On YouTube, ITV’s lavish TV adaptation of the Clayhanger novels by Arnold Bennett, set in Victorian Stoke-on-Trent. It formed a 23 hour costume drama broadcast in 1976, on the UK’s only commercial TV channel at that time. A small handful of Bennett’s classic Potteries novels were filmed, to make an epic family saga.

The quality is VHS, and it’s also available on torrents at Archive.org if you want to do tweaks or audio fixes. But note that the series is on DVD on eBay where — if you shop around — you can currently have the seven-disk set for about £15 including postage.

It was the coherent work of a single scriptwriter, unlike the ‘all must have prizes’ tag-teams of today. Despite some slow and thoughtful moments, it was a success and the series “dug deeply and sensitively into the grimly heroic world of Arnold Bennett’s novels” — Country Life magazine, 1977.

Some of it was filmed in the Potteries, and the rest in ‘the Potteries recreated’ on a large filming lot behind Elstree Studios. They did a good job, and the writer Douglas Livingstone recalled…

Michael Bailey, the designer, and his team did such a convincing job that visitors from the Potteries who’ve seen it have been known to become damp-eyed with nostalgia.

But despite the vast effort, and a cast of over 100, the series was effectively lost for decades. As Maire Messenger Davies, a University of Ulster film and TV historian, commented in an MIT paper…

“the question is raised as to why this prestigious costly production has so completely disappeared from view [and an] expensive, and star-studded adult serial has been lost to public access. [Its loss is especially felt because] It was the last of its kind – there were no more 26 episode series after this … It had an extremely starry cast … [playing to] a major literary work by a regional novelist [and was] filmed, and provided employment, within the Midlands region itself.”

Thus it was an important series on a number of levels, not least as a major expression of ITV’s cultural remit to serve its home region of the West Midlands. Yet it wasn’t just for a Midlands audience. Despite its regional flavour, in those days ITV (aka ATV) could easily have half the nation watching such a major series. And all the way through too, with none of the sort of ‘rapid tail-off’ that you see today, where audiences shrink drastically after episode four of a long series such as the current Doctor Who.

Whatever the reason for its burial it was gone for 35 years, and at a time when other old series were pouring into the shops on VHS and DVD. But it was eventually found and prised out of the archives of the rights holders. After much searching the entire series was found by the Arnold Bennett Society and TV producer Tim Brearley, languishing and dusty…

“in a warehouse in France”

It was only one warehouse fire away from being lost for good.

New on eBay, an 1859 cutting from Leek, in which the town council discuss their liability for the upkeep of footpaths. It reveals to posterity that a footpath to Lady Dale Well was still being frequently used by the townspeople.

This must be what is now called the Lady O’th’dale Well, located about a mile south of the town centre. According to the official listing record for it, the wellhead stone was erected 1855. The record for it also notes “may be associated with an early shrine“.

“Leek: Leek and Lowe” in British History Online has…

The spring south of the town to the east of the Cheddleton road was evidently named in honour of Our Lady in the Middle Ages. The area was known as Lady Wall Dale in the late 16th century, and the spring is now called as Lady o’ th’ Dale well. A 19th-century stone structure survives there.

That there was much use of it seems obvious from the clipping about the well-worn footpath. That there was some sort of veneration is clear from the Catholic naming, which obviously references Mary, and the 16th century dating of this in a document shows the association was made by 1587.

The site was visited in 2014 by pixyledpublications who posted a report on holyandhealingwells.com, adding some useful context …

there was a farm belonging to Dieulacres Abbey along the Cheddleton Road, but the presence of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic church above the well and 19th century fabric suggests it was developed by the local Catholic community. Indeed, a May Day procession was taken by children from the church every May Day, although when it ceased is unclear. … The approach to the well has been improved with a wooden walkway and it appears to be well preserved.

In 2019 planners rejected a planning application for eight new homes there…

“it is considered that the application would result in significant and demonstrable harm to protected species, habitats and the Lady Dale Local Wildlife Site”.

An amusing little poem and aide memoire of key dangers, for young children to learn…

Dear doggies may bite – and give you a fright;
Of deep water beware – there’s not enough air;
A hot plate will frizzle – to steal your sizzle;
From trees very tall – you may tumble and fall;
Big cars can jump – and give you a bump;
Take care of your eyes – don’t put them in pies;
Wash hands with soap – or else you’re a dope.

New on eBay, The Photographs Of William Blake, a 2005 Stoke-on-Trent photobook I didn’t know about and that even Google Books isn’t aware exists. Sadly, what with the virus and all, I don’t have the funds to justify purchasing it. But some reader may want it. The seller provides nice scans…

48 pages, at A4 size. Presumably there was also a People and Places of the Potteries series, at the time, of which this was the first.

Well, who’d ‘a thunk it? The virus lockdown has turned a senior reporter at our local The Sentinel newspaper into a Tolkien and Lovecraft fan, and spurred by this reading he’s turned his attention to our local folklore. There’s hope for local journalism yet, it seems.

I wonder if he knows about Tolkien’s Stoke / Gawain-in-the-Moorlands local connections, that Stoke is also home to a leading scholar of Lovecraft’s life, and that there’s a handy new free annotated bibliography of all our local folklore?

“Spring winds”, with thanks to Nevrax for the underlying loose sketch.

The old-school fantasy Midlands role-playing game Midderlands runs on Swords & Wizardry Complete… but is now Kickstarting for a Midderlands D&D 5e edition. I’m no expert on tabetop RPGs but it looks like this will convert the existing game and its material to run with the popular Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, in the form of a single large letter-sized book (the American ‘sort-of A4’). The Kickstarter for this ends 2nd April 2020, and currently looks like it has a good chance of hitting its target.

I have a Midderlands Stoke-on-Trent expansion, for free.

Thanks to Karen Bradley MP for the tip that… “Staffordshire Wildlife Trust are trying to raise £156,000 to buy Gun Moor.”

The Moor is wildlife-rich un-ploughed moorland in Gawain country, above Rushton Spencer in the Staffordshire Moorlands.

The Rushton Spencer Historical Society has a public talk on the 16th March 2020 (7.30pm): “Gun Moor; Past, Present & Future’, with local historian Alan Weeks and Jon Rowe, Staffordshire Wildlife Trust Warden for the Roaches and Gun Moor.

New on eBay, a picture of ‘The Retreat’, kept by the Birmingham Oratory at Rednal in the Lickey Hills near Birmingham. The young Tolkien spent the later part of the summer of 1904 at a cottage in the grounds, and Tolkien would sit on the veranda of the main house with the house dog ‘Lord Roberts’ (*) and Father Francis while he smoked his large cherrywood pipe. Apparently it was only in this place that Father Francis allowed himself the luxury of pipe-smoking. Cardinal Newman was buried nearby, in the grounds.

* The dog’s full name was ‘Lord Roberts of Kandahar’, and according to Tolkien’s brother Hilary it was an Irish breed.

Another local book found, Alan Garner’s The Old Man of Mow. It’s a story woven around a set of photos of two boys having random adventures and exploring in and around Mow Cop.

The cover picture shows them at the foot of the giant column of rock known as The Old Man of Mow, on the summit of Mow Cop.

The photos were obviously not staged with the story in mind, as the story seems rather loose and shoe-horned in afterwards. Such things can work, and the British photo-comics of the 1970s made them work in b&w for an audience in middle-childhood. But in this instance one imagines that not many children were impressed on reading the book. Most of the photos are in mid-1960s black-and-white, in that dour Bill Brandt sort of style that was then fashionable among agitprop photographers of the inner-city. It doesn’t suit the rural setting or the tale.

Still, the storyteller was Alan Garner and some of the colour pictures are fine , so it’s of some interest. In 2020 one might even ask permission to revisit the book with an ink pen and watercolours, to make a new and lighter version by drawing over the photos.

Garner’s Red Shift would revisit the site a few years later…

In my readings on Tolkien I’ve been pleased to discover another supernatural lyric narrative poem from the Midlands, which in time and spirit seems to sit alongside Gawain and the Green Knight on which I recently wrote a book. The “Man in the Moon” lyric is from the Harley MS. 2253, also known as “The Harley Lyrics”. The best authorities say this performative verse is from “a single scribe working in Ludlow, south Shropshire” (now in Shropshire) and must have been written by a scribe who was active c. 1314 to c. 1349. Which puts it about a generation before Gawain, and in a similarly liminal border-place in the Western Midlands. A touch of Welsh, apparently detectable in a few words, also pins it to the English fringe of the Welsh Marches. It thus has the same difficulty of language and translation that Gawain has, but is just as lively. It has the Man in The Moon coming down to earth, and behaving in a strange ‘alien from the stars’ manner, and thus in a way it’s sort of weird ‘proto science-fiction’. I’ve made a free translation of it that some may enjoy.

This post is now superseded by the new fuller version The Man in the Moon 3.0