Open Microphone

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 20

Open Microphone

NEWS OF BROADCASTERS ON AND OFF THE RECORD

READER AT RANDOM

AFTER being hauled from one art show or concert to another after he first arrived in New Zealand, J. R. Tye (whose picture is at the top of this column) was asked by a Wellington paper what he thought of the New Zealander. When = he replied that he "pursued culture too seriously, ought to

take more time off, and should cultivate’ his garden," he inspired

an amusing Lodge cartoon. Three years afterwards, and now very happily settled in New Zealand, Mr Tye still thinks there’s some truth in what he ‘said. Mr Tye, whose Readings at Random have ‘recently been heard from YC stations, lives in Christchurch, but was born, in 1915, at Lincoln, England"the only place for which I’m ever ‘homesick." Before and just after the war, while reading for a degree, he taught in a London slum, and he_has tender recollections of the great city. In 1939 he volunteered for the R.A.F., trained as a pilot and got married on the strength of it. He is still very happily married. Ironically, he was sent to Rhodesia to train pilots while his wife stayed behind in the blitz. In the end he crashed in the bush and was invalided home. After a spell at Oxford after the war, Mr Tye went to a Church of England training college ina city "even older than my birthplace," which lived on its past. "I didn’t learn much about Education," he says, "but a lot about human beings. Which is the more important?" When, after a while, he felt the urge to look at a new country, he came out to New Zealand, arriving in Wellington at the beginning of 1954 to have "a

whale of a time." After six months the family decided that New Zealand was a good place to live in, so Mr Tye went back home, sold up his house, and came out to his present job lecturing in English at Christchurch Teachers’ College. "Compared with the same job in Britain," he says, "we work at least twice as hard, but I like it. Teaching has changed almost out of recognition in the last 20 years. In fact, they’ve advanced further here than in England." Out here Mr Tye also worked in a rubber factory for a couple of months, blowing up hot water bottles to see if they leaked. Outside his job one of Mr Tye’s main interests is choral singing, for his family in Britain are organ builders, and church music is in his blood. In Wellington he sang with the Schola Cantorum, and he sings with the Harmonic Society in Christchurch, "New Zealand has higher

standards than it realises," he says, "partly because of its isolation." Other interests are broadcasting, journalism, astronomy and punting on the "eminently puntable" Avon. He adds, by the way, that since the newspapers took notice of his family’s punting they have run the gauntlet of admiration and de-rision-"the latter from small boys who run alongside and shout ‘Yah! Queen Mary!’ "