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3.5 Between OurselvesTo gain further insights into how Newfoundland’s relationship with ‘mainland’ Canada was reflected and negotiated through the popular cultural content of broadcasting, it may prove instructive to examine some of Newfoundland’s contributions to the national series Between Ourselves (1966-1979). This series had its origins in the concern of the CBC to implement “its cultural mandate to try to seek out and find the Canadian identity and express it wherever it was found” (Mazé 2006: 241). The public funding of the CBC determined that this mandate was cultural rather than commercial. In the mid-1960s the CBC reiterated its aim to create more programming ‘that reflects Canada to Canadians’, a recognition of the importance of regional programming in fulfilling the Corporation’s national broadcasting objectives (De Sousa 1999: 137). The 1967-1968 CBC Annual Report detailed the national cultural role fulfilled by regional programming, especially in regard to the activities surrounding the Centennial of Canada’s confederation, which took place that same year: They bring the national service to the community and in their contribution to the network they reflect the sights and sound, the character of their area, to the rest of the country, thus helping all Canadians know more about one another. Never was this more true than during the Centennial when all Canadians displayed a heightened interest in the nation and each other (quoted in De Sousa 1999: 137). Between Ourselves, which ran between March 1966 and December 1979, was perhaps the CBC network series that best exemplified this ‘interest’, and the one which benefited most from the liberating effects of the use of magnetic tape in radio production. The title of the series was indicative of the felt need at this time to ‘reach out’ to provincial neighbours and consolidate national identity. Likewise, oral history was a feature of the French-language ‘ethnic’ series Ils Sont des Notres, whose title explicitly signalled the welcoming of ‘new Canadians’, who were invited to speak of their lives and experiences. As a publicly funded cultural institution, the CBC was obligated to recognize the regional, cultural and linguistic disparities highlighted by Quebec, indigenous peoples, recent immigrants, regional ‘minorities’ (such as Newfoundlanders), and other intractable challenges to a nationalist project (Mullen 2009).117 The title Between Ourselves signalled the emphasis within the series on the intimacy of ‘spoken history’ as well as inter-provincial communication, featuring recordings of oral histories within the provincial regions as a means of exploring a shared heritage and creating an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991). Here is a typical introduction to a Newfoundland edition of Between Ourselves: Good evening. My name is Ken Pagniez. There are now something over 20 million people living in Canada – people whose backgrounds and outlooks are as diverse as pebbles on a beach. Through the medium of this programme, we hope to show how one tiny segment of this population lives and feels. It’s all part of our national heritage, our Canadian identity. And, of course, it’s all between ourselves (Pagniez 1968). Newfoundland’s regional contributions to the series were many and varied, as the province had a wealth of historical events to draw upon, including its settlement by West Country English and Irish mariners, military and aviation history; outport life; Inuit culture; the province’s vital role in the development of transatlantic radio and telegraphic communications; expeditions and explorations within journal accounts; settlement narratives; tales of the remarkable ‘iron men and wooden ships’ of the Grand Banks fishery and the Newfoundland seal hunt; and missionary life and the work of Sir Wilfred Grenfell ‘down North’ in icy, isolated Labrador. Other Between Ourselves editions also dealt with outport traditions, seasonal customs, occupational groups, and so on. For example, Southern Shore Queen (Pagniez 1968) is a document of outport life, in the form of songs, stories, local history and folklore that were already fast disappearing when the programme was broadcast (November 15th 1968). Another edition that engaged listeners across the national network was Christmas Mummering in Newfoundland (broadcast on the 21st December 1973), which built upon fieldwork undertaken by staff at Memorial University’s Folklore Department.118 Mummering was (and is) essentially a visiting custom, which involves a group of disguised adults visiting randomly chosen houses during the twelve days of Christmas. During the visits, mummers sing, play music and dance, while the owners of the house offer them food and drink, and try various ruses to guess the identity of their masked ‘guests’. Mummering as a ritual has been interpreted as an expression of unconventional and even intimidating behaviour, which performs the role of a safety valve in a close-knit community, as it represents a temporary escape from the habitual and normative roles that people have to adopt in modern society (see Halpert and Storey 1969). ‘Mainland’ Canadians (as Newfoundlanders sometimes refer to Canadians of other provinces) unaware of this Newfoundland custom at the time of broadcast must surely have been intrigued by this historical survival of ‘primitive ritual’, attributed to English and Irish settlement, which had nonetheless undergone subtle adaptation in the process of migration. Such a programme suited CBC’s remit to include diverse regional input, and the fostering of a distinctive national unity by the exhibition one of Canada’s oldest ‘identity symbols’. As folklorist Gerald Pocius has observed, In many instances, when a particular region becomes a symbol for an entire national identity, it is often because it is perceived as a place where what is believed to be older beliefs and practices untouched by the outside world survive. Newfoundland sometimes plays this role within Canada because its everyday life is seen different – and therefore more authentic – than the areas of urbanized central Canada that more closely resemble the United States. Songs are sung, dialect words abound, calendar customs are practised… (Pocius 2001). Anthropologist Ralph Linton defined the active promotion of such identity symbols as ‘nativism’, or a nativistic movement (Linton 1943: 230-240). During this process, what were in previous generations ordinary everyday practices that were not considered exceptional, become objectified embodiments of cultural identity or cultural capital (Pocius 1988: 59). Such has frequently been the case in Newfoundland broadcasting, from The Barrelman to Between Ourselves and Battery Radio, where local folklore has been publicised or ‘published’ by the mass medium of radio, thereby entering into a kind of canon of national folkways. Newfoundland has always had a great deal of history to draw on, especially in comparison to other provinces that were ‘settled’ far more recently (and integrated into Canada’s federation far earlier), and this has sometimes proved useful to CBC network programming. Yet the prodigious output of the Special Events and Features Department of CBC Newfoundland Radio, which produced the Between Ourselves editions, was in inverse proportion to its staffing and funding: When we were doing the Between Ourselves shows, we would literally conceive the idea, go out and record the elements, then come back and edit for days and days and days - sometimes though the night - to meet a deadline, write the script, go into the studio and voice it, self-produce or direct it…We conceived these ideas, wrote them, edited them, narrated them, produced and directed, we did everything…And many of these shows were done with a nil budget – no dollars at all! (Browne 2008). The Special Events and Features Department that CBC producers Des Browne and Dave Gunn worked for during the 1950s and 1960s was, like the Broadcast, run on a shoestring budget, consisting of only two other regular staff – a secretary/programme assistant, and another producer/presenter/engineer called Ken Pagniez. For many years this ‘skeleton crew’ – sometimes aided by colleagues or freelance writers and presenters - operated outside broadcasts for festivals, parades, sporting events, royal visits and federal and provincial and municipal elections, and produced countless radio (and later television) documentaries, many of which were broadcast nationally. The work of the Department had long encompassed the use of outreach and actuality to create community profiles of national interest, beginning with the yearly Christmas broadcasts from the outports, which began to be received by a national audience in the late 1950s (O' Brien 1962). Each year the team would travel to an isolated outport, where they would record plays and church services, interview material and ambience, with newly available portable tape recorders. CBC radio producers had been seeking out the sounds of everyday life since at least the early 1950s, making documentaries that featured “people working and playing in their accustomed manner” (Hogarth 2001: 127). However, such documentaries were, in fact, carefully staged, and the Newfoundland outport broadcasts, by contrast, featured a high degree of spontaneity. Such broadcasts eventually gained wider recognition within the wider CBC. Staff had to telephone the CBC ‘Head Office’ in Toronto to lobby for the inclusion of particular programmes in the national schedules. Newfoundland contributions were, of course, also regularly featured in regular network ‘round-ups’ of material from the different provinces. For example, in an interview with the present author, Browne recalled a 1967 ‘magazine’ series called Centennial Diary, which featured many contributions from Newfoundland and Labrador: We would contribute to those regularly. And I remember at the end of the year they did a montage of all the preceding year’s items, an hour-long show. And I remember counting something like 13 items that I had contributed alone! We were this little tiny operation, and they [other provinces] had stations in major cities! (Browne 2008). Upon being asked about the preservation of cultural heritage through radio broadcasting in Newfoundland, Dave Gunn recently (2007) noted that the attitudes of the post-war era CBN producers were not far removed from those of their audience; community survival and adjustment to the massive socio-cultural changes accompanying Confederation with Canada, in 1949, and the Government’s resettlement programme between 1954 and 1975 (see the section on the Fogo Process, below) took precedence over any concern or ambition to preserve what was being lost. More specifically, Gunn felt that there was no realisation amongst his bosses at the time about the need for the preservation of aural history, or a sense of urgency in recording the testimony of eyewitnesses to historical events. Gunn had to ‘squirrel away’ tape to stop it from being reused, and often had to deflect queries about his requests for more (Gunn 2007).119 In an interview with the present author, Des Browne reinforced Gunn’s observations about a general lack of archival preservation in St. John’s at that time,120 bemoaning the aural history that has been lost, which long preceded the Between Ourselves editions:121 Every war remembrance, every anniversary, every trip outside of St. John’s brought back a treasure trove of material. Look at the guys who came over here, this was the start of the [British] Empire...In terms of history, what happened here, whether it’s the first white Europeans [the Vikings] coming here, predating Columbus and Cabot by 500 years…at L’Anse Aux Meadows [site of a Viking settlement, on the Great Northern Peninsula]…We had…old seal hunters, or people who fought in Beaumont Hamel on July 1st [1916] in Europe in the war [a battle in which the Newfoundland Regiment lost 710 of their men], and they were, as I said to you, great storytellers. And they would tell us, with tears running down their faces, as they recalled - because some of them, for forty or fifty years wouldn’t even discuss - their war involvement. As they got into their senior years, they confided in you. You got some terrific stories. And most of this was destroyed…the real, moving, people pieces are gone. […] I remember an interview with a sealer [seal hunter], and him describing being wrecked out on the ice…It was, I think, the Newfoundland disaster, where about a hundred people froze to death, and this guy described finding another sealer who had died with his son in his arms, frozen solid…Really gripping stuff. And there was lots of that stuff. Even little things…we had the youngest VC in the British Empire [Thomas Ricketts]. A lot of [the other stuff] was people talking about their fathers, relating what they had been told. So we were too late [to capture eye-witness testimony]. We did have some first-hand things…I wish I had never heard them – I wouldn’t feel so bad. Because then I would have never known they existed (Browne 2008).122 Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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