Founded 8th May 1999

NEWSLETTER No. 27

8th May 2008

 

150th Anniversary

of

John Meade Falkner’s birth

The ancient parish of Manningford Bruce lies two miles south-west of Pewsey in Wiltshire. The name Manningford partly derives from the ford on the Avon. Known as Manningford Petri by the mid 13th century, in 1279 it gained its present suffix from its new lords, the Breuse family. The hamlet had 37 poll-tax payers in 1377; in 1801 the parish’s population was 213 and that number increased steadily until 1851 when 275 inhabitants are recorded. In the 18th century the manor house, church rectory and some cottages were grouped round a semi-circular lane running northwards from the Pewsey to Devizes road. The Hold, obscured by a high brick wall, was formerly attached to a small estate within the manor. It was converted from cottages in the 19th century.

The church, St. Peter’s, was built in the late 11th or early 12th century; but the first mention of it is not until 1291. Pevsner regarded it as “a very completely preserved Norman church”, but it was restored by J.L. Pearson in 1882. Knowing JMF’s opinion of Victorian church “restoration”, one wonders what he thought of Pearson’s work. More congenial to Falkner would be the story behind the tablet to Mary Nicholas (d.1686). The splendid coat of arms includes the three lions of England, granted by a grateful Charles II. Mary, with her sister Jane Lane, helped to save the king when he fled after the Battle of Worcester.

A thatched, one-storey school built c.1841 catered for 25-35 children in 1859. There was no non-conformist chapel, but there were some 44 dissenters who belonged to a ‘Methodist conventicle’ or were ‘Baptists or Fatalists, and Methodists with Upavon Crookites’. JMF would not have approved!

 

In 1818 Robert Falkner married Lucy Alexander and thus acquired a landed interest in The Hold, to which they moved. Unfortunately, the family records detail a catalogue of ill-health: three sons died young and, in 1827, Lucy succumbed. Robert himself died in 1833, still in his forties. His surviving son, Thomas, went up to Oxford in 1837 - spending five years there before leaving with a Third in Greats. As Kenneth Warren remarks, “He returned to Wiltshire a gentle, scholarly man, whose great pleasures were his knowledge of the classical languages and a love for the beauties of a countryside not yet transformed by mechanisation of farming”.

 

The Falkner Papers, lodged at the Dorset Record Office, add to this idyllic image: “[he] came home to Manningford in June, when the avens and the grasses were flowering in the meadows, and the comfeyedged the water-courses, when the robinhood and the bluebells were ablaze in the copses and along the lanes, when Tom sought the white bluebell, and the butterfly orchids in Doles wood. Through July he lay lazily in the hayfields or in the garden reading, always reading; loving all the sights and sounds, the sun and the sweet air.”

 

Marriage to Elizabeth Grace Mead on 22 April, 1852 transformed this life: his preferred quiet and congenial environment was to be injected with his new wife’s more enthusiastic and ambitious approach. Moreover, the birth of their first child, Robert, in 1854 meant that the £500 (unearned) sum they had managed on each year was not enough. Thomas was pressured into taking Holy Orders, his ordination taking place in December 1855.

 

Thomas was given the curacy of North Newton, a mile to the west of Manningford Bruce, although the family continued to live at The Hold. Their second child, Mary Grace, was born in 1856; but, on 26 February 1858 the three years and ten months-old Robert died of croup ‘from exhaustion, from sheer inability to live any longer’. In the midst of death there can be life, and in the spring of the same year - on 8th May - a second son was born. The baby was christened with a long established Falkner name of John and his mother’s maiden name Mead. John Mead (he added the extra “e” much later) was to leave Manningford aged only one for Dorchester, where his father had accepted a curacy that was to provide him with much greater remuneration.

We associate John Meade Falkner with three counties in particular: Dorset, where he grew up and to which he regularly returned throughout his life; Durham, where he made his adult home and where he died; and Oxfordshire, where he fell in love with his university city and with Burford, where he is buried. But it is really Wiltshire that can claim him as its own - thanks to that propitious day in May 1858.

JMF aged 10 - in 1868- 140 years ago.

 

 Moonfleet also celebrates

This year celebrates not only JMF’s birth but also the 110th anniversary of his most famous work. Published in late November 1898, by Edward Arnold at 6/-, it was into its second edition by the beginning of January 1899. The back of the latter has 32 pages of advertisements which has a two line extract from the review by The Spectator:

 

‘In “Moonfleet” Mr. Faulkner [sic] has given us what in the present writer’s opinion is the best tale of fantastic adventure since Stevenson’s pen was prematurely set aside.’

This was but part of a much longer panegyric in the third of December issue: ‘We have had to wait some years for a successor to The Lost Stradivarius — that excellent ghost-story, finely imagined and told with rare distinction of style — but Moonfleet is such an admirable achievement in a somewhat different line that Mr. Falkner may surely be forgiven for his leisurely method of production. It argues no small sense of artistic responsibility in an author who leads off with a conspicuous success to avoid the example of those popular authors who, on establishing a market for their wares, cease to create, and take to manufacture. Moonfleet, though it is written with the utmost simplicity of style, is not the sort of book that can be “knocked off” in this perfunctory fashion, This fascinating ease of narrative is not attained without the expenditure of a great deal of “elbow-grease, to use Stevenson’s phrase. Evidences of curious and recondite learning, so artistically employed as never to seem pedantic, may be found in every chapter.... We will not discount the pleasure that lies in store for the reader by disclosing the plot.....’

So, if you’ve forgotten - why not read it again?!

 

Les Contrebandiers de Moonfleet!

In the Memorandum of Agreement, made on the 13th of October 1898, between J. Meade Falkner Esq. Elswick Works, Newcastle-on-Tyne and the firm of Edward Arnold of 37, Bedford Street, Strand, it was agreed that ‘any sums received for rights of translation...... on the Continent of Europe shall be equally divided between Author and Publisher...”

However, I doubt whether the author would have given permission for the publication of this paperback version. On the title page, whilst it states the book is “par” J. Meade Falkner, it also reads “Adapté de L’Anglais par Pierre Courtier”. Adapted? - more like transformed! The Stewart Granger character Jeremy Fox is much in evidence, with his ‘friend’ Mrs. Milton - “Moonfleet représente pour le cinéma un sujet en or.. c’est dans le même esprit que Pierre Courtier a adapté le roman”

 Six Radio Plays

At least Edward Arnold gave their permission, in 1959, for a radio play adaptation from “a vivid and complete incident” selected from six “well-known” books, which included Moonfleet.

The BBC had already broadcast the plays, which were now collected together [under the title May We Recommend: Six Radio Plays: Book Two] “in order to introduce you to some of the best-known stories for young people”. The scene deals with the forced sale of the inn ‘Why Not?’ and the characters include John Trenchard, Ratsey, Elzevir Block, Rev. Glennie and Maskew. A postscript states: “This book deserves to be much better known. It has many fine qualities... A story that will keep you reading, characters you can believe in, a colourful background and a convincing eighteenth-century atmosphere. Read it. And I’m sure you’ll agree that Moonfleet is something quite outstanding.” Hear! hear!

 

BBC Radio 4 Programme

 

Whilst on the BBC, I hope most of you heard the programme on Radio 4 - A Good Read, broadcast on Tuesday, 20 November. Presented by Sue McGregor, it consisted of a discussion between Sue and her two guests Elinor Goodman and Professor Eamon Duffy [Professor of the History of Christianity at Magdalene College, Cambridge]. Professor Duffy chose The Nebuly Coat as his “good read”, admiring the “evocation of an atmosphere of suffocating respectability in a small country town”. The novel was very good at conveying a “corsetted respectability” but with a ghostly danger ever present - above all the minster itself waiting to produce catastrophe. One speaker suggested it was “everyone’s favourite underestimated novel”. Although Elinor Goodman was irritated by “the twirly bits” (the book reminded her of a Millais painting) and she wanted to say “get on with it”, she admitted there were “lovely observations” e.g. Sharnall “passed into the great oblivion of the middle class dead”. Sue McGregor thought it “a book you have to read slowly”.

 

It was argued that it was a Victorian thriller where there wasn’t quite a hero but a sinister central figure. Was the minster a metaphor for the Blandamer family? Why does Anastasia read and re-read Northanger Abbey? Is the whole a pastiche? Had William Golding read the novel?

All in all the discussion was well worth tuning in to - if only to nod or shake one’s head at the radio.

 

Journal 9

 

This July’s Journal is being put together. So far articles include: The Cobra Trail by George Robson and Kenneth Hillier; Elswick “an augean stable” - a pictorial essay on that great Tyneside firm, with an accompanying poem by JMF himself. Oxfordshire, Berks but not Bucks: John Meade Falkner’s correspondence with his publisher – by Michael Daniell, and another article on the early Falkners by Christopher Hawtree.

 

I am always looking for articles for future Journals or shorter pieces for Newsletters.

 

Best wishes

Kenneth Hillier

Greenmantle, Main Street, Kings Newton, Melbourne

Derbyshire. DE73 8BX