Julia Cave DRAFT Tape 1 Side A COPYRIGHT: No use may be made of any interview material without the permission of the BECTU History Project (http://www.historyproject.org.uk/). Copyright of interview material is vested in the BECTU History Project (formerly the ACTT History Project) and the right to publish some excerpts may not be allowed. CITATION: Women’s Work in British Film and Television, Julia Cave, http://bufvc.ac.uk/bectu/oral- histories/bectu-oh [date accessed] By accessing this transcript, I confirm that I am a student or staff member at a UK Higher Education Institution or member of the BUFVC and agree that this material will be used solely for educational, research, scholarly and non-commercial purposes only. I understand that the transcript may be reproduced in part for these purposes under the Fair Dealing provisions of the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. 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I agree to the above terms of use and that I will not edit, modify or use this material in ways that misrepresent the interviewees’ words, might be defamatory or likely to bring BUFVC, University of Leeds or my HEI into disrepute. 1 Julia Cave DRAFT Tape 1 Side A BECTU History Project Interview no: 380 Interviewee: Julia Cave Interviewer: Norman Swallow No of tapes: 3 Duration: 247:11 Minutes NB: The time codes given here are estimates based on readings from the original cassette recording. Transcriber’s note: the second of the two interviewers was not introduced and the questions from one in particular were hard to hear. This made it hard to attribute their questions accurately. All questions are therefore transcribed in the same italic font, with no distinction between the two interviewers. Tape 1 Side A. The copyright of this recording is vested in the BECTU History Project. Julia Cave, television director and producer. Interviewer Norman Swallow. Recorded on the 10th of May 1996. Side 1. Begin, right, begin. Right, we’re off are we? Yes. Right, okay Yes. Right. So. Yes. 2 Julia Cave DRAFT Tape 1 Side A Julia Cave, television producer, for a long, long time, and brilliantly. Okay Julia, let's go back to square one. Born when and where? Oh right, I was... Education and family, your father, mother and the lot. Fine, alright. I was born on the 1st of June 1937 in The Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire. My father was a mining engineer, and there was a colliery nearby. My mother had been in early films, in fact she played several parts in, in early films, and her name was Marjorie Lorring for those films. Is that L-O-R-I-N-G? L-O double R-I-N-G. Double R? And we left there when I was about two. My father then, War broke out shortly. Ah. Well when I was three I guess. And my father joined the Admiralty, so we, from then on, for the rest of my life, the rest of my childhood, moved around frequently, either every second or third year. So we started off in Scotland. My first, my first school was in Scotland, at a place called Beith, about sixteen miles outside Glasgow. I learned to read very early because my mother taught me, she believed in that. But after that my education was pretty chequered, having been to ten different schools. Shortly, immediately after the War, we moved. My father was sent out to India, where he was in charge of The Bombay Dockyard, and we went out on the first ship, The Capetown Castle, which went through The Suez Canal, and it was the very first time that I'd seen a banana because of course I'd been a wartime baby and I'd never seen anything like that before so, quite thrilled. At that stage I was reading Agatha Christie, I was really on to, sort of, grown up books fairly young, I think. And I really enjoyed those 3 Julia Cave DRAFT Tape 1 Side A thrillers on the boat out. Anyway we, we arrived in Bombay and I spent the next three years of my life there. Starting off at The Bombay High School, where I think I was probably the only European. Which was kind of interesting because it was the time of the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, and the time of all the riots, before partition, and it was quite dangerous, we were in buses which were turned over and burnt on various occasions, and quite often we ended up sort of with guns around and my father had a gun. Anyway, so I was in The Bombay High School, and my parents decided that I shouldn’t stay there in view of the unrest and possible racial tensions. I felt none of that, I must say, as a child. I didn't find, find that I was being victimised at all. So however, I was moved then to the, the sort of Army school, which was a much rougher place altogether, because it contained both sexes and, also it was the time when there was a lot of inter-marriage between the... Yes. Indians and British Service people. And there were a lot of Anglo Indian children at this school, and they were very disturbed because if they happened to have come out rather darker than some of the whites they were victimised quite definitely by the Army kids. And I remember being in a playground and having to fight the battle on behalf of a rather darker child who claimed to be Welsh. These kids obviously wanted to come back to England and be accepted as British. And so it was a time, very early on in my life of, I think, huge racial tensions, which I really had to come to understand. I don't know if that kind of thing is at all interesting. [05:03] Very interesting. It is, yes, it is, I mean it follows on what you were... Yes, because... Saying... 4 Julia Cave DRAFT Tape 1 Side A Yes. I mean did, did you ever refer to it in your work, television work? Probably not, only in an indirect way I suppose. Yes, yes. But I, I think, having been brought up in India was very formative, and I always liked, very much, working in The Far East, and in The East and... Yes. Once written up on the board in the manager’s office was ‘Julia Cave gone East’. I'd been back for quite a while but I think they'd failed to notice. You'd gone, you'd gone back home? Gone back. Yes. Sorry, continue, chronologically then. Then, then, after the Army school. And then what, yes? After the Army school we came back and we went to Northern Ireland, where I was the only Protestant in a Catholic convent because the convent happened to be dead opposite to where we lived in a little place called Ballynahinch about twelve miles outside Belfast. And that's very interesting too, it was a terribly good school, and I really enjoyed that. But, I was saying the Rosary by the end of that stint, and almost became a Catholic. Then we, then we went to Portsmouth and another school. I'm skipping some of the schools. Yes. 5 Julia Cave DRAFT Tape 1 Side A It gets really rather boring. Yes. And after that to Bath where I went to The Bath, City of Bath Girls’ School it was, a rather boring place, which made you walk down one side of the corridor and you weren’t allowed to speak. And, so, anyway, at that stage I particularly wanted to read English at Cambridge and that was really the way I was intending to go, but my father didn't really believe very strongly in education for girls, I think so he rather vetoed this idea. My mother, because she cared very much about the theatre, and, and, and films and so on, had given me elocution lessons, so I did rather well at those and got a few gold medals and things, and thought that I wanted to be an actress. But there was clearly no way that that was going to happen immediately. So, anyway, I said to my parents that I really wanted to go and get a job, and so I went to do a secretarial course. So I actually got trained in shorthand and typing, which I still do rather badly, and bookkeeping. Oh well. Which I do even worse. I was going to say which you do very well. At that time my mother who had worked for Helena Glyn, and The Tiger Skin, which is how she ended up in films. Her daughter was Juliet Rhys-Williams, who was in fact a, a liberal member of parliament, and she was a governor of the BBC, at the time. And I went to see her and she gave me one of those rather wonderful white five pound notes, which have disappeared, and asked me what I wanted to do with my life.