A rare bit of memorabilia for the 1986 National Garden Festival, popping up on eBay. The poster for the accompanying photography exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

I’m pleased to present Three Generations of The Family of Author Sydney Fowler Wright (1874-1965), by leading H.P. Lovecraft scholar Ken Faig Jr.

Ken had shown me the private PDF of his genealogical text before Christmas, and I suggested that a few historians and some fiction readers in the West Midlands would be interested in this local writer, if I could add a biographical introduction and more images. He agreed to the expansion and that it could be made public. This 26-page PDF is the result, now freely available for download.

Download: fowler_wright_genealogy_life.pdf

S. Fowler Wright was a key writer in the history of early science-fiction. To earn money for his family he was also a popular crime-mystery writer of the 1930s and 40s. He was raised in Smethwick and then lived in north Birmingham. As a seminal imaginative writer and as a Birmingham man interested in Mercian history he was thus very much a contemporary of Tolkien, and he even went to the same school in New Street. I suspect a connection with Arnold Bennett, and note that Wright apparently advised Churchill on certain matters during wartime (see PDF for details). S. Fowler Wright’s biography remains to be written. I won’t be the one to write it, so feel free.

New on Archive.org to borrow, the book Forgotten folk tales of the English counties (1970). Late tales gathered by a proper folklorist, with a few of relatively local interest from Cheshire/Shropshire and the west of the Derbyshire Peak. The most interesting of which is “The Asrai” (Cheshire/Shropshire, large mere pools) with supporting evidence from other sources.

The Potteries Post has updated, with more news you can use. The site replaces my former Facebook groups ‘Creative Stoke’, ‘Wild Stoke’ etc.

An excellent short post about “The Britishness of British Faeries”. Despite its click-baity title that article doesn’t sum up the characteristics of Britishness and then tally them with fairy-lore and fairy-traits. Though that might make for an interesting future post at the venerable British Fairies blog.

The article is actually about how the idea of ‘fairy’ can be brought before the more rational mind. In this case by situating the fairies as the ineffable genii loci of a place, especially in the British context of our ‘deep time’ landscape and places. No diminutive Tinkerbell or neo-pagan confabulation is then required to get the basic idea across to the musing young walker.

The concise article sums this up very well. But I’d like to add a few points, around the idea that its not all about an ‘immediate emotional response’ to a place.

At worst that sort of response can simply stop short, easily slipping into a purely nostalgic and preservationist view of a place. The preservationist ends up ‘pickling the fairies’ of a place, as if in a jar of pickling vinegar.

The ‘immediate emotional response’ assumption can also overlook the contributions made by the rational thinking mind, in terms of ‘landscape place-making’ (from path-makers to tree tenders to grand folly-makers to wall-builders), and also ‘landscape place-discovering’ (folklorists and antiquarians through to modern metal-detectorists, from child den-makers to footpath naturalists). It’s not just about cultivating a hazy awareness that some distant ancestors may have once ‘dwelt’ here long ago, but rather that an active chain of creators helped to subtly shape and ‘make’ this place while respecting all the past contributions. In which case today’s beholder of the place could become a part of that chain, one of the many local stewards and makers whose work of centuries eventually enables one to say…

“Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say” (Samwise Gamgee)

Although cultivating such an awareness would then risk opening the place up to unwanted ‘tinkering and improvements’, of the sort which may do more harm than good. Rather than ‘pickling the fairies’, in this case it would be ‘suffocating the fairies’ in a cloud of cringe-inducing naffness. I’m thinking here of hasty bits of ‘improvement’ of a place. Such as:

* a massive shiny new DIY shed which instantly destroys the lovely ambience on the corner of an allotments;

* some old rain-bedraggled ‘yarn-bombing’ or ‘inspirational’ message left to rot in a depressing manner;

* various quick-fix local council ‘improvements’, at best new ‘interpretation boards’ and/or a mundane municipal sculpture, at worst things like the replacement of a park’s proper wooden-slat benches with one tiny and freezing anti-dosser metal-mesh seat;

* the numerous examples of over-interpretation and political ‘interventions’ at National Trust sites, and increasingly also at nature reserves;

* ersatz ‘fairy-fication’ via sculptures — ranging from some quite acceptable bits of outdoors art sympathetically made by local people, through a host of bland wickerwork dragonflies made by fly-by-night ‘creative practitioners’, right down to the occasional naff garden-gnome gardening (sometimes not without an eccentric charm, admittedly).

Doubtless readers can think of some tinkering or ‘improvements’ done at their own favourite places, which has caused the genuine fairy-feeling to vanish while (curiously) the litter remains un-picked.

So, yes… perhaps after all it’s best to leave most people with their brief ‘immediate emotional response’, before ushering them back to their latest forgettable TV series. Rather than pushing the mood on further, into a response that risks being either about ‘pickling’ or ‘tinkering’.

Stoke-on-Trent in the National Biodiversity Network Atlas.

Two items. Ecology last surveyed in the early 1980s, under the work-experience schemes of the time (so I’m told). The Museum has records of molluscs. Nothing else to see here. Move along now…

My first try at a translation of “Pangur Ban”. A 9th century cat poem, written in Old Irish by an anonymous Irish monk and scholar.

PANGUR BAN

I and my white Pangur Ban,
Are a man and a cat each to his own,
He preens to pounce on a granary mouse,
I leap on some lost word on loan.

I want only quiet with my open book,
Thus I seek no fame from my pen,
Even my Pangur gives me no look,
As he guards a miscreant’s den.

He gladly flicks his tail and I my tales,
All alone in our silent chamber,
Finding endless sport which never pales,
hunting always the errant stranger.

In stoic Pangur’s path one will stray,
Then heroic struggles, valour and death!
For my part, I too will pounce and slay
Some difficult crux with rolling breath.

His sharp eyes can pierce all my walls,
Or roundly compass the floating mote,
Though my own age-dimmed sight appals,
In the light of distant ages I lift and float.

A power of joy is in his swiftest move,
His sharpest claw darting down and out!
I too am swift to joyous pen, when I prove
Some dearly-loved and devilish doubt.

Pangur and I are always like this,
Neither of us troubles the other,
Each of us starts to play at his own art,
Then finds his finish full of bliss.

He is made perfect, master of his trade,
Day and night he works and schemes,
I perform my own work, even in dreams,
Marking wisdom in what man has made.

My The Potteries Post has updated. ‘News you can use’ from the Potteries and nearby, with a focus on the creative industries, history and wildlife.

“New app to bring Legend of Alderley Edge to life”…

Launched on 21st December 2022, the Invisible Worlds app will enhance the visitor experience at Alderley Edge. Through their smartphones or tablets, visitors and users will be able to explore Alderley Edge with Augmented Reality wizards, knights, and white horses appearing throughout the landscape, as well as specially commissioned soundscapes providing an atmospheric background.

I think I’d just rather hear the slosh of wellies and the howling of warg-winds. But for kids and those who can’t go anywhere without a mobile phone, it may be just what the wizard ordered.

This looks fun. A seemingly-new Stafford Cat Extravagaza at the County Showground on the edge of Stafford, 18th & 19th March 2023.

If you prefer an at-home kittee experience, Stoke and Newcastle Cats Protection will be only too glad to introduce you to your very own permanent Tibbles or Tabitha.

Currently on eBay, and possibly of interest to some locally. The magnetic tape soundtrack for a local comedy movie called “Jael’s Nail” (1950). Evidently it was a locally-made 16mm comedy of some quality…

The Daily Mail Challenge Trophy, for the most outstanding film entered, went to Jael’s Nail, a black and white comedy by the Stoke-on-Trent Amateur Cine Society.

It also won The Wallace Heaton Cup for Best Photography, 1950. Of unknown ‘local colour’ and length. I’m not sure if the visual part of the movie survives, and can’t immediately find details for it online.

Update: Movie Maker reel listing from 1977: “A comedy about a man who claims to have the original nail with which Jael killed Sisera as told in the Old Testament”. So possibly Biblical and not of much local Stoke interest, re: local scenes and settings. Although I guess it might just have a contemporary 1950 Stoke setting? I’m imagining a sort of strange Stokie hybrid of Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, and Waiting for Godot, with a dash of The Life of Brian.

It’s good to hear that Uttoxeter’s three-day Acoustic Festival of Britain will return in early June 2023 after a long hiatus, and it still seems to be set for Uttoxeter Racecourse in the Staffordshire Moorlands. Booking now. Probably also a good time to pitch them your music workshops, storytelling sessions, and the like.