My 1970s

Have spent today sorting out my attic which has revealed a few things I am sharing here. Boxes of stuff from the 1970s. It can be hard to remember  what I was involved in. I notice a notebook of prehistiric features including stone circles. I was living close to Stonehenge, which might be the reason. Whether this list is of any use today is an interesting question but I don't have the time to type it out.  The source was Treasures of Britain (AA 1973). What was the point? Why was I interested? A good question. I remember my wife asking. Over the years since we have visited many of these sites from Cornwall to Orkney. Ancient history gives me a buzz.

My files have regular clippings (from the Guardian) about Israel (this was the time of  the 1973 war which brought Sinai into the Israeli empire. We were to visit during that decade, going to St Catherine's  monastery when it was in Israel. There seems not a lot worth keeping now, but it is a good reminder of those days

I was a good friend then of Tony Brown, a peripatetic music teacher in our school. He drove an ancient grey  car, Austin 8 or something. His daughter Iona was a talented violinist with The Academy of St Martin in the Fields and conducted The Lark Ascending on a record which I will take to my desert island. She was later to die of cancer as her father did. I visited his cottage in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, with veg beds and bee hives. He lived close by William Golding, and Tony used to visit him regularly to play chess. Golding was deeply into alcohol at that time and not writing. After Tony's death he wrote a moving obituary for the Salisbury Journal (I hope I find it somewhere) and settled down to write Rites of Passage. I was to become neighbour to Brian, who was taught by Golding in Salisbury and depicted as one of the twins in Lord of the Flies. Sadly Brian died last year of a brain tumour. His response to the specialist was 'Bugger'.

Other press cuttings reveal an interest in social justice. I notice book reviews on social morality. I was becoming involved with world religions and I notice pieces about ethnic minorities living side by side positively with white neighbours were preserved. Not outstanding today, but the memory of Enoch Powell's rantings was still recent then. Inter-cultural friendships were something I hoped for and would enrich my life a decade later.

I joined then the Wiltshire Folk Life Society concerned with social history and folklore.. Why? No idea. We were invited to an outing to Longleat where we saw the 'mucky murals' (sexually explicit  reliefs made of oilpaint and sawdust covering the bedroom ceiling). There must have been an intellectual point to the meeting but I can't remember it.  The Society had a journal which I wrote for and built up my skills in writing for publication. I haven't made these openly available (though I have them), but they were OK. Since then I have been regularly involved in non-academic writing, which helps my academic writing. An important person to attract me into this was June Buckley, who became a key figure with the National Trust's Beatrix Potter/Healis operation in te lake district. She sadly who died early this year (2017). The Society developed The Great Barn in Avebury into a Folklife Museum. By 1980 I had stepped back and moved on to other things. One wise member, Bernard Stiles said to me (just before his own death) 'choose your battles, your time is short'.

I had sent off an article on Incest to the Journal of Biblical Literature - not earth shattering and I would write it differently today. I tried to get a book contract called The Curse of Eve: Ancient Hebrew Sexuality and Marriage. I have the sample chapter and may put it online. However, the relevant literature, especially of feminism, developed rapidly so a book then would have been premature so I am not unhappy that the book never happened. In addition, I had no support or mentoring to help me publish. I have since then encouraged PhD students to publish, although most have not. Warren and Bigger, Living Contradiction: A Teacher's examination of Tension and Disruption in School is my latest effort.

Spent the day sorting out the family archives. Here is my grandafther, born 1898, died 1990, introducing one of his notebooks:
On Old Age.
Age is a quality of mind.
If you have left your dreams behind,
If hope is cold
If you no longer look ahead
If your ambition's fires are dead,
Then you are old.
But if in life you seek the best,
and if for life you have a zest,
If love you hold,
No matter how the years go by,
No matter how the birthdays fly,
You are not old




It is from How Old Are You? by H. S. Fritsch an American poet from near Chicago. Zest in this version is 'jest' in the Google version, but I think zest works better. Grandad talked about helping old ladies who were usually twenty or so years younger than him. He was a Nottinghamshire coal miner who was down below from the age of 12 till 65. He refused to become management as he said this took money from the working man's family and produced a non-productive member of staff. That tallies with my experience of universities, anyway. He refused to strike in 1926 (the general strike) on conscientious grounds. I have been uncomfortable with the song Death to the Blackleg Miner when I hear it. He was an evangelical preacher with fundamentalist biblical beliefs, refusing to believe in the moon landings (the Bible says the moon is a light, not a solid body). A conspiracy theorist before conspiracy theory, maybe influenced by his reading of the Daily Express. Strike refusers were gathered together into Newstead Colliery where he saw out his years 1926 to retirement in 1963. I have an 8 hour tape recording of his life, which I asked him to do in the 1970s. I remember having a row with Nottingham University when they sent him a form ascribing copyright to them. I did not let him sign. And received no reply. He died of miner's lung, prematurely, cross and in pain, at the age of 92. His compensation was £5000, payable after death, which crooked solicitors tried to get their fingers on