History in Scraps
HE Palace of Westminster is so rich in association that a series of documentary programmes could no doubt be centred on it. The attempt to compress this wealth of material into half an hour was the main reason why the BBC programme (heard from 1YC) turned out to be a competent but very pedestrian performance. The treatment of Westminster’s long and eventful history was merely scrappy; except perhaps in'a brief glimpse of Charles I on trial, and Macaulay on the Reform Bill, it lacked any real sense of the past. The account of the burning of old Saint Stephen's was even faintly comic ("O lawks, the "Ouse o’ Lords is afire’-loud music — crackling flames- bells and hoarse shouts of ‘Fire’’). More vivid and more dignified was the description of the blitz of 1941, when the great Hall was saved. .and the two Houses burned away uncannily in the London streets. "as though in a desert." There were some other moments of this kind -the echoing voices calling "Who goes home?" the voice of Mr. Speaker, in 1945, as he relit the light above Big Ben-but they came mainly in describing the Palace as it is today.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19531009.2.21.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 10
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199History in Scraps New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 743, 9 October 1953, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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