RALEIGH WITHOUT HIS CLOAK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 16

RALEIGH WITHOUT HIS CLOAK

N ANY people think of Sir Walter Raleigh only as the picturesque hero of the schoolbooks-the dashing explorer who first brought potatoes and tobacco to England, the courtier, high in the favour of his Queen, who spread his cloak in the mud for her to walk on. Less has been written about Raleigh in adversity, when James I had come to the throne and the treacheries and deceits of his ~ enemies brought the great Englishman to prison and the scaffold. The story of those years is told in The Long Ending, a BBC programme written by the Irish author and poet H. A. L. Craig, which will have its first New Zealand broadcast from 4YZ at 9.30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26. An important part of the narrative deals with Raleigh’s trial at Winchester where, on the flimsiest of evidence, he was accused of -| treason. At that time he was not a popular figure, but his gallant bearing in the face of the vicious attacks of the Attor-ney-General, Sir Edward Coke, turned public opinion in his favour. Raleigh’s own writings and other contemporary documents have been used to reconstruct the trial. The story then moves to the aniena eaace ef tmanreanmaent in the Tower

See 2) ee ee OT ee ee of London, the futile search for the gold mines of Guiana that followed his release, and the final plottings that sent him to the scaffold in 1618. In this BBC production by R. D. Smith, Robert Harris plays Raleigh and Hugh Griffith plays Coke. Valentine Dyall speaks the narration, STORY OF THE CAP PILAR STRANGE episode in the voyage of the sailing ship Cap Pilar in 1938 is related in Drifting Through the Galapagos Islands, another BBC programme which will

have its first playing from 4YA at 9.15 p.m. on Friday, March 28. The Cap Pilar was becalmed in the South Pacific when the. Humboldt current-the great saltwater steam that helped the Kon-Tiki on her way — took her onward to the Galapagos Islands. Adrian Seligman, who was on board the ship, describes in this talk the impression that the lonely islands made on the ship’s company. It was as though the Cap Pilar had voyaged in another world-a world, idyllic in its way, of birds and beasts, that, never having seen man, had no fear of him, and of strange, almost primeval creatures, sinister and loathsome. DISCOVERY OF LONDON ENNIFER IN LONDON is the title of a programme, first broadcast in the BBC Children’s Hour, which will be heard from 1YA at 8.30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27. Jennifer Justice, an American daughter of an English mother, was visiting London when she wrote home describing all that she had seen there. Unlike most people, Jennifer can bring to life events and people of the past. and in this programme she finds out

many of the stories about Hyde Park, Marble Arch, Kensington Gardens and other well known places. She apparently discovered quite a lot that Londoners didn’t know themselves, for when this programme was first broadcast many people wrote in to say that, after listening, they realised how little they really knew of the city in which they lived. In Jennifer in London an English girl, Jane Fergus, who has been in America many times, plays Jennifer. The script is by Howard Jones and the production by David Davis.