Home Commonwealth on Film

It is with much pleasure that I greet you,

the representatives from the Parliaments of all the lands within

our Commonwealth Family of Nations, which enjoy a responsible government.

It has different ties of race, faith, language and finance.

And yet, the Commonwealth is there.

It cannot be stated exactly, but it lives and works.

Well, it should mean that there are relations between everybody

of sharing and giving and taking.

Each Commonwealth meeting is a celebration of continuity

in community and each is also a challenge to find the ways to

advance that common purpose.

So, the first bushman family at Beira make the move from hut

to house.

It is the beginning of urban existence, in fact.

Easy to build, once you know how.

His home is compact and strong.

I'm rather happy

to be home.

My name is Udorar. Udorar Quati.

I'm 21 years old. I'm a final year sociology student

at the University of Ghana.

And I live with my mother in Accra, the capital.

Because my father wanted the best education for me,

he sent me to England.

I went when I was six and I stayed there until I was 11.

My mother sent me my ticket to come back to Ghana.

She realised that I was becoming more British and less Ghanaian.

I wasn't pleased, I didn't really want to come back at the time.

Now, I'm older and I'm glad I did come back.

I don't really know what my mother meant by saying

I was becoming too British.

But, I think she saw that I could hardly do anything for myself.

At the age of nine, ten,

a Ghanaian girl ought to be able to do all kinds of little things.

Helping in the kitchen, you know, cooking.

We don't have any servants, as such,

with all the people in the house our relatives.

In Ghana, a family means more than just husband, wife and children.

It means, practically, all levels of relationship.

And it carries down to three or four generations.

Say, in Europe,

if your grandparents are old, they can be sent to an old folks home.

That would be sacrilege in Ghana.

They say that they have children so that,

when they do grow old, they'll have someone to look after them.

The old are very much respected and they're not to be cast off,

just like that.

When I'm at home I do, practically, everything for her.

I wash her things, I serve her food, I make her bed. Talk with her.

The Ghanaian can never really escape from his roots because the family

is so integrated, you might live 100 miles away but you have to go back.

A slum, in Calcutta.

When the British left India,

they left behind, not only systems of law and government,

not only monuments in stone, they left living memorials, too.

A quarter of a million of them.

They may be black, white or any shade between.

They call them the Anglo-Indians.

The Anglo-Indians were the instruments of British power.

The British wanted a class of dependable civil servants to

settle in India, with Indian roots

but whose first loyalty would be to the Crown.

In the early days of British rule,

the government paid a bonus to any soldier marrying an Indian woman.

Few of them ever thought it would come to this,

stretching out their hands for a few rupees of charity to stay alive.

The Anglo-Indians are Christians, they were taught to love God

and the Queen.

This church fete, in the centre of Calcutta,

is almost pure Hertfordshire.

One rupee.

Can't be cheaper than one rupee.

Do you feel more English than Indian or more Indian than English?

Let's say I feel 50/50. Why should anybody feel 50/50?

What did I do to be born something that was neither here nor there?

I'm not prepared to stay in India, I don't feel there's

a future in India, I want to leave India.

How am I going to be accepted in another country?

I'm born in India, I'm an Indian. There's no doubt about that.

Of Calcutta's 20,000 Anglo-Indians, there are, probably,

10,000 living in distress, beyond the reach of any charity.

-Where is home to you?

-Home, actually, is where my people are.

-That's where I want to be, back in Carlisle.

-In Carlisle?

-Yes.

-If you could go to Carlisle now, would you go?

-I would.

I'd leave this very second with everything and no regrets behind.

The residence of Mr F.H.W Smith. Once a man of property.

This is the size of the room in which I am living in.

I have lived here for just over one year.

Before this I had a beautiful bungalow, with furniture,

crockery servants at my beck and call, a car.

Would you leave this country, if you could?

I would leave this country, if I got the opportunity to leave this

country, I shall leave immediately.

-Have you tried?

-I have tried.

Five years ago, as the war flooded over Europe, South Africa

opened its gates to child evacuees from Britain who sought to

escape the terror which the Nazis had let loose.

Many of the children were very small and very young

but they were able to appreciate that they had come from a dark shadow into the open sunshine,

and their delight with their surroundings knew no bounds.

Yes, those little ones were very pleased

and thankful to be out of harm's way.

But five years have passed.

The war is over and the little people, well,

they're some of the same evacuees, aren't so little any more.

Now they're going home again after five happy

and eventful years in South Africa.

And how they've grown in the sunshine.

Their families are going to have quite a job recognising them.

To these young travellers, sorry to leave their kind friends

and a hospitable country, but glad to be going home,

South Africa wishes bon voyage, may their ship take them

into a far better world than the one from which they came.

Meet the Heureux family, 17 children.

This French-Canadian household lives up to its name.

Heureux means exactly what they are - the happy family.

Mum, Dad and the 17 offspring operate a 100 acre farm

just outside the city of Quebec.

Completely self-sufficient in dairy produce, green crops and vegetables.

They gather bumper harvests of spuds, too.

Grace is said before the family of farmers settle down to

an open air meal.

Lovely, sweet and juicy apples straight out of the orchard.

You lucky little...

And turning to the not inconsiderable

question of laundry, many willing hands defeat the wash day blues.

Harvest time is bottling time, too.

If this isn't the life, I don't know what is.

Spinning is another of their accomplishments.

They want for nothing, except Claude, perhaps,

he wants more elbow grease.

A busy but contented family.

Mum and Dad haven't been exactly idle, either.

Aborigines in Western Australia. They feel they've been cheated.

Aborigines are the only people colonised by the British

to be offered no kind of treaty for their land. It was simply taken.

And, today, they're fighting back.

I believe all countries should be able to be themselves,

not try to be someone else.

It's a whole lot of headache, as far as I'm concerned.

I've tried it, I've tried to live the way the white people are living

and I failed in the society and I wanted to go back to my own

culture because it's a more pleasant and less strenuous culture.

What happens to people is they become urbanised, they're just outcasts.

They're just a middle person, they can neither

fit in the aboriginal culture nor the white culture.

Why the land is important,

because it's not like the way a European treats his land.

He just builds on it.

He wants to mess it up by putting things on it, skyscrapers

and all this stuff.

But ours is simple because all we want to do is just hunt

and just live on it and look after it as much as possible.

I'm planning a desert home for them where we want to settle

and be our own selves again.

We would like to take our young people out and give them a very good

start in life, out in the desert, away from all the town situations.

At least we're our own selves again and we've got our own identity

back again and at least we won't be trying to live another person's life.

Trying to be someone else that we're not.

Jamaican-born Mrs Tyson has to put up with poverty in one tiny room,

which she's obliged to share with 12-year-old John.

Mrs Tyson has plenty of reason to want to go home.

It's as if one is living as a bird in a cage.

Mrs Tyson is going back to Jamaica to rejoin the family

she left eight years ago.

She has no job to go back to.

The change will also be difficult for John.

John was only four when he came here, his best friend is an

English boy, in fact, John himself is more English than anything else.

A black Brummie.

Which do you feel is your country? Jamaica or England?

I think they're...

I think Jamaica is my country but England's my adopted country.

Mrs Tyson, like most who do go back, saved the money herself

and then booked a passage on an old Spanish ship.

As you might expect,

accommodation for the two-week voyage is not luxurious.

Nevertheless, it's cost her almost every penny she has.

-Hello.

-Hello, John. How are you?

'Well, I can't express.

'Regardless of the setbacks that I've had, I'm rather happy to be home.'

What about seeing Jamaica, itself, again?

Jamaica itself, I sat up all night, Friday night,

just to see the mountains. You know?

And I was so happy that I cried when I saw...

I don't know what hills it was first that I saw,

but I saw Jamaica in hills for the first time.

And I did have a good cry.

# I am a poor West Indian

# And I went to seek my fortune in England

# But when I landed in London

# I just could not understand

# I found the place very disappointing, Lord

# Yes the sight was frightening

# And buildings were so dismal and so old

# Yes brother, England was cold

# Lord, look, I want to go

# I can't stay here no more

# The West Indies is my home

# I can't stay out longer to roam

# Yes the healthy tropical sun

# The friendly people to keep me warm

# So I'm going back to the West Indies

# I'm going back to the West Indies. #

SINGING

Abdu Rahman, a fisherman, lives in the middle of the

Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh, the largest river delta in the world.

He's one of 66 million landless Bangladeshis who,

because of the soaring birth rate and scarcity of land,

is forced to live in the most vulnerable area, the chars.

The shifting silt islands which emerge,

flood and disappear with deadly regularity.

After half a century, the Union of South Africa has

withdrawn from the British Family of Nations.

Racial discrimination remains her policy

and she will not apply for continued membership of the Commonwealth.

Holding a dove of peace, Verwoerd called apartheid,

"good neighbourliness." No-one objects to

Commonwealth Republics, racial discrimination is another matter.

But the door remains open, may the Union abandon apartheid

and South Africa return to the British Commonwealth.

GUITAR PLAYING

There's a coal train that comes from Mozambique and Angola.

From Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland.

From Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

And all the hinterland of Southern Africa.

And it carries with it very old men, middle aged men, young men,

and very young men.

All contracted to come and work for the mines in Johannesburg

and the surrounding metropolis.

They sit in their flea-ridden barracks,

and they think about the herds and lands that were taken from them.

About their children, their lovers, their mothers, their fathers.

Their friends.

Almost all of the African miners are housed in compounds.

It's supposed to preserve the tribal pattern of authority.

But it more closely resembles an all-male boarding school,

with the white compound manager acting as House Master to his boys.

They always curse the train, the coal train, that brought them to come

and work in the mineral mines of Johannesburg.

These men live in Chandigarh which, so far as the future is

concerned, is the most remarkable city in India.

The city is still being built.

It began in 1950,

when the government of the Punjab asked the advice of Le Corbusier,

in Paris, about appointing

a team of architects to build a new state capital.

Every house built by the state, in each category of buildings,

has a terrace on the room or a court with trees in it.

So that, in the summer, the family can sleep out of doors.

Here, in Mr Krishan's house, space is what you must adapt to.

Mr Krishan has a daughter and a son.

The four of them live together in two small rooms.

Yet, in any other city in India,

the whole family would be living in one room.

Today, half a mile from the city of Chandigarh,

there are still entirely traditional villages.

The difference between a village like this

and the new city is already enormous.

In many Indian cities, the poor share what little living space

they have with their cows, which yield hardly any milk at all.

In Chandigarh, no cows are allowed inside the city.

But there must be a minimum continuity so that the

villagers should not feel lost when they live in Chandigarh.

People cannot be separated from their own sense of identity.

The city recognises a traditional way of life

and, at the same time, changes it.

Everything depends on the plan we make today for tomorrow's

housing in post-war Australia.

The Commonwealth Department of Post-War Reconstruction

discloses something of its plans in a current exhibition.

Sydney itself had no plan, it just grew, like top seed.

And with it grew slums, unsavoury, unlovely places of dirt,

disease and child delinquency.

Australia has a quarter of a million sub-standard houses.

85,000 already condemned as not fit for human habitation.

We didn't plan for playing spaces, we left the kids in the street.

Here's what we could do now. Here's a model of a model neighbourhood.

The Department of Post-War Reconstruction estimates,

in the ten years after the war, Australia will need 750,000 homes.

Most of these will need to be houses low enough in cost

for the average wage earner to be able to afford to live in.

These examples would cost between £600 and £700, pre-war.

The plan is for modern houses, with light and sunshine all around.

With work made easy for the housewife by designing kitchen

and dining room and lounge rooms adjacent.

You, the parent, looking to the future.

You, the soldier, who's fought for a better world to live in.

Which do you want?

This?

Or this?

A decent home, or slum horror?

We planned, all in, to win the war. And we're winning it.

We have to plan, as a nation and not for ourselves,

if we're to win the peace.

That's Victor Kimusaro.

He's undergoing an education, near Dar es Salaam.

And, he's reached university entrance level.

He's about 18, he's not exactly sure.

No doubt, Victor represents the future.

And, no doubt, the past is where his home is.

And often his thoughts, too.

A thousand miles away, in the heart of Tanganyika.

Victor's brothers have passed through a long,

tough initiation and are now warriors.

They fight and feast and guard the herds and maybe go cattle raiding.

Of course, Victor can never be a warrior.

Away at school,

he missed the initiation ceremony of his age group.

Victor is very proud of his birth, very conscious that he's a Masai.

But, whenever he goes home, he feels alien. Ridiculous.

He's quite certain he will never return to tribal life or

tribal dress.

And sometimes he feels sad about this.

He says, "I've escaped from the tribe. That's a rigid sort of life.

"I'm free.

"But, I suppose, I've lost something.

"I don't belong any more, I've lost that."

CHILDREN SINGING

London, the day of the Royal homecoming.

A chill dawn but, from first light,

the city has made ready to greet Her Majesty.

Britannia passes through Tower Bridge, gateway to the capital.

And, this moment above all, means that the Queen has come home.

The Royal Barge, bearing the Queen, comes upriver

and turns towards the pier.

Now follows the climax of Her Majesty's return.

The Royal Journey that took her,

and Prince Philip, 50,000 miles around the world ends under the

shadow of Big Ben, as Her Majesty sets foot on English soil again.

The Royal couple, with their children,

begin the last stage of their journey home.

And, so, the Queen enters the gates of her palace, once more.

Now, the Royal family are with the people of their homeland again.

And, yet, in the course of her triumphant tour,

Her Majesty has shown how fully and rightfully she was at home,

even in the most distant lands of the Commonwealth.

In the Queen, her Consort and her children, we see the living symbol

of the Commonwealth Her Majesty has visited.

A family united, constant and unswerving in its duty.

If you'd like to learn more and trace the progress of the English language

across the Commonwealth, through an interactive timeline, go to...

And follow the link to the Open University.