Interesting new blog at enlightenmentderbyshire.wordpress.com on the place of the Derbyshire Peak and Derby in the Enlightenment. A Heritage Lottery Project to tell the story of Derbyshire’s role in the Age of Scientific Discovery (1712 – 1916).
Potteries Folk Art exhibition
It would be great to have a folk art exhibition at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Perhaps in two parts. The first could include items like the Buxton Mermaid; the Staffordshire Clogg Almanacs; the Staffordshire corn dollies recently exhibited in 2010 in St. Ives and the traditional corn bowknots of Staffordshire; examples of the pottery bird whistles that were placed in chimneys to prevent spirits from entering the house that way; the oldest traditional canal art relics; unusual weather vanes; small pre-Victorian kinetic wood or papier-mache toys; textiles and embroidery; wood carving if some has survived from before the 19th century (also the Staffordshire Clogg Almanacs); archaic designs on ceramic slipware from the 1700s and 1600s, with curious ceramics such as bear jugs and the weird archaic owl in the FitzWilliam. More could probably be found if one put out a call to the UK’s museums. But if there’s not enough material available, then the older items could be the lead-in for an exhibition of modern and contemporary (genuinely naive) folk art from Staffordshire.
Staffordshire owl at the FitzWilliam, circa 1730-1750.
Primitive bear jug.
Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur
It’s not often we get a new work by the Midlands author J.R.R. Tolkien. But one is to be published in hardcover and Kindle ebook today, presumably with an audio-book to follow soon after. Written in the early 1930s, The Fall of Arthur
Tolkien’s Arthur is a Romano-British military leader fighting in “Saxon lands” in order to stem an invasion of the island at its root, he eventually finds himself at the edge of a great eastern Mirkwood when he and Gawain are called back to Britain to deal with the treachery of Mordred. Tolkien appears to have assumed a King Arthur drawn along the Romano-British historical lines proposed by R.G. Collingwood (the excellent Director’s Cut of the recent movie King Arthur did much the same). This character developed over time into a legendary one, but much later descends to touch history again — when Arthur was re-shaped by the bards to parallel Alfred and his defence of Mercia against the Vikings. What will be interesting will be the extent to which Tolkien blends this plain historical approach with a mythic one, and the extent to which he sets the pursuit of Mordred in the nexus of the Welsh Marches and the English Midlands. One has to hope that, from a Midlands man, we might have a Midlands epic.
Anyway the result was a 1000-line epic poem, much admired by his colleagues, but which was left unfinished. Here’s a taste of his dark Mordred…
His bed was barren / there black phantoms
of desire unsated / and savage fury
in his brain had brooded / till bleak morning
And his scheming Guinevere…
lady ruthless
fair as fay-woman and fell-minded
in the world walking for the woe of men.
Tolkien left the work unfinished and instead turned to the realms of Middle-Earth where his world-building talent had a free rein, namely The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings.
Once The Fall of Arthur is published, and despite our culture’s general modern disdain for poetry, doubtless there will be numerous unofficial fan attempts to finish the work. The new publication is also perfectly timed to feed into interest in the vivid poetry contemporaneous with the iconography of the Staffordshire Hoard.
The Old Pottery Kiln, Bradwell Wood
Super. “The Old Pottery Kiln, Bradwell Wood”, by Unknown Artist. If this was an on-the-spot painting of the short-lived Elers’ pottery then it would be from circa 1690s.
Wedgwood Institute to be saved
Super news! One of the main settings for my novel The Spyders of Burslem, The Wedgwood Institute in Burslem, is to be brought back to life….
“Burslem’s historic Wedgwood Institute has been identified by the Prince [Prince Charles] for his latest Potteries regeneration project.”
It was last used as the Burslem public library, but that was closed by the City Council (Labour) and the building mothballed. A few years ago I was told that the roof needs a lot of attention, but if anyone can pull off a restoration it’s the Prince’s Trust.
A creative industries use would fit nicely with the School of Art etc nearby. It would be nice to see it as home to a mix of craft ceramics makers and digital 3D modelling and 3D printing startups, based around project work where craft makers and digital technologists worked together on projects — something which might also chime with the City Deal’s aims of working with innovative new materials in Ceramic Valley.
Garden as eschatology
Interesting article on the possible beliefs implicit in the garden at Biddulph Grange [dead link removed, not re-findable], from Paul Baker of the Garden History Society…
The concept of a link between the Millenarian belief of the imminent second coming [of Christ] and the layout of the garden at Biddulph has been the subject of some literary discussion. […] Brent Elliott in his book Victorian Gardens writes ‘… the garden at Biddulph Grange, by evoking vanished and alien civilizations, served as an affirmation that the millennium was coming.’
However, Peter Hayden’s Biddulph Grange, Staffordshire: A Victorian Garden Rediscovered (1989) is more cautious…
“While religion was an important factor throughout Bateman’s life, it is difficult to gauge to what extent the garden was created as an expression of faith”
Old Staffordshire saying: Fetch a duck off water
I heard an interesting old phrase used in natural speech today, by an elderly man remembering a girl he once knew: she’d “fetch a duck off water”. The Internet has hardly heard of it and its possible variants, and Google Books hasn’t heard of it. My source used it in the context of remembering a Hartshill (Stoke-on-Trent) childhood in the 1940s, and used it naturally to refer to someone so ugly that they’d “fetch a duck off water”. Or possibly I was mis-hearing, and he said she was ugly but had eyes that would “fetch a duck off water”.
Online I found a memory by Ian Clayton who remembers of his grandmother that…
“She met and fell in love with my Granddad [a man originally a miner from Staffordshire, the “rural Midlands” north of Wolverhampton] on a bus near Tadcaster after he had said to her “You have got eyes that could fetch the ducks off the water.”
I then did some further online research and found…
Manchester:
Nick Allen (raised in Manchester) remembers of his grandmother…
“As me granny would say “he could charm a duck out of water and money from a miser”
I’ve only found one use in old literature: The Sorcery Shop, an impossible romance (1906), a utopian political romance novel in the English tradition of William Morris…
“She has an eye that would charm a duck off the water”
The author was Robert Blatchford, who after 1890 was based in Manchester.
East Midlands:
An online source from someone living in Nottingham uses it to mean that: someone’s eyes were so attractive that they’d “fetch a duck off water”…
“Eyes to fetch a duck off water, and she does”
And there’s an oral history account in the BBC wartime memories archive in which “fetch a duck off water” is used by someone from Leicester…
“I noticed what beautiful eyes she had, large and dark brown, they spoke volumes. I always said ‘They would fetch a duck off water’.”
Yorkshire and general:
There’s also a recent review of a folk LP by Bob Pegg originally of Leeds and later for a long time in Yorkshire, that uses…
“singing, guaranteed to charm the ducks off the water”
P.R. Wilson’s Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors (1993) does record something like it, but only in Yorkshire…
“It would charm the ducks off the water” (West Yorkshire)
An earlier book Modern proverbs and proverbial sayings (1989) records the same phrase in a newspaper from 1956, and this may be where the 1993 Thesaurus had it from. That exact phrase has since been used in three pulp historical romance novels, possibly all by the same person writing under pseudonyms, and again I’d suspect the author(s) had it from one of these book collections.
There’s no use of “charm the ducks off water” online either, other than one lone British review of a Turkish holiday, said by a young woman of the charm of the young Turkish waiters in the hotel.
There’s also a mention of a similar phrase in the pulp Harlequin romance No Way Out (1980) by Jane Donnelly…
“You know what they say about charming a duck off water”
It’s also used in a Christian book, Spiritual Arts (2009) by Jill Briscoe. It doesn’t say where the author grew up in, but there’s enough to know it was England during the Second World War. She uses it as…
“smiles that would charm a duck off water”
So it seems to have been used from Staffordshire above Wolverhampton, up through North Staffordshire to Manchester, and across into the East Midlands in Nottingham and Leicester. Possibly also in Yorkshire, although that may rest on a single newspaper usage that was recorded in two collections of sayings.
Anyway, it seems to have almost died out now, so I’m just “rescuing” it for the Web 🙂 Maybe a few people using it again will start a revival.
Bear jug
A wonderfully archaic Staffordshire -style bear-jug, complete with cover. Recently sold at auction and dated to the mid 18th century in either Staffordshire or Derbyshire. 16 inches high.
Slip back to the 1700s
Some of the wonderfully archaic-looking Staffordshire slipware of the 1700s and 1600s, which recently sold at auction at Christie’s in London. Is that a witch on the first plate? Or, perhaps more likely, a man with a telescope under a pair of surveyor’s dividers. Not sure why he’d be wearing a skirt, though. Unless it’s meant to be a Masonic apron?
Trubshaw Cross
An interesting new article from historian Fred Hughes, on Trubshaw Cross, between Dalehall and Longport [Longbridge] in Stoke-on-Trent…
“Trubshaw Cross is one of Stoke on Trent’s major gateways. It’s where Percy Adams gave us a glimpse of an ancient world where the packhorse was once king of the road.”
Now the area’s modern bits are mostly demolished.
But in 1624 the Cross was described as the terminus of the Moorlands and Peak packhorse routes headed across the Fowlea for the London Road…
“a great passage out of the north parts unto diverse market towns”.
The turn-piking of roads in 1763 likely put paid to the cost-effectiveness of the onward route to Newcastle-under-Lyme, and then canal haulage effectively came to Burslem around 1805 with a new wharf just a stone’s throw from the Cross.
Trubshaw Cross is a place which is featured in the first chapter of my novel The Spyders of Burslem. Fred interestingly notes an antiquarian dating of the cross base…
“[Percy] Adams identified the stone base as being of Saxon origin” […] “the historian John Ward Ward notes in 1843 that only the stone base remained”.
Fred seems to imply there’s a threat that the cross’s traffic island might be removed. In which case, if it is Anglo-Saxon (as seems likely from the ancient age of the site and the old documentation), then it might be interesting to first do a proper deep archaeological dig on the site of the whole island. Perhaps nearby Steelite might sponsor that?
Sir Oliver Lodge exhibition
Just spotted news of a must-see Staffs Uni Science Centre exhibition. The “Spirit of Radio Exhibition” is on the life and work of the Stoke inventor Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940). Lodge was the pioneering inventor on whom I loosely based Miss Merryweather Craft, in my novel The Spyders of Burslem. The exhibition runs from 19th March – 22th April 2013.
Interestingly, there is a further parallel between Lodge and my novel’s Miss Craft, although I’m not sure how much the exhibition will feature of that side of Lodge…
“For many years, Lodge had been investigating psychic phenomena…”
It’s interesting that the traditional historical mingling of science and superstition could persist right into the 20th century. There’s a fascinating book-length history of such unexpected co-minglings, Techgnosis.
Robert Bateman (1842–1922)
It’s good to hear that the local historian Nigel Daly is to publish a book on the life and work of the North Staffordshire artist Robert Bateman, one the the “last romantics” in the school of Burne-Jones, and also one of the Bateman family sired by botanist and garden designer James Bateman (Biddulph Grange). Nigel wants to locate images of Robert Bateman’s large major oil painting “Saul and the Witch of Endor”, given into the trust of the Potteries Museum — but since mislaid. It was last heard of in Longton Town Hall in the early 1950s. If you know anything of it, please contact Nigel at: nigel@nigeldaly.co.uk
Above: Robert Bateman, “Three Women Plucking Mandrakes”. The mandrake root was reputed to produce a deadly scream when plucked from the earth, and the root has accumulated many strange superstitions over the centuries. Picture: Wellcome Trust collection.