Contextless Ethnography?

When my parents died a couple of years ago, my sister and I were left with a vast amount of physical stuff to clear from their house. Conditions last year were hardly conducive to long travelling to do this, so we’re only now finally getting it all sorted. As a result, I have recently become the custodian of my father’s photographs. All of them.

My dad, Tony Day (1937-2019), was a serious amateur photographer from adolescence right up to his death. He kept all his photographic images, good and bad – prints, negatives, slides, cine film, digital video tapes. On top of this, he had also received all his family’s photographs, including those taken by his father, and on top of this were all the pictures from my mother’s family. My conservative estimate is tens of thousands of images, which posed the question of what to do with them all.

The sheer volume was compounded by what one might charitably call my dad’s often cavalier attitude towards tidiness. Many of the images were loose in boxes. He had latterly begun to put his prints into albums, although he had not dealt with all of them by the time of his death. Some of these were roughly labelled, but many more were not. (I have not even begun looking at the slides or cine films yet: I see that he did make a rough catalogue index of slide boxes, but seems to have used the same numbering system more than once).

As all this stuff had arrived at my house and was filling up my spare room, I urgently needed to get it into a more immediately manageable space. The first step was to empty out the albums he had so lovingly filled, which was perhaps the oddest of the emotional pangs during this process.

I initially worked to separate the prints into three very rough top-level categories: Family; Friends; and Other. The latter was ridiculously unwieldy, but a necessary starting point just to work out what I was looking at. The rolls were rarely thematic, but a sequential record of what he saw and found interesting: he loved churches, stained glass, birds, plants, caravans, landscapes, cars, things he found curious, odd or funny …

His curiosity, as a very serious practising Anglican, about people and their religious and other practices threw up some surprises for me. Here were morris dancers, giants, processions. (The morris dancers were my fault: he had given me a lift to the Tenterden Folk Festival, and photographed the passing troupes while I was giving a talk). His intimate knowledge of churches and church life meant there were a lot of photographs of craftsmen engaged in church renovations. Here (somewhat to my alarm, given his occasional lack of worldiness and general conservatism) were gable end murals in Northern Ireland. It may have been simple curiosity, but the result was ethnographic evidence.

 

Free Derry Corner. Photo: Tony Day

 

Yet how to understand the pictures?

I cannot say that his curiosity at what he saw was leading him to investigate directly the practices he photographed (although this is complicated, as he was also thinking deeply about religious observance and meaning), so many of the pictures are probably best treated as discreet records rather than part of any inquiry on his part. This is compounded by the somewhat random character of his taking of photographs, further randomised by the distribution of the prints. I do not know, for example, in which French town the Chinese parade seen here was taking place.

 

Chinese New Year(?) procession, France. Photo: Tony Day

 

 

Investigation of the images would require treating them as contextless ethnography to some extent, although that does an injustice to his inner life, his unstated thinking. I have to start from that position simply because the context is not available to me. From my knowledge of him, he could have commented on most near any picture if asked, but would not have put this together into any overall record. Yet his obvious love of xeroxlore, which ties to the images he found amusing, obviously fits into a broader, more consistent outlook.

2010 well dressing. Photo: Tony Day

Buxton (?) well, 2010. Photo: Tony Day

I am starting slowly, therefore, with individual images, like the ones here. I may not be able to put him back into many of them yet, but I can start by making sense of some of what he saw. One of the dressed wells, for example, is conveniently dated 2010, so the other photo from the same roll of a trip to the Peak District is clearly from the same time. The town centre dressing is, I believe, in Buxton, outside the NatWest on Spring Gardens. Funnily enough the other one, which should be the easier to identify, currently eludes me. If anyone can help, I’d appreciate it. Because making sense of this stuff is what I’m going to be doing for a while, I think.

A couple of upcoming presentations

Academic folklorists without an institutional position, like me, have to find various workarounds to provide such things as university library access. I am grateful, therefore, to the University of Hertfordshire for my Visiting Research Fellowship, which has given me this as well as some sort of institutional recognition I can appeal to when out in the wider academic world of conferences and publications. It is all too easy for the precarious academic to feel that they are under-achieving, or not achieving at all, simply because they have no wider social academic context in which to place their work. Over the last month or so I’ve been reviewing my output for the period of the Fellowship to date, and it’s been a relief after all to see that I have put out more than I’d realised, which has therefore gone out over that institutional affiliation as the quid pro quo.

 

What hasn’t happened so much – inevitably, given the circumstances – is conference and live appearances, but even that is beginning to change. Having missed two years of Folklore Society conferences (family bereavement followed by COVID-19 suspension of events), I’m really happy and quite daunted to be back presenting at next weekend’s Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference, held over from last year.

 

I’d submitted a proposal to force myself finally to have a look at some 1920s Belgian notebooks containing songtexts that I was shown some years ago. As some of the notebooks were previously study exercise books, I’d hoped to investigate the relationship between formal school/informal folklore education and transmission of knowledge. I’m not convinced I’ve got very far with that aspect of the investigation, but I have started to piece together an overview of interwar popular singing traditions as they’re represented and play out in these notebooks. This is beginning to pose questions about interpretation, as well as further historical research: some of the songs, for example, came from the doyen of marktzangers, Lionel Bauwens, known as Tamboer, a man so significant he has this statue in his hometown of Eeklo. I think this paper is very much the starting point for research rather than its conclusion, but that makes it all the more stimulating to me. 

 

Lionel Bauwen, 'Tamboer' by Spotter2 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

 

Shortly afterwards, when I’ve caught my breath, it will also be my turn to give an online talk for the Folklore Society. ‘Old Clem! Blow the fire, blow the fire: St Clement’s Day and Dickens’ is a return to a talk I gave some years ago (but have now completely forgotten, it seems). It started with an investigation into Joe Gargery’s song at his forge in Great Expectations, which led me to contemplation of the relationship between folklore and literature (something which has exercised me more recently in consideration of the folkloresque) as well as to the specific folkloric content of St Clement’s Day observations. This, in turn, opened up something of a rabbit warren of details about saints’ days generally. Bernardino Fungai's lovely picture of St Clement being hoiked overboard chained to an anchor, for example, codifies one account of his martyrdom, but it is unclear who (if anyone) he really was. The situation gets even murkier when you look at the various St Catherines with whose observations Clement’s later merged, so it’s a pleasingly chaotic mélange of ideas and avenues for exploration. And it does involve dynamite. Booking is still open!

 

The Martyrdom of St Clement, by Bernardino Fungai

Subversive folklore in the military?

I’m not particularly a fan of online meetings/events, but needs must when the devil drives – why, yes, I have recently been reviewing a book of proverb scholarship for Folklore – and I’ve been very happy about the current series of Folklore Society events. (I’ll be doing one myself in June). On Tuesday I had the great pleasure of chairing Professor David Hopkin’s excellent talk on ‘The Soldier’s Tale: Military Storytelling in Revolutionary Europe’, which was followed by the usual invigorating discussion. David’s focus was very much on the genre of folktales, and I wondered about the place of legend in military narrative traditions.

 

Professor David Hopkin

I mentioned in passing, for example, the song McCafferty (Roud 1148), based on the true story of a soldier killing an officer at Fulwood Barracks in Preston (1). From recollection (subsequently filled out in the discussion by William Roberts), one staple of the song’s performance is a comment on its subversive/banned character. In the late 1960s Shropshire singer May Bradley recalled singing the song some 40 years earlier ‘and a man jumped up and said, “Mrs Bradley we mustn’t allow that song in this house”. And I said “What’s that got to do along o’you?” and he said “If you was found singing that song you’d get 10 years in jail”.’ (2) Roy Palmer reported that ‘In the army itself it was widely believed that to sing the song was a chargeable offence’: his father had heard it sung in the Leicestershire Regiment in the 1920s, but ‘only when there was no one [in authority] about’ (3). It certainly continued to circulated within the military, with one of A.E. Green’s informants having learned it while serving in the Navy.

This kind of introductory comment gets me very excited, because non-sung verbal contextualisation of performances was often omitted/ignored by the early collectors, who were much more interested in the songs as musical artefacts, but is clearly an essential part of understanding what exactly is going on in the sharing of lore. David Hopkin added an extra layer to this with a wonderful story about Roy Palmer. David had been at a conference with his PhD supervisor, Peter Burke. They had met Roy Palmer, and Peter Burke said ‘The last time I saw you was at Catterick Barracks in 1952: I heard they’d court-martialled you for saluting the red flag!’

The story went that on the firing range, where red flags were hoisted to signal live fire, then Communist Party member Palmer had stood to salute one, resulting in disciplinary action. Not true, said Palmer, although as a CP member he had been removed from signalling duties as a possible security risk. However, the development of the legend – paralleling the claim that singing McCaffery was ‘chargeable’ is itself an interesting moment of military folklore.

 

By chance I have also just picked up a book on the 1797 naval mutinies, where, in another echo of the Burke/Palmer story, the Spithead mutineers used the hoisted red flag as a prearranged signal for sending delegates to central meetings – although the Spithead mutineers do not seem to have intended it as a republican gesture, that was certainly how it was seen by the Admiralty. I was reminded of the wonderful broadside ballad The Death of Parker, or President Parker (Roud 1032) on Richard Parker, hanged for his part in the Nore mutiny. It is a sympathetic song, treating of Parker’s widow and the story that, in Roy Palmer’s words, ‘the navy buried his body on the shore between high and low tide marks, and that his wife secretly removed it for proper interment’ (4). Here’s a nice version sung by Annie Dearman, accompanied by Steve Harrison.

 

Richard Parker about to be hanged

I first heard Parker sung in a folk club by Dave East (who had himself done military service). Dave would comment that singing this song was a disciplinary offence because of the line comment that ‘although he was hangèd up for mutiny, worse than him were left behind’. I’ve seen no evidence to support the claim, nor have I yet found any evidence of other singers believing the same, but the similarity with the McCaffery comment is suggestive. (Even if it is only suggestive of an experienced singer with a wide repertoire transferring legends from song to song on the basis of similarity). It suggests an intriguing nuance to some singers’ selection and perpetuation of specific songs, with some interesting implications for attitudes to military service and activity.

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1) The best consideration of the song I’ve read is A.E. Green ‘McCaffery: A Study in the Variation and Function of a Ballad’, Lore & Language, 3 (1970), 4-9; 4 (1971), 3-12; 5 (1971), 5-11.

2) Fred Hamer, Green Groves: More English Folk Songs (London: EFDS Publications, 1973), p. 48.

3) Roy Palmer, ed., The Rambling Soldier: Life in the Lower Ranks, 1750-1900, through Soldiers’ Songs and Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 120. Palmer gives a good historical account of the story, pp. 119-126.

4) Roy Palmer, ed., The Oxford Book of Sea Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 167.

Into the Future Thanks to the Past

The last year has brought home how much I’ve missed fieldwork, but I have found other ways to fill my time.

Seasonal customs have been hard hit by the pandemic and restrictions on meeting, and folklorists have been documenting how this has played out. There’s been a huge proliferation of online material, inevitably, from virtual events to the spread of memes and legends of all sorts. The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research have been collecting COVID contemporary legends, while the spate of memes photoshopping a masked and gloved Bernie Sanders are being collated by archivists at the VermontFolklife Center.

 

Shortly before the second lockdown I learned of an excellent local legend, in family tradition, and had made a provisional arrangement to speak to at least one of the two people known to tell it. She wanted to speak to the other, her brother, so I’m optimistic I’ll be able to compare their tellings directly, at some point – but that ‘at some point’ rather vanished into the unknown, inevitably.

 

I’ve been busy, however, with some things which are not fieldwork dependent but are tied up instead with the history of folklore studies as a discipline. One is a chapter in an intriguing edited collection Folklore and the Nation that follows up my recent Western Folklore article on the folkloresque. While I’ve always found investigations of the ways folklore and popular culture interact fascinating, it surprised me somewhat to find myself contributing. The folkloresque is a handy set of ways of thinking about this interaction that started out by probing how popular culture creates representations of what looks like folklore. Watching the Hammer film The Witches (1966), and later reading its source novel, I’d come to see this folkloresque representation leaning heavily not just on folklore, but on the evolving history of the discipline itself. The forthcoming chapter pursues this further in an investigation of a 1930 detective novel.

 

For British folklorists this takes a particular historical slant, as the folklore studies that are reflected are often exactly the low points of our history that we’d much rather forget – what I’ve come to refer to casually, but with a shudder, as ‘the Murray/Gardner years’. So it’s been a pleasure too, to take up some actual historical research into this for a couple of projects. One was a small essay to mark the 90^th birthday of that doyenne of recent British folklore scholarship, Professor Jacqueline Simpson. I confess I wrote it in part because it felt a shame not to use the title: ‘Margaret Murray: Who Didn’t Believe Her and Why’.

 

Jacqueline Simpson with Terry Pratchett

This came hot on the heels of some extensive rewrites to an article on the rather neglected Violet Alford, which should hopefully now appear later this year. In lots of ways Alford’s a massively appealing figure, but she’s slipped from sight a little because of her rather retrograde theoretical positions, including her critical agreement with some aspects of Murray’s thinking.

One reason for going into some of this awkward history is because of the valiant and ultimately successful efforts by serious folklore scholars to overcome it. One of the real joys of this recent study has been reading pieces by two of the extraordinary group of scholars who reoriented and rescued British folklore from the edge of that abyss. Leading the way in the modernisation of the Folklore Society was the great scholar of Norse and Germanic mythology, Hilda Ellis Davidson, who wrote a charming reminiscence of the 1949-1986 period within the Society (1). In it she described Gerald Gardner as ‘flamboyant and rather sinister’. The skewering that follows is immensely witty, but points to how the Folklore Society was steeling itself for more serious work: ‘It is, in retrospect, difficult to see how Dr Gardner ever got on to the [Society’s] Council, but possibly it was after his arrival that people became so cautious’.

 

Margaret Murray interviewed by the BBC (UCL Institute of Archaeology, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps even more entertaining, and possibly more revealing of how this defence of serious scholarship actually played out on the ground, is a characteristically hilarious piece by Jacqueline Simpson, written not for the Folklore Society’s journal but for its newsletter, FLS News (2). The piece commemorates a lecture given on 19 February 1964 – Jacqueline’s first meeting following acceptance of her application for membership. The lecture was The Synthetic Sabbath by Rossell Hope Robbins, a critical demolition of Margaret Murray’s views on the history and persistence of witchcraft as ‘a secret society of fertility cultists’. It is a great pity that the Society never published the lecture, but the evening was clearly part of a scholarly accounting with ideas that had until recently dominated its existence.

 

What made the event so extraordinary was that those ideas still held great sway, and the Murrayite contingent fought a determined rearguard action against this very public redress. Arriving, Jacqueline noted ‘a pile of broomsticks in the corridor, brought, I hope and believe, by students, not witches. And I noted with dismay that female scholars and witches can look rather alike, both tending to dramatic jewellery and hats’. The lecture ‘passed smoothly’, aside from the occasional squawk from Hotfoot Jackson, the tame jackdaw perched on the shoulder of Sybil Leek, High Priestess of the New Forest Coven so closely associated with Gardner. The ensuing questions were all together more riotous, with witches haranguing and denouncing Robbins. Peter Opie, another of the brilliant fieldworking scholars who did so much to revive serious folklore study in Britain, was, in Jacqueline’s words, ‘the luckless Chairman, sat with his head in his hands, speechless’.

 

But the scholarship and debate remained robust. It’s worth quoting Jacqueline at length, both in regard to the argument and its impact:

 

‘Angrily, the witches asked how Dr Robbins could explain the close likeness between what they did and believed and what Dr Murray had described in her books. Simple, said he, modern witches had cribbed all their ideas from these very books, which had been around for forty years, and from later ones by Robert Graves and Gerald Gardner. None of these were historically sound. It must have been bitter for the witches to hear all this; not only was their cherished self-image being denied, but Margaret Murray was being criticised by the very Society where she had been President … Probably the FLS Committee were feeling equally tense – dreading bad publicity and striving to make clear their academic standards’.

 

The extensive press coverage of this well-attended meeting (Angela Carter was among those present, it turns out) seems to have been ‘reasonably balanced’. It was not the first or last shot, nor the decisive turning point – intellectual history rarely works like that, even though that’s how narratives are constructed – but is emblematic of a resolute and determined struggle to champion the best of scholarly standards.

 

I’m missing the field, but telling the story of how we are able to do what we do now is not a second-best alternative. It’s an integral part of the same story, and I will continue to work at it, if only to pay due homage to scholars of the brilliance of Jacqueline Simpson, without whose efforts we would not now be doing what we do. 

 

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1: Hilda Ellis Davidson, ‘Changes in the Folklore Society, 1949-1986’, Folklore, 98.2 (1987), 123-130  

2: Jacqueline Simpson, ‘Which Was Witch? And Witch Was What?’, FLS News, 15 (1992), 3