To Jay Smith, Marcus Boerger, George Schlossnagle, Sara Golemon, Michael Walter in particular, and all who've kindly responded to my struggle to upgrade my C++ to handle my hopes on php, thank you.
We now have a C++ class factory for generating Php objects derived from C++ classes, as I'd originally hoped. It wraps and hides the complexities of the creation process, but leaves the user to write simple handlers for each of the methods to be exposed as required. I've no idea how to make it available, if anyone else would find it useful, but for now I'll simply say thank you and get on with my coding. Cheers, Andrew.