King Pharaoh

M R James and The Folk-Song Collector

In a bound volume of the London Mercury I have, its binding faded to madder red, there is an essay in the May 1921 issue, by I.A. Williams, entitled ‘Notes on a Small Collection of Folk-Songs’.

Williams was a regular columnist for the journal under the heading ‘Bibliographical Notes & News’, on recent book auctions, catalogues and discoveries, and was evidently himself a keen book-collector.

However, in this contribution he celebrates another interest of his. Williams recalls how last Christmas Eve two ragged and hungry children had come to his door in Surrey and sung a carol, ‘The Moon Shines Bright’, which went well enough until the last three verses, where ‘ . . .something appears to have gone wrong. The beauty is there right enough, but it has got mixed up and broken somehow’.

Indeed, a graveyard song seems to have obtruded itself on the carol with an unseasonal memento mori (‘there’s a green turf at your head, good man’), before the duo ended with more conventional hopes for a Happy New Year, and were rewarded with the food they preferred to coin.  

These visitors reminded him of ‘a small collection, of about a hundred folk-songs, which I had made a few years ago during the very ample “vacs” of my undergraduate days.’ He was in fact a student at King’s College, Cambridge, during the period when M R James was Provost. His notes were contained in three notebooks, which he began to browse through, remembering the (mainly) old men and women who had sung the songs to him, in return for a sixpence or, at Christmas, half a crown.

The first thing he looked for, he tells us, was another carol, ‘taken down on Christmas Day, 1912, from a gipsy man and woman who came to our house singing to the accompaniment of a tambourine and a concertina.’ This was called ‘King Pharaoh’ and, though also muddled, proved to contain a rather curious myth.

‘King Pharaoh sat a-musing,/A-musing all alone,/Up came our blessed Saviour,/And it was to him I own.’ Where have you come from? asks Pharaoh: ‘out of the land of Egypt’ is the reply. If it is true, says the Egyptian king, that you are sprung from the Holy Ghost, why that roasted cock there will crow three times.

The bird restores all its feathers to itself and duly obliges: ‘Three times the roasted cock did crow/On the plate where [he] did stand.’ The song then veers off to another legend, about how corn was miraculously sown and reaped the same day.

‘To what antiquity does this carol carry us back?’ asks the essayist. Well, ‘Dr. M.R. James has written in the Cambridge Antiquarian Society’s Communications, Vol X’ of ‘the roasted cock crowing, and thus bringing about the conversion of an unbeliever’. The latter, it seems, is more usually King Herod than King Pharaoh. This would make more sense in the context of the song, since it looks odd to go ‘out of Egypt’ to find Pharaoh.

 (Though another possibility occurs to me, which is that by King Pharaoh the gypsy couple meant, not the Egyptian ruler, but the King of the Fairies, which would make the song more interesting still . . .)

‘Dr James,’ continues I A Williams, ‘records versions of this legend from Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and Sweden, as well as similar miracles among pilgrims and travellers in France, Italy, and Spain. He also tells of earlier forms of the tale in some copies of the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus.’ In this case the cock is in a pot being cooked by Judas’s wife and pops up alive and feathered to announce the Resurrection.

Williams then quotes M R James’ theory about the story:  ‘I am inclined to think’, says James, ‘that the incident has been elaborated out of the story of Peter’s denial, and that the first step taken was to connect the cock with Judas, and then possibly with Herod.’

The essayist then goes on to discuss other folk songs he has collected, some of them somewhat bawdy, others with a smattering of seemingly ancient myth. He was evidently part of the surge of interest in folk song that is now associated in particular with Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and in the next number of the London Mercury he has a letter to the editor telling readers about The Folk-Song Society.

Iolo Aneurin Williams (1890-1962) was, despite his Welsh name, born in Middlesbrough to a family of Liberal politicians, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal candidate himself, though in forlorn hope seats. He published several volumes of poetry, and his other interests are reflected in volumes on Elements of Book-Collecting (1927), English Folk-Song and Dance (1935), Flowers of Marsh and Stream (1946) and Early English Water-Colours (1952).

I could not help wondering what M R James might have made of the first carol discussed by Williams, which so oddly changed its tone towards the end. Just as James thought that a Punch and Judy show, a Christmas cracker and a children’s game, offered opportunities for a ghost story, so might carol singers with a strangely muddled song.

The cheerful householder, perhaps with a secret past, goes out to listen with a glad heart to the youthful carollers, only to find the words of the song suddenly turning macabre and invoking the grave. And when he peers more closely at the pale ragged children glimmering in the winter dark, why they almost look as if . . .

Compliments of the season to one and all!

(Mark Valentine)

A Christmas Eve Ghost Story

There will be a festive reading of the lesser-known M R James ghost story 'There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard' at 5pm GMT on 24 December by the historian and folklorist Francis Young. 

It will be broadcast from All Saints' Church, Conington, Cambs, which is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, an excellent body who look after disused churches. The event is free, though donations are welcome. 

Whenever out on bookshop expeditions I always try to find out what churches the CCT have nearby, as they are usually reliably open, well-kept and full of interest. It isn't always the medieval work that attracts either, though that can be well worth a detour. 

My curiosity has been stirred before by a weary old harmonium enjoying a peaceful retirement, with wonderfully-named stops inscribed in black Gothic lettering: as my colleague Mr Howard pointed out, Viola Dulce sounded like a faded Victorian poet, while there was also Seraphone, Eolian Harp, Vox Humana, Octave Couplex (the well-known French dandy) etc.

Even a vast piece of ribbed black iron Victorian heating apparatus was impressive in its stolid preservation.

It was while visiting one of their churches that I discovered a dresser in the vestry with drawers singularly full of voluminous quantities of hymn numbers. This caused me to speculate just why they had all been assembled there, which naturally led to the idea of a barbarous arithmetic, the equivalent of the 'barbarous names' in ritual magic. 

Thus followed my short story 'Zabulo', first published by Rosemary Pardoe in The M R James Ghosts & Scholars Newsletter, and then  in The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things (Zagava). 

Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Enjoy if you will this M R James ghost story on Christmas Eve from a suitably ancient location, recounted by a learned and mellifluous reader.

(Mark Valentine)

The Winter Thorns

The Glastonbury Thorn is a hawthorn tree that blossoms in midwinter. Legends and customs have grown up around it, and its renown is such that it was featured on a Royal Mail Christmas stamp. A garland of blossoms from the tree is traditionally sent to the reigning monarch at Christmas.

The thorn is said to have grown from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea when he planted this on the slope of Wearyall Hill in the Somerset town. This connects the thorn to a wider myth involving a visit by Joseph to Britain, sometimes, it is claimed, accompanied by Christ as a child: the inspiration behind William Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time…”

It is not the only species of holy tree recorded at Glastonbury.  In Miles Hadfield’s An English Almanac (1950) there is a reference for the date of 11 June, St Barnabas’ Day, to a Glastonbury Walnut Tree that budded and leaved then. This Barnabas Tree seems very little known now, probably quite eclipsed by the Holy Thorn

The winter flowering thorn has been recorded in Britain since the 13^th century. It was originally held to be holy simply because, unusually, it flowered around the time of Christmas. The suggestion made by the antiquarian Vaughan Cornish (Historic Thorn Trees in the British Isles, 1941) is that the monks of Glastonbury discovered one unusual specimen of this kind and then nurtured it and developed the story for pious purposes.

There are in fact now several holy thorns in Glastonbury, including in the Abbey grounds, in the parish churchyard of St John, and in the gardens of Chalice Well. Cornish suggests that the original thorn would have been at the Abbey. 

Less well-known, perhaps, as Cornish explains, is that the Glastonbury Thorn is not the only holy thorn in Britain. There are recorded examples of at least thirty more. Cornish was himself the guardian of one such, the Salcombe Regis Thorn, Devon, and for his book, he wrote to a wide circle of correspondents, including parsons, squires, and antiquarians, to ask whether they had any in their parish. His book chronicles the replies he received. Others have come to light since in folklore surveys.

Cornish suggests that some notable thorns marked Anglo-Saxon hundred-moots or meeting places, while others may be a relic of pagan tree worship—this is because some have folklore associations quite different to the Glastonbury Thorn. But the hawthorn is not generally a long-lived tree, and quite a few examples have disappeared over the years: they have fallen victim to storms, development, neglect and decay.

A notable example of an ancient survivor is Hethel Old Thorn in Norfolk, claimed to be the oldest hawthorn tree in Britain, and to date from the 13^th century—it is now, with a small patch of land around it, a miniature nature reserve. It too is now linked to Joseph of Arimathea, though it was not originally: an example of a piece of major lore overshadowing a more local, older legend. There are other East Anglian holy thorns, in Suffolk, at Leiston and Parham, and in Essex at Billericay, Coggeshall, Stock and Woodham Ferrars.

Some examples are now said to have been grafted from the stock of the Glastonbury Thorn, which may indeed be the case, or this may simply be a further instance of overshadowing by the greater myth. There seems, for some reason, to be a particular concentration of holy thorns in the Welsh Marches: in Herefordshire at Orcop (felled by a storm in 1980), Wormesley, Eaton Bishop, Little Birch, Dinedor and Kimbolton; and in Worcestershire at Alfrick, Hampton, Newland, Ripple and Tardebigge, and a ''wishing'' thorn on the Malverns.

There is or was also one outlier, the Jerusalem Thorn at Paythorne, on the edges of the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire, close to the Buck Inn: the little settlement may even take its name from this thorn.

In some of these cases, the festival of the winter thorn was usually held on ‘Old Christmas Eve’, the night of January 5^th.  This is because of the change in the calendar in Britain, from the Julian system to the Gregorian, in 1752, for greater astronomical accuracy, when some days were “lost”.  Some people refused to let them go, and so still counted the real festival as twelve days later than the modern calendar.

This is not the only example where, in some, especially remote, rural areas, the old calendar was still used to commemorate ancient customs. A Calendar of Old English Customs Still in Being, published by Mark Savage of Upper Basildon, Reading, in 1940 (and attributed by the British Library to one ‘Philip Hogg’), notes the Wormesley custom on Old Christmas Eve, as follows: ‘Visiting the Holy Thorn Tree, Wormesley, Hereford. The belief that this may burst into bloom at midnight on the eve of Old Christmas Day attracts many visitors.’

Usually the ritual involved gathering around the tree to watch for the blossom to appear, but the custom was often associated with revelry, feasting and drinking: so much so that one farmer felled a winter thorn on his land to stop the nuisance of these rumbustious gatherings. It will be no surprise, given the way folklore often works, that he was said to suffer misfortune afterwards. Watches at the winter thorns seem to have continued until within living memory, but it is not clear if any are still observed. 

(Mark Valentine)

Castle Bigod and other ghost titles

‘Ghost titles’ is the pleasing term given in book collecting and bibliographical circles to books that were announced but never in fact appeared. I suppose this would usually be because the author had promised a book but was then unable to complete it; or else had completed it, but it wasn’t what the publisher was expecting.

There might also be occasions when the publisher folded before the book could appear and also, I suppose, simple clerical errors about a book that never was. They seem to me to make quite an intriguing field of study – I don’t know that anyone ever has surveyed the subject – particularly because the imagined book naturally would sound even more alluring and interesting than it might have been had it ever materialised.

These spectral volumes are not exactly the same as the unfinished or discarded works to be found in many writers’ literary careers, though there may be some overlap. The essential quality of a ghost title, I take it, is that it must have been thought likely (even in error) to appear, and to have been announced accordingly.

These remarks were occasioned when I was browsing through an old copy of The London Mercury and Bookman for October 1937, which announced itself as the Autumn Books Number and devoted several pages to a listing of books promised by publishers for the forthcoming season.

If you were settling down by your fireside in the Autumn of 1937 and contemplating this catalogue, you could have looked forward to new books from Agatha Christie (Death on the Nile), Evelyn Waugh (Scoop), Michael Arlen (The Crooked Coronet), Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart), Christopher Isherwood (Sally Bowles), Stevie Smith (Over the Frontier) and Edith Wharton (Ghosts).

You could also meditate on evanescence by anticipating The World Ends by the previously unknown William Lamb, with designs by John Farleigh, about an inundation of England: though later you might discover that the publisher was trying to pull the wool over your eyes and the author was in fact Storm Jameson.

Most of the books listed also have a month of publication by them but some have the ominous word ‘Later’. And it was thus that I began to notice the ghost titles. The first one I came across, under Fiction, was Castle Bigod by David Garnett, due from Chatto & Windus at 7/6d. This struck me as an excellent title, derived perhaps from the ruined 12 century castle at the charming small town of Bungay, Suffolk, built by the Bigod family.

But I could not remember any such title by this author, and sure enough there is none in the British Library catalogue. And in fact there was no novel by Garnett in 1937 nor for many years afterwards, until Aspects of Love in 1955. There may well be a Garnett expert who will be able to explain all about Castle Bigod and say whether there is anything left of it, but I think I prefer wondering about it.

The very next entry seemed to offer a further ghost title, Renaissance of Baldridge by William Gerhardi, the witty satirist who influenced Evelyn Waugh. This title I thought not so good, but then Gerhardi, or his publishers, had the habit of changing the titles of his books. Even so I didn’t recognise this one, and sure enough he too did not publish a novel in 1937.

In this case, however, it is only the title and not the book that is ghostly, because it duly appeared in 1938 as My Wife’s the Least of It, and several other possible titles had been mooted before the one finally adopted, as The Modern Novel explains.

The third ghost title that I spotted was The Goat by G W Stonier, due from The Cresset Press. Stonier was later to be author of the Blitz fantasy The Memoirs of a Ghost (1947) and of sundry miscellaneous titles, but not The Goat. There was indeed a caprine title in 1937 but that was Old Goat by Edwin Greenwood, actor, film director, friend of Arthur Machen and writer of picturesque thrillers. This was sub-titled 'A Fantasia on a Theme of Blackmail and Sudden Death'. Did Greenwood's ancient horned creature see off Stonier's goat?

As I explored in an earlier post, Stonier’s fiction was original and thoughtful and it seems a shame that we may have lost an earlier novel or story by him. Would his memoirs of a goat have borne any relation to his memoirs of a ghost? Perhaps we shall never know.

There are doubtless quite a few other ghost titles well-known to enthusiasts of particular writers. However, I cannot pursue them all just now as I should be working on an enthralling novel of the underground, underworld and otherworld, called Change Here for Hades, due to appear – well, later.

(Mark Valentine)

This Wounded Island - Collected Edition

Probability Distribution Group have announced a Collected Edition of the three books in the series This Wounded Island by the enigmatic topographer J W Böhm: The Condition of England, Another England, and Uncertain Times. The first of these has been out of print for some time.

The melancholy observations and resigned reveries of the Berlin aphorist can now be appreciated in a single collection, and I have been called upon to provide an introduction, “The ‘Truth in Fragments’ of J W Böhm”. Here is a brief extract:

‘On the page the writings of J W Böhm look terse, austere, as if they were the hasty scribbled case notes of a puzzled and overworked social worker, as if they might have been found in a dog-eared fawn folder in a chipped green filing cabinet with the sort of drawers that lurch out when you pull at them, as though they mean to topple you over and make their escape from their resented grooves. 

They record doubt, regret, resignation, a restrained bewilderment. Yet beneath this there is also to be discerned, I suggest, [a] ‘tenderness and intimacy’ . . .’ about the island he is surveying.'

(Mark Valentine)

The Strange World of Colossive Press

Ad Astra Per Croydon: The Lost History of London’s Forgotten Spaceport compiled by Tom Murphy celebrates this strangely little-known but ambitious municipal project in a 28pp commemorative booklet. It features the eccentric visionary and confectioner Septimus Payne, the powerful Councillor Elvira Spraget, Chair of the Transport Committee, and the selected Croydonaut, Norman ‘ Nails’ McAvity, mobile librarian and water polo champion.

This important publication is available from Colossive Press, an imaginative South London zine publisher. Also available from them is High Precision Ghosts, an eerie hand-sewn double-concertina book of enigmatic photographs which look like they might be from Carnacki the Ghost-Finder’s personal album, or  snapshots taken by Mr Dyson in his quests as a savant of the singular.

Enthusiasts of hauntological music meanwhile will enjoy the Colossive Records 2019 catalogue of their highly elusive releases, sub-titled ‘Urgent transmissions from the liminal zone where noise meets sound’, featuring such outfits as Carrion Baggage, Alabaster Chambers and The College of Emotional Engineering.

Urban explorers are not neglected either, because they will surely relish perdu sur le vaisseau spatial, photographies de JP Marsaud, with its monochrome images of echoing stairwells, rusting dial-faces, snaking tubes and corroded machinery.

The press also issues a series of zines made up from a printed sheet of A4 paper folded up to A6 size using a technique known as the Turkish Map Fold, which sounds like it might be a mysterious clue in an Eric Ambler novel. The idea is that these are the equivalent of the much-loved 7” single format in records. 

There is much more to discover in the strange world of Colossive Press. 

(Mark Valentine)

Robert Herring and The Return of Merlin

Robert Herring (1903-75) was the 23 year old author of The President’s Hat (1926), a novel presented in the form of a travel book, with drawings by Hubert Williams, about a walking tour in Andorra and the Pyrenees. They did not in fact undertake any such journey and the whole thing is imagined, an armchair spoof. It is a flippant, high-spirited jaunt that reads, however, persuasively in its light parody of the typical oblivious young Englishman abroad. It’s a highly engaging, whimsical odyssey.

Since its form is unreliable and the content a fantasia there is an experimental dimension to the novel that is not immediately obvious. It might be put perhaps somewhere in the same category as the work of Ronald Firbank, who visited places only after he had finished writing about them, or (later) Jocelyn Brooke in such titles as The Dog at Clambercrown (1955) and The Crisis in Bulgaria (1956).

Herring was later the editor of  the journal Life and Letters To-Day, which also took over The London Mercury, and he was known as an early film critic, writing several books on the subject. Otherwise his bibliography is mostly of limited editions of a few plays, poems and fantasias.

However, the wartime Gollancz paperback anthology Transformation (1943) edited by Stefan Schimanski and Henry Treece includes a one act verse play, in six scenes and an epilogue, by Robert Herring, entitled ‘Harlequin Mercutio, Or, A Plague on Both Your Houses (A Ride Through Raids to Resurrection)’. It is a sort of Blitz fantasia on Shakespeare, in which characters from the plays appear in the ruins of London. It concludes with the rediscovery of Merlin, here representing ‘the good in Man, and hence his power of self-help and resurrection.’

The poetic diction and neo-Romantic style are similar to the better-known plays of his contemporary Christopher Fry (A Phoenix Too Frequent, 1946, The Lady’s Not for Burning, 1948, etc); and some of the imagery suggests the work of artists such as Paul Nash and John Piper, for example the striking idea of ruined London as a new Stonehenge. We are in the realm of what the art critic Alexandra Harris has called ‘the Romantic Moderns’.

‘Pieces of Apocalypse’, a recent critical commentary by Richard Warren on this otherwise forgotten play, remarks that ‘the overall effect – Shakespearian verse drama enacted by Jungian archetypes and set in the London Blitz – is, frankly, bizarre’ and adds that ‘ as a piece of theatre, not that it was intended as such, Harlequin Mercutio would be unperformable. As an extended poem or (hypothetically) a radio play, it is incoherent, wilfully difficult and virtually unreadable. But there is something oddly brave about it . . .’

I think that it is in fact best read as a narrative poem in the mode of ‘The Waste Land’ and indeed some of the imagery seems to have echoes of Eliot’s epochal poem. The ‘highly condensed and fractured syntax’ that Warren also notices is not dissimilar to the modernist prose of Mary Butts, allusive and elliptical. It also has its fragmented Blitz imagery in common with similar haunted fantasies such as Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Mysterious Kôr’ (from The Demon Lover and Other Stories, 1945) and G W Stonier’s The Memoirs of a Ghost (1947), both discussed in my A Wild Tumultory Library (2019). Herring's play is dream-like, eerie, strangely compelling, with many slivers of weird imagery.

It was only two years later that C S Lewis, in his metaphysical thriller That Hideous Strength (1945), also wrote about the rediscovery and revivification of Merlin, and what I remember of this scene is that he is not presented as a haughty mage but rather as a crafty, wily peasant cunning-man. Also that he speaks a tongue no-one can understand until they bring in a priest with a knowledge of Basque (since this is believed to be one of the oldest European languages). Though he is using a figure from Arthurian romance, Lewis does not depict him in the least romantically, and this is a sound artistic choice, because his atavistic Merlin has a deeper, more disorienting power.

It seem unlikely that Lewis, not perhaps particularly attuned to avant-garde literature,  had heard of Herring’s play, but it is possible. He certainly took an interest in his close friend Charles Williams’ sacred dramas and his Arthurian poems, so a transcendent play with an Arthurian figure might have come to their attention. In any case it is curious that two literary figures should both decide to revive Merlin within a few years of each other. Perhaps the archetypal magician was making his presence felt.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Addyman Books, Hay-on-Wye

'Castle Mandragora' - Mary Durham

An enticing title,  and it has wonderful Neo-Romantic cover art by Felix Kelly. He specialised in Gothick country houses and illustrated fantastical books such as Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1945),  an edition of  Le Fanu’s A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay : a tale from Chronicles of Golden Friars introduced by Herbert van Thal (1947), and To the Devil A Daughter by Dennis Wheatley (1954).  

The setting of this novel is also unusual, at a remote folly in the Brecklands area of Suffolk. This is a large expanse of sandy heath mostly given over to heather and bracken, but now also with dense serried fir tree forestry. It is notable for the ancient monument of Grime's Graves, prehistoric flint mines in a lunar sort of landscape that looks unreal: empty yet pockmarked. You can, upon payment of an admission charge, descend into one of the pits by a ladder and enter a gallery. I didn’t fancy it. Idols have been found there.

Castle Mandragora by Mary Durham (1950) is not predominantly a novel of the supernatural, it is more of a crime thriller, though it has eerie elements to it.

An educated young man loses his job as an advertising clerk during the Depression of the Thirties and in desperation agrees to take up a post as a footman. He gets the job through the influence of a friend, a solicitor, and in fact he has a secret role, to keep an eye on things at the castle and report back anything suspicious. His friend is uneasy about aspects of the set-up, though he cannot quite say why.   

His employers are two eccentric brothers. The other staff there are aged and mostly semi-senile: they include a querulous librarian. The castle is circular and the living quarters cover two floors: we are provided with a diagram showing the rooms and staircase.

The parts where the protagonist is learning his job and getting to know the layout and somewhat somnolent ways of the castle are rather painstaking, before the mystery element (a bit brisker) takes over. There is an incidental ghostly scene, rather sentimental, and not, as one might expect in a crime novel, fully rationalised.  

Although in many ways following conventional formulae, there was just enough about the book that was distinctly odd to give it an unusual flavour. The resolution is not entirely unexpected, but it is deftly handled. The austere scenery and the picturesque castle are well-evoked. The claustrophobic atmosphere and the unusual characters give the book a particular peculiarity.

Mary Durham wrote eleven thrillers, including others that have Gothic elements, in the Forties and early Fifties, and then seems to vanish. Nothing whatever seems to be known about her. Usually such an abrupt career might portend that this was an experienced author running a sideline under a pseudonym: or, conversely, that the author changed direction and adopted a different name for later work. 

But if so in neither case does any clue about this seem to have emerged. It’s also possible this author just couldn’t find publishers after that mid-century spate, even though her later work also seems to be among her strongest.  

Most of her books were issued by minor provincial publishers: John Crowther of Bognor Regis, Sussex, published Why Pick on Pickles? (1945), Cornish Mystery (1946), Keeps Death His Court (1946) and Crime Insoluble (1947);  Skeffington issued Murder Hath Charms (1948),  Murder by Multiplication (also 1948) and Corpse Errant (1949); while John Gifford offered Castle Mandragora, Hate is My Livery (1945), Forked Lightning (1951), and The Devil Was Sick (1952).

Forked Lightning was picked up by the Thriller Book Club in 1952 and is therefore much easier to find than the others. This too has a dramatic, Modern Gothick dustwrapper. But some of the other titles seem to have disappeared almost as thoroughly as their author. 

(Mark Valentine)