969), I met Alistair Cooke for the first time over tea at the Dorchester. And the next morning, it was all settled – except for three-and–a-half years’ hard work, thousands of words, millions of feet of film, and over 150,000 miles of travel.

  The article also contains a vivid description of the visits from the American uncle, Clifford, and the extraordinary story of the earlier American uncles.

  Our family connections with the United States began in 1830, when a great-great-great-uncle emigrated from Southowram in Yorkshire. Later, he became one of the Forty-Niners, and, on failing to find gold, set up a grocery business in San Francisco. A greatgreat-uncle was for many years paymaster on the Grand Trunk Railway. A lively artist, he sketched scenes in the Civil War, edited a comic magazine called Froth, wrote and performed in a number of operettas in Detroit in the 1860s and 1870s, and despite his mutton-chop whiskers, was famous for his female impersonations. One of his sons absconded at the age of nineteen with two beautiful teenaged actresses, and was arrested in the Far West for passing dud cheques. The other, who was secretary of the Detroit Stock Exchange, maintained that he was the Earl of Scarthmore in Yorkshire, England, and ended up in an asylum.

  Another ancestor, Bethel Aspinall of Minneapolis, inherited a fortune in middle age and set off to see the world. He got only as far as Memphis, Tennessee, where he fell down a lift-shaft, leaving all his money to his English nephews. Young men of nineteen and twenty-one, they had a heady season in London with their own hansom cabs and a box at the opera, and then decided to breed English bloodstock in the West. Their idea was to cross the thoroughbreds they shipped out with them with the tough wild horse that they would catch on the open range.

  But the ranch they started in Colorado in 1883 was not a success, despite the advice of Buffalo Bill Cody, a neighbour. The horses were rustled, and while gambling in a saloon in Denver, the younger brother, Will, accused his opponent of cheating. The next day, his brother Fred went looking for him and saw his boot sticking out of a rubbish dump. Will was on the end of it, miraculously not dead, though he had been hit on the head and robbed. He survived to see, thirty years later, on a bartender who was serving him in New York, the pearl-monogrammed tiepin which he had lost in that Denver saloon.

  Such stories were fortified by old letters describing breakneck moonlight rides across the prairies; sepia photographs of young men sporting long moustaches, bandoliers and pistols; and the huge head of a buffalo in the Batley museum, which my great-grandfather had shot while on a visit to Colorado. They strengthened a romantic vision of America already fed on Zane Grey, Mayne Reid and R. M. Ballantyne. . . .

  Fred and Will gave up the ranch and retired to Detroit, where, in the course of time, they prospered and married. But neither had a son, and so they invited their nephew, my uncle Clifford, to join them in their brick manufacturing business. It was 1904; he was sixteen, and had spent all his life on the farm in Yorkshire. When he went, his mother and his younger sister went with him to settle him in. It was a trip my mother, who was twelve, has never forgotten.

  She stayed in an Indian village on the shore of Lake Huron, drove in horse-drawn sleighs across the snow, was entranced by the warmth, wealth and size of America. When it was time to return, Fred drove her and her mother from Detroit to Quebec in a newfangled open car. The journey took a week. The ladies were swathed in veils against the dust of the dirt roads, and it was my mother’s job to sit at the back and jump out with a brick to put under the rear wheel, if the uncertain engine faltered on a hill.

  Following the success of Alistair Cooke’s America, in 1973 Michael was invited to join an Anglo-French delegation to China to arrange a major exhibition of Chinese archaeological treasures which would travel Europe and the United States. He returned
to make two films there, and was fascinated and impressed by the country, then hard to visit for non-Communist foreigners. In an article for The Listener he wrote:

  Everywhere the food was delicious, varied and exotic. Some things like sea slugs were almost too exotic. They are considered a great delicacy and are usually encountered floating in a sort of broth. They look a cross between a distended snail and a jellyfish and the first hazard is to capture them with the chopsticks. Then you seize one end with the teeth and suck in the rest of the warm glutinous mass. They are clearly an acquired taste, like oysters, which they somewhat resemble with their faint flavour of the sea. . . .

  In the big cities of China, there are few policemen visible except those on traffic duty. I learnt not to bother to lock my hotel room, to be confidently careless with money and private possessions. I was told opium smoking had been eliminated, I never saw a drunk or a prostitute. Cigarettes are everywhere, and on the long-distance trains there is a good deal of card-playing: that seems almost the limit of indulgence. There are few cinemas and fewer films; there are no dance-halls, no magazines of entertainment, not many new books; television is rudimentary and virtually restricted to public places; radio is largely instructional or devoted to the music of the revolutionary operas; there are no privately owned motor-cars. In these circumstances pleasures become as personal and simple as observing the bloom on a single flower or the polish on a stone. I once saw from my hotel window my middle-aged interpreter stand for half an hour alone watching the changing colours of the sunset over a lake. . . .

  At the end of a long evening’s discussion in Peking a highly intelligent man said: ‘perhaps the greatest gift we can offer the West is our optimism’. This man, a middle-rank cadre in government, bicycled to the office, probably earned about £12 a month, probably paid about 60p in rent for his three-roomed apartment, worked six days a week, and, in common with his fellows, had no time off beyond the seventh day. ‘China is too poor yet to allow us holidays,’ the man explained.

  The hopes of intellectuals seem based on faith in the potential of the 80 per cent peasant population. This made more sense each time we went to a country commune. I had asked to be allowed to visit one of the self-help projects, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I climbed to the top of a large earth mound in Shensi Province. Two thousand men and women from fourteen villages were toiling resolutely with the simplest tools to build a vast reservoir to improve their water supply. Red flags fluttered and patriotic music echoed tinnily from the amplifiers. The sight of so much organised energy seemed the true apotheosis of Communism.

  In 1976 Michael made Royal Heritage for the BBC, to mark the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. No royalist at the outset, he became increasingly impressed by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles. Michael and I had just met, and I would lose him for weekends to Balmoral or Sandringham. He would return with tales of the Queen’s talent for mimicry, or a brace of pheasants from a Sandringham shoot.

  Windsor was our favourite palace. It seems to express the genius of the British and their peculiar conception of monarchy in the way that Versailles formulates the rational intellect of the French. Rambling, old, enduring, full of surprising beauty and some ugliness, added to and modified through a thousand years, Windsor is built into the landscape, so as to seem an essential and enhancing part of it. It speaks for a noble past yet is quite well adapted for modern living. It stirs you more than you expected.

  What could follow Royal Heritage? Michael and I were living together, Michael’s sons were growing up, and he was beginning, at 53, to think about changes to his life.

  Adrian Malone, producer of The Ascent of Man, had just finished a series on economics with J. K. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty. Filming in the United States with the great economist, he had seen that Americans might like to make their own major documentary series. The commercial nature of the networks, and the fragmented and underfunded status of the Public Broadcasting Service, had so far precluded this. Adrian believed he might find funding to start a centre of excellence, a Bauhaus as he put it, which would provide the expertise to make these major series.

  While the BBC had been able to fund Civilisation on its own as a special expenditure (Michael’s initial request had been for £9,000 a programme, since production costs in those days were calculated only on the actual money that had to be paid out in fees and travel expenses; only a little more than this took a twelve-person film unit travelling with a 35mm camera, tracks and lights all over Europe for nearly two years), costs had risen sharply through the 1970s and Alistair Cooke’s America had been made possible by the support of Time-Life. So the money for these series was increasingly going to come from America; why not set up a production base there? Adrian initially invited Michael to contribute, as a kind of visiting producer or professor. Michael, feeling changes around him, thought that he might at last follow the uncles and emigrate. A friend of J.K. Galbraith’s, Stanley Weiss, loaned Adrian the money to move his family to the States. Michael found work with American Heritage magazine, who thought they might make films based on their magazine’s rich knowledge base and talented stable of writers, rather like the enduring National Geographic films. One of these was made, An American Christmas, produced with WGBH, the Boston public broadcasting station. It took us on some wonderful trips across the United States, from the Navajo mid-winter in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, to recollections of snow-bound winters in Iowa, and the dropping of Christmas parcels by helicopter to the isolated lighthouses of New England.

  The next film project drew Michael back to London. He’d spent so much of his childhood near the sea, and his love of history constantly reminded him of the importance of the sea’s role in our island story. So when he was approached to make a series about the sea, he agreed immediately. The Thomson Organisation, noting the sales of the books associated with television series, and contemplating the advance of the home video system, with the possibility of similar sales of video tapes for the home market, offered finance for the series.

  Clare Francis had twice sailed the Atlantic single-handed and written a successful book, Come Hell or High Water, about her adventures. Would she, could she, present a major television series? Michael invited her to lunch on her return from skippering ADC Accutrac’s bid to win the Round the World Trophy. She was small, blonde, and very goodlooking, with a fragile air that concealed the strength of the ballet dancer she had trained to be. She was elegantly dressed and very feminine, but Michael was transfixed by a glimpse of her hands on the tablecloth, scarred with the marks of wind, water and rope. He was delighted with her, and she agreed to present the series, though she was anxious that it not begin too soon. ‘Something rather exciting may happen.’ It did: her son Tom was born just a few months before the television series went into production, carrying Clare into the pressured schedules of television all over the world for the next two years. Michael filmed the oldest boat in the world, Pharoah Cheop’s funeral boat, the wooden planks and the ropes which bound them still perfectly sound; he sailed with Clare and the film unit on the replica of Sir Francis Drake’s ship the Golden Hinde, on her voyage around the world. They travelled with her through the South China Sea, where the chief hazard was once again piracy. Powerful small boats roamed the waters, looking for rich pickings from private yachts. The Golden Hinde was a very visible and not a very fast target.

  One of Michael’s most vivid filming trips was to the Louisiades, a group of islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea, thought to be one of the most untouched fishing communities in the world. It seemed an earthly paradise of grass-skirted women, palm trees and ritual, marred only by giant land crabs. Missionaries had been there, so the islanders were nominally Christian, and one anthropologist had worked there. She guided the unit through the mazes of appropriate behaviour.

  Most of the islanders can build sea-going boats and sail them, swim underwater and catch fish, grow crops and skin a pig; they can sing, play musical instruments and
are clever storytellers; they can build a house and furnish it; they know something of herbal medicines. Their lives demand many skills, daring and initiative. The benefits of civilisation – wider horizons, more complex pleasure, a longer life-expectancy – seem increasingly passive in contrast. Something like the island way of life was the common lot of mankind for thousands of centuries. Now it has almost vanished everywhere.

  One of Michael’s most enjoyable experiences of later years was the making of Vintage: A History of Wine by Hugh Johnson. Michael had been initially concerned about the visual potential of the subject (it’s either red or white) but was rapidly won over by Hugh’s enthusiasm and knowledge, and their shared love of history. Quickly their approach to wine became the story of its close entanglement, over thousands of years, with the culture and history of Europe. In Babylon, Ur and Sumer they had drunk wine imported from the north, carried down the Euphrates on rafts. Romans planted their vines up the Rhone valley and northwards throughout Europe, and now the making of fine wine has followed money and power to the New World. Interesting locations, from the Caucasus to Japan, and winemakers who epitomised Hugh’s description – ‘Farmer and artist, drudge and dreamer, hedonist and masochist, alchemist and accountant – the winegrower is all these things, and has been since the flood’ – all contributed to a series which brought depth and illumination to what might have been considered a slight subject.

  Working with the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and American historian Peggy Liss on The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World brought new challenges and rewards, from running with the wetbacks through an illegal border crossing from Mexico, to making artistic amends for Spain’s absence from Civilisation.