A Second Lilliput Anthology

Lilliput magazine ran from 1937 to 1960, publishing some 277 issues. In 2024 Chris Harte published a History and Bibliography of the magazine, which was described here at Wormwoodiana. As with some of his earlier magazine studies, Harte has followed up with an anthology,  titled A Lilliput Magazine Anthology 1937-46, which I also covered here. 

Now comes the second anthology covering the remaining years of the magazine's existence. In full, the title is A Second Lilliput Magazine Anthology 1947-60 (ISBN 9781898010210). 

It contains seventy-one pieces, fourteen of which are by the star of the magazine, Maurice Richardson, longtime editor and contributor under many pseudonyms. (No Engelbrecht tales are reprinted.) Other contributors include Eric Ambler, with a history of a Paris cafe called Maxim's (from March 1958); Hector Bolitho, about the estimated one-in-seventy Members of Parliament who slip up (February 1950); Lionel Birch, discussing Cambridge University (May 1960); and sketch by John Symonds ("Across the Square" January 1949). 

This second anthology is quite a bit larger than the first, and the selections showcase the times in which they were written, with the three volumes making for an excellent history of the magazine and it's contributors. The official publication date was, I believe, May 2nd. It is now vailable from the usual sources. 

 

 

Avalon and Buchan Country: Two Books by Augustus Muir

The village of Brampton Bryan, Herefordshire, consists of a small cluster of houses on the road between Ludlow and Knighton, in the Marcher Country between England and Wales. Four miles to the west is the early medieval border earthwork of Offa’s Dyke. Above the village a wooded, domed hill rises, very much like those in Arthur Machen’s fiction. It has always looked to me somewhat otherworldly. I expect to see smoke rising from a temple hidden in its evergreen grove.

The church here is notable for a particularly serpentine yew hedge which undulates around the curtilage. It looks like a dragon merely resting here for the time being who might at any moment decide to rise and up and ravage the countryside. Opposite the church is the turn to Aardvark Books, where you find yourself in a farmyard. One barn houses cattle, the other books. Inside the latter is a large space on two floors, warmed in winter by a wood-stove.

The bookshop has a café offering coffee and tea, soup, croques monsieur and cakes. I have spent many contented moments here browsing or imbibing, and have had some unexpected finds: a half-row of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, for example, some self-published poems by a café bohemian in Paris, two classic volumes of ghost stories in a box on a trestle table.

On a recent visit, in the company of John Howard, I found under Theology the alluring title Candlelight in Avalon (1954). This suggested an Arthurian and Glastonbury theme. Indeed, I have myself written a story, ‘Candle Land’, (The Fig Garden, 2022) which evokes the significance of the candles in the Grail procession in the medieval Arthurian romances. Had this earlier writer, I wondered, noticed this too: was the book about some similar mystical experience?

But Candlelight in Avalon proved to be quite different to my expectations. It is the journal of a worn-out soul who has left London to find solace and tranquillity. ‘Avalon’ is not the mystic Arthurian realm, but the name of a house about an hour north from London lent to the protagonist by a friend. Houses are called ‘Avalon’, of course, just as some are called ‘Shangri La’ (and one I saw was rather marvellously called ‘Coromandel’). No doubt we are meant to see a symbolic link with the sanctuary where Arthur was taken to be cured of his wounds. But the title rather promises a larger legendary resonance than the book in fact pursues. 

Though it is presented ambiguously, which was presumably why it had been shelved as non-fiction, it is in fact a novel.  I should have been alert to that, for the author is the prolific Scottish writer Augustus Muir, most known for the entertaining The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller (1942), which was at first taken to be a genuine memoir, but is in fact a drily humorous fiction.

Candlelight is an odd book. The narrator is a valetudinarian solicitor, and, on the face of it, a diary whose narrator is mostly interested in the state of his nerves and then extends this to the state of his soul, is not particularly beguiling. It is true that at times, in his spiritual seeking, the lead character gets close to evoking elusive mystical experiences, but these are never quite evocative enough, as they would be, say, in a Machen or de la Mare story. Muir relieves his protagonist’s self-examination by introducing several unusual supporting characters with whom his narrator comes into contact. Yet these also are afflicted in various ways: you wouldn’t mistake any of them for characters from Rose Fyelman’s and Millicent Sowerby’s The Sunny Book (1918).

One, the local schoolmistress, has a tragic past: another, a bohemian pianist who lives in a remote cottage in the woods, has consumption. It is as if the author is trying to depict as much melancholy as he possibly can. These characters do engage our interest, but I found the narrator an unsympathetic figure and the theme a bit too earnest. I would rather have heard much more about these other characters, particularly the bitter pianist. The ending, intended to be both poignant and uplifting, is rather too conventional. It is a book that might just have worked if it had ventured further into stranger terrain or had a bolder conclusion. Nevertheless, it does have a certain morbid, haunting quality.

Later in the week, at the Welsh Bridge Bookshop in Shrewsbury, with its array of rooms and staircases at all angles, I found a copy of another book by Muir, from thirty years previously, which is in complete contrast. It is a Buchanesque thriller, The Third Warning (1925), which celebrates its centenary this month. The yarn starts in the good old style with a chap in London visiting his solicitor to ask for an advance on his funds, only to discover he has unexpectedly inherited a sinister country house in the Lammermuir Hills, in the Scottish Border Country, together with the title of Laird. It's the sort of thing that could happen to anybody.

In no time at all, he and a staunch chum are motoring North to inspect the demesne. I must admit to a fondness for this sort of beginning, and when a chapter soon follows entitled ‘The Light in the Library’, I am further beguiled. Our hero’s inheritance of the estate has not gladdened the hearts of certain rivals, and so when uncanny happenings begin there are several suspects to hand among his neighbours.

The book turns out to be a fairly standard espionage story, but colourful enough and with suitable twists and turns, light gusty reading. But what a complete contrast to the later book. Evidently Muir was a versatile writer, or perhaps he simply enjoyed exploring different terrain. Even though I found Candlelight in Avalon did not really live up to its evocative title, it did have an atmosphere of melancholy that tends to linger with the reader. In any case, Muir may be worth looking out for: The Third Warning is a perfectly sound Buchan pastiche, and The Intimate Thoughts of John Baxter, Bookseller will delight those who enjoy wry tales about bookshops.

(Mark Valentine)

Monologues for the Curious

On 21 July, 2025, the BBC Proms are presenting 'Monologues for the Curious', a new, 25 minute, contemporary classical work for tenor and orchestra by composer Tom Coult, based on fragments from M.R. James stories. It will be performed by singer Allan Clayton and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, on a bill with Mahler's Seventh.

 

The composer is no stranger to the supernatural and fantastic. He has written 'Spirit of the Staircase', for 17 instruments (2016), 'Inventions (for Heath Robinson)', for piano  (2019), 'Two Nocturnes and A Maze', for horn, viola and piano (2022), 'Three Pieces That Disappear', for orchestra' (2023) and 'Black Shuck Lament', for tenor and strings (2025).

 

The last of these "uses extracts from contemporary accounts of 'black shuck', a demonic black dog that seems to have roamed East Anglia from around the 12th century, terrorising locals . . .".

 

Tom Coult's recent debut album, Pieces That Disappear, is available from NMC Recordings.

 

(Mark Valentine)

 

‘Steeped in Antiquity and Fantasy’: Some Esoteric Seventies Music

 

In the late Seventies and early Eighties, when punk, ska, electro-pop and disco were all the rage, the folk-rock and progressive music groups of the preceding years were in disfavour and it was possible to pick up their shunned albums cheap from second-hand record shops pervaded by cigarette smoke and patchouli oil. Already drawn to fantasy and supernatural fiction, I saw some of these bands and artists as in the same tradition, as their very names revealed. The first that I encountered were called Comus, Titus Groan, Heron, Dr Strangely Strange, Third Ear Band and Gryphon. They sounded strange and alluring.

These bands seemed all of a piece to me with my interest in ancient mysteries, part of the same mood that had inspired Janet & Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain (1972) and a cavalcade of similar books. They belonged with stone circles, flying saucers, ley lines and terrestrial zodiacs. I liked their music too. It was either gentle, wistful and pastoral (at the folk scene end) or adventurous and unusual (at the more progressive reaches). Some of their songs became great favourites: ‘Song to Comus’, with its wild flute and caprine vocals; Titus Groan’s ‘Hall of Bright Carvings’, also flute-driven and with a soaring chorus; ‘The Unquiet Grave’ by Gryphon, a haunting version of a traditional song, augmented with sonorous crumhorn; the plaintive, melancholy minstrelsy of ‘Wanderer’ by Heron.

Such is my affection for these often obscure and off-centre bands that I have recalled this period of discovery fondly in two stories: ‘Goat Songs’, about the elusive album of that title (The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things, 2018) and ‘Lost Estates’, about what happens when The Perpetual Motion Machine Co. get back together again (Lost Estates, 2024). It is a theme that often draws me back. A band called Piccalilli, in red velvet flares and embroidered waistcoats, who regaled village halls in West Northants and thereabouts with a long oboe-led instrumental tribute to Edward Lear’s ‘The Dong With the Luminous Nose’, have yet to become a story. My own ‘band’, The Mystic Umbrellas, though it responded to the d-i-y tape scene of the early Eighties, was musically (if I may stretch that term) and thematically much closer to the ethereal, melancholy, drifting ambience of the soft- progressive style.

A decade or so further on there was a revival of interest in some of these (real) bands, and their records became sought-after and rare, in much the same way as the old books of Machen, Blackwood, Dunsany and Hope Hodgson came back into favour and vanished from the shelves. Some of the bands then got back together again, decades after they had disappeared.

In this revival I found out about bands I hadn’t discovered in the original Seventies afterglow: Jade, who had a wonderfully eerie song, ‘Five Of Us’, set in a haunted Norfolk cottage where they had stayed, all about shadows dancing on the whitewashed walls; Amazing Blondel, a medievalist band whose instruments included theorbo, cittern, archlute and other arcana; Trees, a Fairport-ish band who also had spooky songs such as the uncanny ‘The Garden of Jane Trelawny’; Oberon, whose only album was issued in just 99 copies and whose influences included King Crimson and Debussy; Fuchsia, named after the saturnine sister in Titus Groan, and unusual for being violin-led and chamber music-ish; the pagan and folkloric Forest;  and Dulcimer.

Dulcimer were a folk trio from the Cotswolds whose first album, And I Turned As I Had Turned As A Boy, was very sought-after. The title sounds like a quotation, but seems to be original to them: it is part of a poem recited (by the actor Richard Todd, who ‘discovered’ them) in the opening piece, ‘Sonnet to the Fall’. Their music is gentle, whimsical, sometimes peculiar, often melancholy. The songs are about the passing seasons, pilgrims and travellers, lost loves, falling leaves and falling snow, butterflies and fairies. ‘Their lyrics were steeped in antiquity and fantasy’ noted music columnist Bruce Eder, and this is true of many of the other bands mentioned here too. In an interview with Psychedelic Baby magazine their lead singer Peter Hodge explained that ‘Most of my songs have been stories set to music’. 

Fantastic literature pervades the ideas and images of many of the bands. Robin Clutterbuck, who designed the sleeve artwork for Oberon's rare LP, explained:  'I was really keen on mythical literature like Beowulf; also ‘The Hobbit’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, Alan Garner and Mervyn Peake.  As for artists, I liked the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Gustave Doré, Richard Dadd and Samuel Palmer.'

The Tolkien and Peake influences are not surprising for the time. When I later looked into all these bands and plotted out the dates of their first albums (see below), I saw that they clustered around a brief period from 1969-1973, and in particular the middle two of those years. By the time I was flicking through the racks of record shops, about a decade later, they were regarded by the trendsetters as quaint and obsolete (er, like the term ‘trendsetters’ too, now I think of it). That was why I was able to pick some of them up, with scuffed sleeves and often grooves too, for very reasonable sums. It was just like the delight of bookshop finds.

It is important to note that though they are known and collected for their Seventies music, this often comprised only a few years of their careers. Some players drifted out of the music scene altogether, others continued to write and perform, and some have resumed after a long gap. Comus, for example, returned after some 40 years, and their singer Bobbie Watson now releases her own work too. Gryphon are still releasing albums and performing. Dulcimer’s Peter Hodge is also actively at work, and has released three albums in recent years, including Pipers Grove (2023) and Too Many Frankensteins (2024). It is cheering to see their vision and virtuosity continuing.

Checklist

Dr Strangely Strange: Kip of the Serenes (1969)

Forest: Forest (1969)

Third Ear Band: Alchemy (1969)

Amazing Blondel: The Amazing Blondel (1970)

Dulcimer: And I Turned As I Had Turned As a Boy (1970)

Heron: Heron (1970)

Jade: Fly on Strangewings (1970)

Titus Groan: Titus Groan (1970)

Trees: The Garden of Jane Trelawney (1970)

Comus: First Utterance (1971)

Fuchsia: Fuchsia (1971)

Oberon: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971)

Gryphon: Gryphon (1973)

(Mark Valentine)

Image: Oberon's A Midsummer Night's Dream: sleeve art by Robin Clutterbuck