St Clement

This weather vane sits on top of St Clement Danes church in the Strand, London WC2. A church had stood on the site for a long time - according to one tradition, it was founded in the 9th century by Danes expelled from the City of London. (The boundary between the City of London and Westminster was only a little way to the east). It was gutted in 1941 during the Blitz. After the war it was handed over to the Air Council, who raised funds for its rebuilding. In 1958 it was reconsecrated as the Air Force church, a role it still has today.
The church has become the focus of a number of unstable traditions. Its very foundation legend is debatable: Steve Roud writes 'On the question of the Danes, there is no simple answer'. (1) The churchbells now peal the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons' four times a day, although the meaning of the current words is just as questionable as the song's attachment to this church, rather than St Clement's Eastcheap.
The weather vane is a nice example, having nothing to do with the nursery rhyme, the Danes, or the RAF. It is stamped with an anchor, representing St Clement, the patron saint of sailors. Happily, given the altogether unclear history of any of the traditions involved, St Clement's own past is equally murky. Even some sympathetic sources query whether he died a martyr. The most common version of his legend is that he was killed by being thrown into the sea with an anchor round his neck, hence his invocation by sailors, and, later, his adoption as the patron saint of anchor-smiths. This was logically extended to blacksmiths, too, although it isn't exactly clear when. Blacksmiths were widely honouring him by the early nineteenth century, but there had already been a long history of St Clement's Day (23rd November) as a day of general festivity, marked by fishermen and bakers amongst others.
I like the uncertainty. I like the whirling mass of stories out of which all sorts of customs emerge. I particularly like this weather vane, because it symbolises a group of motifs and themes which have now largely been superseded by other traditions. You could so easily miss it.

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1) Steve Roud, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City (London: Random House, 2008), p. 114

Traditional story about Cuvier

I had half an eye on the third part of the BBC programme The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion last night. The third part of the series, 'How Did We Get Here?', dealt with the rise of scientific assessments of biodiversity. Along the way, presenter Michael Mosley (left) looked at the contribution of the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Mosley told this story about Cuvier (pictured below). I've transcribed the story from the broadcast programme:

There's a story about Cuvier which I like, which I think really sums up the man. It's late at night, and Cuvier has gone to bed, when one of his students, dressed in a devil's costume, bursts into his room and cries 'Cuvier! Cuvier! I have come to eat you!' Cuvier opened one eye, calmly looked the student up and down, and said 'All animals that have hooves and horns are herbivores. You cannot eat me'.

I've always liked this story, too, and it seems to have had an oral circulation. Augustus Hare recalled being told the story in Suffolk in 1894. Hare's version concerns 'some young men ... determined to frighten the famous naturalist'. His version doesn't change tense, as Mosley's does, but this might be because it was written down. Hare's punchline is a bit pithier than Mosley's rather classroom description, too:

Cuvier looked at him. 'Carnivorous! horns - hoofs - impossible! Good-night;' and he turned over and went to sleep. (1)

It's always a pleasure to hear a tale with some kind of traditional life being told orally, and it's a delight to hear them crop up on television.

• • • • • • • • •

1) reprinted in The Penguin Book of English Folktales, ed. Neil Philip (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 394

Dorson, Hospital, and Folklore Lived

I've been thinking a lot lately about Richard M. Dorson (1916-1981). Dorson was one of the key American folklorists after the Second World War, responsible for cementing the reputation of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University. Anyone interested in the early development of folklore in Britain should read his book The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), and the two-volume anthology he edited to accompany it, Peasant Customs and Savage Myths: Selections from the British Folklorists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
Dorson fought, above all, to establish Folklore as an academic discipline. He saw a university basis for the discipline as the way to ensure the training of new generations of folklorists. He was fierce in attacking 'fakelore', a word he coined to summarise 'the pseudo-scholar creating folklore for the mass culture', as he once put it. There's lots to argue with, to dispute, and to disagree with, in his conclusions, as well as in the positions he advanced in defending them, but his writings still burn as a passionate and reasoned championing of a marginal discipline that should be valued.
I was delighted to find that a couple of ghost traditions had attached to him. One is very funny (his ghost appearing in a dream to Henry Glassie to give him some important advice), the other is a deeply touching account of Nancy C. McEntire seeing his apparition. The stories are in Elizabeth Tucker, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 51-53.
He'd already been on my mind, though. He was a clever fieldworker, and able to turn his clarity of vision onto his own situation. In 1972 he was hospitalised with arteriosclerosis, and underwent by-pass surgery. On his recovery he wrote 'Heart Disease and Folklore', about the procedures he saw in the hospital, and the folk medicine preventing such heart conditions. (It's reprinted in Readings in American Folklore, ed. Jan Harold Brunvand (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 124-137).
I thought about that article a lot during a recent stay in hospital. I did observe a little of the changed folklore of nursing, but mostly I just lay there. I don't remember anything of the accident that laid me out, so I've renewed respect for Dorson's attentiveness on the ward. When he came out of hospital, he investigated folkloric mechanisms for managing stress and maintaining 'emotional equilibrium'. I wasn't in hospital because of any heart condition, but I was delighted with the concluding hypothesis of Dorson's essay. It's been a bit of an effort writing this, but now that I'm out again I'm happy to embrace Dorson's hypothesis fully: 'folklore lived, not studied, is the surest preventive of heart disease'.

Wild Signs

I haven't bothered to advertise my publications here, beyond putting them in an easily missed box at the bottom of the page, but I thought I would make the effort to note one new publication. I'm really pleased that the British Archaeological Report volume Wild Signs: Graffiti in Archaeology and History, ed. Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal, Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology, 6 / BAR S2074 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010) is now out. It's been a while coming, but it's well worth the wait.
The book is expanded from the proceedings of a panel on graffiti at the 2005 TAG conference at the University of Sheffield. (TAG is Sheffield's The Archaeology Group). Jeff and Tim, who convened the panel, made a point of sending the Call for Papers over to the folklorists in the university. I gave a paper on Banksy's rat stencils and their relationship to folklore about rats, and I was glad I'd gone. It was a broad and diverse panel, and it triggered a lot of my subsequent interest in graffiti. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe's photographs of obscene tree-carvings done by Basque herdsmen in Western American states really got me enthusiastic about occupational graffiti. I haven't seen the whole book yet, but I've had the pdf of my chapter and the illustrations are looking good (which matters in a book about graffiti).

Graffiti is one of those areas that's being studied in a lot of disciplines, and it's all too easy not to know what else is out there. So I'm delighted to know this is.

Ghost Questionnaire Closing Shortly

As I've mentioned before, I'm into my writing up now. I've also just been reminded that the period of fieldwork I'd agreed with the university Ethics Committee is about to expire. I will therefore be taking down my ghost questionnaire in the next two weeks. If you've been thinking about completing it but haven't got round to it yet, now is your last chance.

This post gives some background information to my research, if you want some idea of where I'm coming from. I'm interested in hearing from you whether you believe or not.

FLS AGM Conference on 'The Supernatural'

I'm looking forward to the Folklore Society AGM and Conference at Leeds Trinity and All Saints University College, Horsforth, Leeds. It takes place between 26 and 28 March, and is dedicated to 'The Supernatural'. You can still (just about) get the advanced booking rate. The registration details are available here. There is now a draft programme available. There's lots of interesting things I'd actually go and hear even if I wasn't giving a paper myself (which isn't true of all the conferences I've been to, I must say).
Friday 26 March
Registration opens at 2pm, and tea will be available. The Folklore Society AGM, which is restricted to FLS members only, is at 3pm. At 4pm Eddie Cass will give the President's Lecture, which is open to all. This is on the subject of 'Alex Helm and His Collection of Folk Performance Material'. It will be followed at 5pm by a wine reception, and dinner at 6pm.
Saturday 27 March
9:00 Jacqueline Simpson (FLS), 'The Ambiguity of Elves'
9:45 Ariella Feldman (University of Birmingham), 'Jane Eyre: Fairy and Witch Power: A Study of Gender'
10:30 Mikel J. Koven (University of Worcester) and Gunnella Þorgeirsdóttir (University of Sheffield), 'Televisual Folklore: Rescuing Supernatural from the Fakelore Realms'
11:15 Coffee
11:45 Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University), 'Contemporary Urban Fantasy and the Lessons of Folklore'
12:15 Maureen James (University of Glamorgan), '"Tatterfoals, Will-o-the-Wykes, and the Old Lad": Exploring Supernatural Beliefs in Lincolnshire'
1:00 Lunch
2:30 Peter Robson (University of Sheffield), 'Thomas Hardy's Ghosts'
3:15 Paul Cowdell (University of Hertfordshire), '"I Have Believed in Spirits, From That Day unto This ...": Oral Narratives, Belief, Literary Adaptation, and Transmission'
4:00 Tea
4:45 David Clarke (Sheffield Hallam University), 'The Supernatural Content of the MoD UFO Files'
The day's proceedings end at 5.30.
Sunday 28 March
9:30 David Hunt (FLS), 'Perception of Time in Folklore: Transitions between Mortality and Immortality'
10:15 Gideon Thomas (FLS), '"Lady Margaret Was Standing in Her Own Room Door ...": The Roles and Meanings of Revenants in a Selection of Traditional Ballads'
11:00 Coffee
11:30 Irene Petratou (Panteion University of Athens/Kapodistrian University of Athens), 'Supernatural References in Advertising: The Case of "Supernatural Women"'
12:15 Lunch
2:00 Close

Academic and/or Scholarly? Or just serious?

As you’d expect of someone involved in postgraduate study, I read a lot of academic books. I can’t stand academic books that are only written for other academics. I’ve always enjoyed finding serious scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that is also readable and accessible.
Many works of folklore scholarship, particularly, make important theoretical points, but they do so in a comprehensible and engaging way. I’m not suggesting that folklore is immune to academic jargon and the publication of self-indulgently baffling pieces for their own sake – career-minded folklorists are under just as much pressure to publish too much and be pleased with their own cleverness as graduates of other disciplines – but that, at its best, folklore never loses sight of its engagement with real people. This also means making folkloric research available to readers outside the academy.
I’ve been thinking again about readerships and scholarship this week, having just read an overdue English translation of Claude Lecouteux’s Fantômes et revenants au moyen âge (‘Phantoms and Ghosts in the Middle Ages’). Lecouteux is one of the outstanding scholars of mediaeval afterlife and supernatural beliefs; this book was a major contribution to our understanding of the interaction between Latin ecclesiastical literature of the Middle Ages and Germanic traditions, and I’m pleased to see it being made available to an audience that cannot read the French original. Other important French works in the field, like Jean-Claude Schmitt’s Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in the Middle Ages (1), have already appeared in translation, and this work belongs alongside them.The translation, however, may not. It is not that it is particularly bad. For the most part it reads well enough. It seems, rather, that the translator and his publisher have a slightly different aim to the author. Lecouteux’s book was certainly about the influence of Germanic pagan traditions on Latin Christian material, but the English subtitle (in particular) is rather overstated: from the neutral description of the French title the translator (Jon E. Graham) has entitled the English book The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind (2). There is little justification for this in the French. (By way of comparison, Jean-Claude Schmitt’s book was originally called Les revenants: les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale – ‘Ghosts: The Living and the Dead in Mediaeval Society’).
Of course, the publisher specialises in esoteric literature, and so wants to make the work appeal to their readership. They go about this the wrong way, by confining it to that readership. They let down the author, and in doing so they patronise their own intended readership.
They fail the author not in the text, but in the scholarly apparatus. The footnotes, frankly, are a mess. Graham and his editor appear to be unfamiliar with most of Lecouteux’s source material, and not to care very much about it. One need not read mediaeval Latin, for example, to recognise the name of M. R. James, who edited some twelfth and thirteenth centuries English ghost stories. He turns up in the footnotes here as M. R. Graves.
Latin authors’ names and works have standard English renderings, which are different from their French equivalents: what we get here is an unhappy mixture of the two, with some novel mistakes thrown in to confuse things further. We find the standard English Cicero, Ovid, and Pliny, sure enough, but sitting alongside ‘Petronious’ [Petronius], Virgil’s ‘bucolica triennio’ [Eclogues], and the really odd ‘Titus-Livy’ [Livy]. This is clearly taken from the standard French form ‘Tite-Live’, but it is further compounded by a typo in the relevant footnote, making it ‘Titus-Levy’. As it happens, most of these mistakes are then not included in the index, making the book even harder to use.
I read no Danish, but it took me around 30 seconds online to correct the spelling mistake in the title of Svend Grundtvig’s collection of folksongs. Why didn’t an editor do the same? There is a cavalier attitude to translated quotations: some are given in standard English translations, others are translated from French translations, some old French passages aren’t translated at all. There is no acknowledgement that some works of French scholarship have already been translated: was it really not possible to find an English translation of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, for example?
If you read French, this translation in no way replaces the original text. If you don’t read French, the translation is useful, but you will still need some other help with the references.
So why is all this a problem?
It’s offensive towards the publisher’s target audience, as it assumes that none of this matters that much to them. This becomes a self-fulfilling argument: if the footnotes don’t enable you to find source material, you tend to stop looking for it. Yet here is a readable and serious work of history: if any work were capable of obtaining a wider readership it’s this one.
Whatever use one makes of such a book, it will depend for its effectiveness on its accuracy in these areas. I’m not here talking about academia, but about scholarly standards, which can be upheld by anybody. It’s about taking a subject, and an audience, seriously.

* * * * *

1: Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)
2: Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind, trans. Jon E. Graham (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2009)

Pepper's Ghost

Posts are likely to be somewhat irregular for the rest of the year, as the writing up of my ghost research is now underway. I won't be taking down the questionnaire opposite for a while yet, but if you'd still like to participate, now is the time.

I've spent most of the last month writing about the historical appearance of ghosts. Part of this has involved looking at popular representations of ghosts in woodcuts, on stage, in films and so on. For a splendid woodcut (used a great deal through the 17th century), check out the ballad 'a true and perfect Relation from the Faulcon at the Banke-side; of the strange and wonderful aperition of one Mr Powel a baker lately deceased' in the Bodleian collection.

Of course, I've been having a look at everybody's favourite 19th century theatrical effect, Pepper's Ghost. It was all done with mirrors, as seen below.

Pepper's Ghost was tricky to fit into existing stage mechanics, it seems, but thrived in dedicated fairground shows. It's still highly regarded - here's a design for a recent model.

I also enjoyed learning that it was so popular that it entered London slang. By the mid-1860s, London cabbies used the term 'Pepper's Ghost' to refer to passengers who ran off without paying their fare. I don't know how long this usage lasted. Is there an equivalent term in use today?

New Year's Eve in East London

In October 2001 I spent an enjoyable afternoon with Don Jackson from Manor Park (E12). Don was extremely entertaining company, with a repertoire of music hall songs and a seemingly endless supply of jokes and stories.

Don was then in his early 60s, and had recently retired. He was living in his parents' former house, and recalled the New Year's celebrations in the street. At midnight, all the families would come out beating dustbin lids with pokers and making as much noise as possible. If anyone had a bugle, he said, they'd play that too. Gradually, over the years, fewer and fewer families joined in, and the custom had died out in the early 1960s - 1962 or '63, he reckoned.

It seems to have been widely observed locally. The following year I met Ellen Cordery, from the Bonnie Downs area of East Ham (E6), a mile or so south of Manor Park. When I mentioned this custom she said that it still persists (just) in her area. Her daughter supported her in this.

A couple of years later I had the opportunity to hear it for myself. A family who stayed briefly in my street (E7, roughly halfway between Manor Park and Bonnie Downs) came out at midnight with their pots and pans. They were the only ones who did it. They moved away shortly afterwards, and I have never heard it since.

Whether you're beating pots and pans to welcome it in or not, have a good 2010.

More on traditional songs - and a Christmas treat

A couple of nights ago my regular folk club, Sharps, held its Christmas party. There was a certain preponderance of comic songs and party pieces, inevitably. Ruth Bibby did some clogging, which was a treat - there's a photo of her dancing here, but it's not quite the same as seeing her dance on a pub table.

There was a nice couple in from LA. I didn't catch their names, but the chap stood up and sang his party piece, 'Aunty Maggie's Remedy'. He'd learned it from his father, who'd sung it at family parties in the north of Ireland. The singer didn't know where it came from, and nor did I, but it was a fun little song that suited the evening admirably.

Of course, when I got home (and sobered up) I did some searching around for it. It turns out to be a song by George Formby Junior. As a special festive treat I'm posting here the clip of him singing it in his 1941 film 'Turned Out Nice Again':

So, of course, it isn't remotely a traditional song. However, it was clearly learned traditionally, and the singer understood it as belonging to party entertainment, ie it already has a specific place in his understanding of vernacular singing events. It's also worth noting that the melody had changed slightly in his learning and singing of it

While folk clubs may be the place for hearing what we've always (traditionally?) understood as 'traditional' songs, a whole body of other popular song is also entering a vernacular singing tradition. There's a body of material of a certain age that's becoming part of the repertoire of domestic singing events. I prefer George Formby Senior's songs, personally, but George Junior's material is clearly part of that developing tradition. (I was struck by this some years ago when Ricky Tomlinson sang 'My Grandad's Flannelette Nightshirt' in a party on 'The Royle Family').

Maybe it's time to acknowledge these vaudeville pieces the way the folk scene of the early 1970s did with music hall songs. (Thinking of which, I sang a disgraceful Sam Mayo song, by the way). After all, there are plenty of people out there now who still use such songs and their singers as cultural touchstones. Earlier this year I was in Sainsbury's, East Ham, where there's a popular cashier named Mary. An elderly man saw her across two checkouts and shouted 'Mary! Mary!' before breaking into 'I fell in love with Mary from the dairy ...'

And so, partly because I've thus now authenticated it as entering tradition, but mainly because it still makes me laugh, here's a Christmas gift of the Cheeky Chappie himself, Max Miller. Miller's the name, lady, there'll never be another ...