Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 24

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS,

_ON AND OFF THE RECORD.

By

Swarf

— HE story of the Battle of the Atlantic covers the only battle that went on from the first day of the war to the lasta hard, grinding struggle with one side and then the other gaining a lead. U-boats were countered by convoys; convoys were countered by "wolfpacks"; British science was developing

radar and Germany was producing the schnorkel. In the second volume of his war memoirs, Sir Winston Churchill says: "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the Battle of Britain." At 11.30 a.m.. this Sunday, July 5, Captain G. N. Brewer, D.S.O., R.N., who had much to do with the administration of the Western Approaches Command, will relate to 2ZB listeners some of the more unusual incidents which occurred durin z the Battle of the Atlantic. Captain Brewer joined the Royal Naval Col‘lege, Osborne, as a cadet in September, _

1914. He went to sea as a midshipman in H.M.S. Royal Sovereign, a battleship of the Grand Fleet, in 1917. Most of his time between the wars was spent in destroyers, and he was Captain of the Tribal destroyer Maori for the first year of World War II. Since the war Captain Brewer has been Director of Naval Recruiting, and more recently Captain of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, where Sub-Lieutenants of all the Commonwealth navies are given a course of training. Now he is Senior ,Naval Liaison Officer on the staff of the High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and he works as a link between the Admiralty and the New Zealand Navy Board. It is probable that more talks on naval exploits will be given by Captain Brewer later. >

REQUESTS

iad N Auckland reader asks if she could make written requests to Guy Lombardo (The Guy Lombardo Show, 1YA.

Monday evenings) for certain items. The recordings are part of a series de-

cided on by Lombardo and his men in the United States. The correspondent would find it easier to ask one of the Auckland stations broadcasting request programmes for her favourite Lombardo numbers, as

£1 A WORD

\ HEN Nicholas Monsarrat joined the R.N.V.R. in 1940, like most other Servicemen he had no thought of financial reward. Today, although he chooses to work as a British information officer in Canada, he has earned enough from

his largely autobiographi- : cal novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The

Cruei oea, to enabdie him to retire when he wishes. The British edition of the book has alone sold half a million copies since it was published in August, 1941, and it is estimated that Monsarrat has earned more than £100,000

in royalties. The Cruel Sea took him two years to write and when it was finished he re-wrote the book three times. But the effort was worth while; those 150,000 words earned him nearly £1 a word. A radio version of The Cruel Sea is being broadcast by the four ZB stations and 2ZA at 9.0 p.m. on Saturdays. *

s PIANIST FROM BUDAPEST

A CONCERT pianist new to New Zealand will be heard with the Studio Orchestra from 4YC on Tuesday evening, July 7. She is Margarete.

Zsamboki, a new settler’ in Dunedin, * who _ received her

musica] education at the Conservatorium in Budapest, where,

teaching .and concert. playing. She had further radio and concert experience in Switzerland, and in 1950 she went to the Paris Conservatorium of Music on a French Government scholarship. Miss Zsamboki is particularly interested in Bach and Debussy, but her repertoire contains works from many of the classical, romantic and modern composers. For her broadcast she has_ chosen Mozart’s D Minor Concerto, K.466, which she will play during the first half of a performance by the Dunedin Choral Society. * as nd

LIFE BEGINS AT 40

"CYNE thing I’m certain of is that life really does begin at 40," says the Australian broadcaster and _ journalist

Elizabeth Webb, who is now in England, writing a novel. "Up to 40 I was festless.

with a hankering for excitement. NOW eas I-am content to read and study, and 1 — find I. can soak facts up like a sponge." io

THE SPLITS

"THIS whole question of poetry is a bit baffling, and it’s one that seems to bring out violent passion in the most apparently placid sort of people.

They seem to think either that all poetry is life, and all life poetry

and that the poet-not the statesman or the scientist or the schoolteacherthe poet is the most .significant figure of his age; or, the other side, that poetry is merely a rather droll form of verbal cat’s cradle, and that its main use is / — =

to fill up awkward little lacunae in the columns of newspapers and magazines. All I’ve found so far is that if you try to keep a foot in both camps you inevitably end up by doing the splits.-From an NZBS Book Shop programme. **

PATHWAY TO WEALTH

E V. TIMMS, author of The Path- " way of the Sun (the four ZB stations, 2.0 p.m., Wednesdays and tidays), and of many other Australian *historical novels, radio plays and short stories, never wanted to write. But his

wife did and_ she pushed him into the work which has now occupied half his life.

His career began on’ a wet afternoon at Lismore, Australia, soon after World War I, when his wife said, "Let’s both write a shért story." Timms, who wasn’t very intérested, wrote a tale called Jerry, and sold it to a weekly newspaper. Mrs. Timms, who wanted to write more than anything else. still

hasn’t completed the story she began that day in the early 1920’s. Timms, or "E.V." as many of his friends call him, was born at Charters Towers, North Queensland, in 1895. His grandfather, who came from a_ land-owning family in Worcester, England, was a surgeon in the Indian Army. His father was a lieutenant in the Navy. Timms was badly wounded at Gallipoli. His doctor said, "You'll have to live a quiet ids. 1 advise thé:-bush’’And "so KV. took a property on the Richmond River where for seven years he farmed, ran cattle, and gradually recovered from the war injury. As history had always interested him, and he had made a special study of the 17th Century, Timms wrote, at the rate of one a year, six novels of 17th Century England and Europe. Hutchinson of London published them, and they brought him a lot of money. The French Society of Literature and Arts made him a member after the»publication of one of these novels, Conflict. In World War Il Timms was Commandant of a P.O.W. camp outside Cowra

during the mass Japanese revolt and camp break on the night of August 5, 1944. He still has the Japanese bugle which started the revolt and the homemade weapon the prisoners intended for him. Today, while he produces all the books he once never wanted to write, Mrs. Timms, the frustrated novelist, does much of his historical research, runs her home and takes her husband his meals during his long bursts of work at his desk in a Boer es -workroom.

t HOUSEHOLD : HUMOUR

] )OMESTIC humour is the oldest form of humour in the world. Socrates used it against his scolding wife, Xanthippe; Shakespeare introduced it into many of his plays, and it’s the basis of Punch and Judy. Since

the days of John Henry and _ Blossom domestic comedy has made up a larve pnart

of radio entertainment. Eddie Maguire. who has written more than 150 domestic sketches for Ted Ray and Kitty Bluett (Ray’s 2 Laugh), was once asked if there was any secret about it. His reply was: "I really don’t know-I can only say that I’m a happily married man." Maguire recalls what he describes as the most satisfying sequel to a broadcast of a domestic sketch, as told to ‘him by a North of England clergyman. The minister had missed: a rather nice young couple from his congregation one Sunday, and the following week he asked them what was wrong. They

confessed they had quarrelled and had not spoken to each other for nearly a week-until they both listened in silence to a _passage-at-arms between Ted Ray and Kitty Bluett. They, too, were quarrelling — about exactly the same thing — and the young people then realised how faolish they had been.

RARELY HEARD MUSIC

PETER COOPER, the New Zealand pianist, and one of the guest artists to appear this concert season with the National ‘Orchestra, likes to present as |

often as he can good compositions that are seldom heard, "There is quite a large field

of good music which is rarely played," he told an Australian interviewer the other day. Since his last visit to New Zealand in 1949 Peter Cooper has appeared in many parts of Britain and Europe, and he has broadcast frequently for the BBC.

VE Falstaffs are in a-class by ourselves. We're sartorially neglected --down at ‘heel and out at the seat. Perhaps you think "it’s funny, but how" would you like to be left with the choice between a yellow and puce checked | overcoat that’s tight under the arms, and a sea-green double-breasted one that the | wife could probably make single-breasted for you if you buy her a new. hat"Jack Faint, who weighs. 18 ¢tone, in a BBC Home Service talk on the drawbacks of obesity.