Day Return to Oxford

49 years ago, in the glorious summer of 1976, I was lucky enough to persuade ATV, then the ITV company for the Midlands, to let me go back to my old Oxford college, New College, to make a film about how things had changed since I had left eight years before. The result was a programme called 'Day Return to Oxford' which can now be viewed online thanks to MACE, the Media Archive of Central London. This is the link https://www.macearchive.org/films/day-return-oxford

One of the big changes the film focuses on is the admission of women to what had been, in my day, exclusively male colleges, and one of the interviewees is the first female cox of Brasenose College's rowing eight. Then there is New College undergraduate (student) Miles Young, talking about his sadness at leaving Oxford and about how hard it was to find a good job. After a distinguished career in advertising, he would go on to become Warden (i.e. boss) of New College. There is also a veteran 'scout' (college servant) giving the lowdown on what is was like cleaning up after privileged young men, and the head of the careers service discussing the challenge of finding Oxford graduates the job of their dreams.

Other vexed questions tackled included: how much work did undergraduates do, and what was it like for young men and women to be in a university where the sex ratio was still about four men to every woman. But because the weather was so wonderful, the real star of the film was Oxford itself.

Tristan da Cunha - the volcano that emptied an island

On holiday, I read Hervé Bazin’s Les bienheureux de la desolation (which appeared in English as Tristan) – his novel about the volcanic eruption on the island of Tristan da Cunha, a remote British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, in 1961 and its aftermath.

It tells of how a violent eruption of Queen Mary’s Peak at the centre of the island forced the entire population of 264 to flee to the UK.

There was a strong collective spirit on Tristan, with a belief that no one should raise himself up above anyone else, but life was hard, and the British authorities thought that once the islanders experienced the greater comforts of life in England, they would want to stay.

In fact, many rejected what they saw as the materialism and emptiness of modern British life, and when the government held a ballot a couple of years later, the islanders voted 148 to 5 to return. Most of them did.

They adopted some of the new things they had seen in England, but live television did not arrive until 2001, and there is still no mobile phone coverage. Tristan’s population has barely grown, now standing at 266.

Bazin’s book appeared in 1970, and is seen by some as a comment on the misgivings about ‘progress’ which had helped to foment the French riots of 1968.

After a disaster: return or move away?

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, there were plans to sweep away London's courts and alleys and replace them with something grander and neater, but many of them survived (and still do). A lot of Londoners wanted to rebuild the city much as it had been before the fire.

After the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, it was a similar story. Grand designs floundered because locals wanted to live in the same kind of homes in the same places as they had before. And when the Ugandan government tried to get people to settle away from an area devastated by floods in 1978, they too ran into opposition.

Now history seems to be re-repeating itself in Japan. After an earthquake and tsunami caused meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station in 2011, some argued that the 80,000 people evacuated should be persuaded not to return, but to go and live somewhere else. 

And some have, but older people in particular seem to be keen to go back to the places they still think of as home. The town of Naraha is the first to be declared safe by the government.