Founded 8th May 1999

NEWSLETTER No. 26

3rd January 2008

 

Subscription Renewals

Most of you will find the usual subscription renewal form with this Newsletter. Please return as soon as possible, as I hate sending out reminders. If there is no renewal form enclosed it means you are paid up for at least 2008. I have held the sub at £5.00 yet again - the ninth year running. Early warning, though - it may have to go up in 2009, purely because of ever increasing postal charges. However, thanks to some members also giving small ‘donations’, we may celebrate a tenth consecutive “no change”!

 

Burford Church

In early November I received through the post the Friends of Burford Church Newsletter. The front page was entirely taken up with the disaster that hit them on 20/21 July. The haunting photographs gave credit to accompanying text: “a scene of devastation. All the houses around Burford Bridge were under water as was the church....”. During the morning of Saturday 21st, a team of people rescued all the furniture that they could: “in under an hour, St. Thomas’ chapel was full of chairs and kneelers and everything else was propped up on bricks. The water kept rising for at least a couple of hours...”

Although recovery was “remarkably swift” - with a supportive insurance company and loss-adjustor, huge drying fans and pumps - clearly there would be costs to be borne in replacing equipment and furnishings.

In another article, by the Treasurer, attention was drawn to the fact that subsequent sales were down, due to the church being out of action for several weeks. A large amount of postcards, guides and leaflets were also lost.

I wrote back to the Hon. Secretary of the Friends, Fenella Pearson, enclosing a cheque for £100 from our Society. We are simply following, in our own small way, the tradition of JMF himself, who gave many valuable objects to the church and paid for many other changes. His ashes are, of course, buried in the churchyard - with his brother and, later, his wife Evelyn. I always try to visit the church when I am passing through, but have particular fond memories of our Society gathering, held on 20 September 2003, when Peter Harris and others gave us such a warm welcome. This was made possible through the kindness of two of our members, Raymond and Joan Moody - I only hope that Cobb House did not suffer too much in the Floods.

The Nebuly Coat on the Home Service

I remember, years ago, walking across Marlborough Common, with a Dansette radio glued to my ear, listening to an adaptation of The Nebuly Coat. Until recently I had not been able to find any proof that it did actually occur! Now I know. I have a photocopy of the relevant page of the RadioTimes, dated 1965, which shows it was a serial (I think in three parts). I quote in full the accompanying piece by Brian Miller.

“Today’s new serial, The Nebuly Coat, set on the south coast of England in the nine- teenth century, is not about a piece of wearing apparel. The ‘coat’ in question is a coat-of-arms, and ‘nebuly’ (from the Latin nebulus- cloud) describes the predom -inant heraldic device upon it. There is a cloud, too, over the ancient and noble Blandamer family that bears the coat - a mystery surrounding these earls of the manor of Cullerne - which is at the core of J. Meade Falkner’s novel.

But there are other puzzles - for instance the mystery of the brilliant but embittered Sharnall, the organist at Cullerne Minster, a man who knew too much about the Blandamers for his own safety. Then there is the enigma of the great fifteenth-century Minster itself, a secret only its groaning arches could reveal.

To Falkner, a Victorian romantic (known to listeners and viewers for the serialised version of his Moonfleet on radio - entitled Smugglers’ Bay on BBC-1), the eerie and the sinister were everyday matters. That is why the atmosphere of foreboding crept so easily into anything he wrote, not least in The Nebuly Coat. In Thea Holme’s dramatised adaptation, which begins today in Story Time, I hope we can convey much of this vivid atmosphere and help acquaint a wider public with an (undeservedly) lesser-known work.”

Well for one university student the atmosphere was very well conveyed, as I have never forgotten that Marlburian stroll - little realising at the time that JMF himself may well have walked (or bicycled) across the same turf, on one of his many forays from the nearly College.

The time is ripe for either a repeat (if the recording or even just the script is still extant) or a new version for the radio - a challenge to our literary members.

 

Wesley Stace ( a great supporter of ours) has had another novel published - by George (Jonathan Cape, £17.99) and one of our founder members, Chris Hawtree reviewed it in The Daily Telegraph books section on 3 November. Chris thought it was “brimming with imagination..[with]..as many scenes and characters as some writers would bring to a couple of novels”. JMF inspires taste!

 

A Variety of Tunnels

Moonfleet appeared in 1898, as did Harry Patch; the novel is still with us - and so is that great enthusiast for it, Harry Patch. A last veteran of Great War trenches, he has appeared on several television programmes to speak of experiences long kept to himself during life as a West Country plumber. After such subterranean rigours, he could finally give much time to exploring the hidden Fleet territory which Falkner had made so vivid for him soon after Moonfleet’s publication.

This surfaces in his recent The Last Fighting Tommy written with Richard Van Emden (Bloomsbury, £16.99). Brought up in the quarry territory of Combe Down, near Bath (itself well known to Falkner), Patch was son of a master stonemason. Existence was not far removed from that of Falkner’s mid-nineteenth century Wiltshire and Dorset childhood. “In winter, chesty coughs and colds were treated with honey and vinegar, which tasted horrible, as well as goose grease which was smeared on your chest.”

One informal teacher was the Reverend Alfred Richardson, a noted antiquarian, who inspired relish of history and archaeology. The quarry tunnels became “hands-on history”, Moonfleet made real. One day, a nearby house’s scullery wall moved an inch, precipitated by an old quarry. His father “found out that the only known entrance to the quarry was in the postman’s garden, just the other side of the well we all used for water. He got permission to open it up and he took me down. I was ten years old and it was my first experience of being underground. First we climbed down a short ladder and then, through the second bed of stone, we found a stairway down to the third bed, about fifty feet underground, where the spring ran. I was fascinated. I could see the tool markings in the wall, but much more than that, for there were the workmen’s tools, a great saw, teeth an inch long, two stones with a cut between, used to sharpen the saw, and the files stuck in a crevice. It appeared that the workmen had left a shift, never to return”. Masterly, worthy of Falkner, is Patch’s evocation of the quarries’ decline through the Edwardian years, whose end is so often symbolised by the Titanic: the headmaster called them in for the 23rd Psalm. “Yet it didn’t mean much to us; it was a ship that had sunk but when you grow up in the countryside and perhaps a few of your friends haven’t even seen a ship, the significance is rather lost on you.” An apprentice plumber as those mythic golden summers mutated into war, Patch saw his brother invalided out with damaged legs when he himself was called up in 1916 during the coldest winter ever known to him; come the summer of 1917, over the top at Passchendaele, “others were just blown to pieces; it wasn’t a case of seeing them with a nice bullet hole in their tunic, far from it, and there I was, only nineteen years old. I felt sick”.

Did Patch but know it, Falkner, so often sleeping the night at the Elswick works, was cognisant of this, troubled by all that the company’s products had wrought. From ground level, and below it, Patch’s incisive account of trench life has many haunting encounters, notably one with a young German fifteen yards away. Stray cats moved in, perhaps attracted by choice rats, and one soldier smuggled home a terrier who, born there, was naturally hardened, teeth readily bared in blighty after a time in which “if they found a biscuit to eat - which was probably ripped from a dead man’s tunic pocket - they would start to fight over who should have a bite. And I thought, ‘Well, what are we doing that’s really any different? Two civilised nations, British and German, fighting for our lives, just the same.’”

Veterans, on hearing a car backfire, would not jump but duck. Patch had to put it out of mind while creating a firm in the West Country as the world again slid towards war.

After this, his brother George moved to Chickerell, close to Fleet, where they revisited childhood fascination with secret passages during a decade’s search for the one used in Moonfleet. Come the mid-Fifties, George summoned Harry for another weekend: there was a difference in the grass behind a tombstone. With a spade they took the turf off. Underneath were two big stones. “We lifted them, and there was the passage. George wanted to go down, but I insisted on testing the air first, and we put a candle down. It was all right, and we went in. The tunnel was two feet four inches wide and less than four feet high. It was the right one but it was not a smugglers’ tunnel. Now George, before he died, met a fellow from Charleston, well over ninety, and as a boy he had seen the crypt opened in the 1870s, and he told us what it was like. There were six coffins inside. The kegs bumping about under the chancel floor had smashed all the coffins to pieces. The parson gathered up the bones and the brass plates and put them in a space in the vault and it was sealed again. We’d noticed that the tunnel we found led towards the vault but that it ended in solid masonry. The book tells you there’s an entrance; well, there isn’t.”

As for the Bath tunnels, the city Council sought Harry’s memories, in his nineties, lest building work brings future residents as much a shock as the Moonfleet congregation.

Christopher Hawtree

 

Another JMF Society author!

James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s UK, and member of this Society since September 2002, has just published Great Collectors of out Time: Art Collecting since 1945 (Scala, £45). The reviewer in The Sunday Telegraph says “a true collection can itself be almost a work of art, and the process of putting it together may require something close to heroism”. JMF’s wonderful library of “Fine Illuminated & other Manuscripts, Rare Early Service Books, Incunables and other Valuable Printed Books” surely fell into this category. Sotheby’s appears to have agreed, as they provided three days for their sale of 487 lots in mid December 1932. Good luck with your sales, James!

 

Journal 9 could still do with a couple more articles. It would be heartening to receive some from members.

Many thanks to Chris Hawtree for yet another fascinating article for a Newsletter.

 

Best wishes

Kenneth Hillier

Greenmantle, Main Street, Kings Newton, Melbourne

Derbyshire. DE73 8BX