DRUGS

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 4

DRUGS

Gale, a good looking, intelligent girl who died at 19, a drug addict, is the principal of a 50-minute “Man Alive” documentary called “Gale is Dead.” It has been bought by the N.Z.B.C, but has-not yet been scheduled. “Man Alive” first.met Gale ten months before her death, when they were making a programme about people brought up in children’s homes. She first went into the care of local authorities at the age of six months and before she was found dead in the filthy basement of a derelict house in London’s Chelsea had been in no less than 14 institutions. This film looks at the people in her short, hopeless life; her mother, her friends and those who cared for her trying to help but finding, in the end, a girl who felt she belonged to no-one. The programme does not try to apportion blame, but ask if Gale need have died and tries to show that there may be other Gales it is- not too late to help.

Tour of harbour.— Children from Waimangarda School, near Westport, who are on a week’s educational visit to Christchurch accompanied by teachers, visited Lyttelton on Thursday afternoon. They were taken on a harbour cruise aboard the pilot cutter Wairangi.