Believing all sorts of stuff

Posted on 29th September 2018 by Ian

A wooden garage door at the roadside was decorated with corroding brasses, souvenirs from visits to various places. A visit to Ireland had added a brass from Bushmills Distillery and a plaque bearing the fading words “céad míle fáilte.” The metal ornaments included three horseshoes, one of the nails holding the largest of the three had been lost and the shoe had fallen so that its heels pointed downward.

In younger days, a horseshoe hanging in such a way would have been thought to be a sign that something bad was likely to happen. Good luck would have been thought to have run out through the heels.

Unproven old wives’ tales and irrational superstitions seemed plentiful when I was young. It seems strange now what was accepted without question. Perhaps it was just the case that everyone thought that what adults said was authoritative, but there was never a moment when I asked why people believed things that didn’t make sense, things that were often just plain daft.

No-one ever explained why a horseshoe was thought lucky, nor why chimney sweeps and black cats were also thought to bring good fortune. If a black cat crossing the road was a harbinger of good luck, a white cat would have the opposite effect. White cats were fortunately in short supply; in our neighbourhood, tabbies were the standard farm cat.

Physical conditions could be caused or addressed in random ways. Sitting on a cold stone wall was said to cause piles; dandelions caused bedwetting. Dock leaves were thought to be the remedy to nettle stings, and stinging nettles were thought to be a treatment for arthritis.

Some things were definitely a cause for fear. A white owl was said to be the call of the dead. On late summer evenings, as days shortened and nocturnal birds set off on their nightly hunts, barn owls were a frequent sight and a frequent source of anxiety about who might die as a consequence of them being seen.

Why did we believe so much that was patently nonsense. The 1960s were a decade filled with space exploration and technological advance, but in our small rural community folklore and superstition still seemed dominant. It seems odd that we could have watched the television coverage of the Apollo missions and not have questioned the things among us that were obviously absurd.

Turning the horseshoe would not have made one whit of difference, unless people still believe in “luck.”

 

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A land of huorns and ents

Posted on 26th September 2018 by Ian

The dawn sunlight shone above the moorland below, the clear, sharp colours in the sky contrasting with the blanket of greyness at ground level. There was a moment’s temptation to stop the car and just to ponder the expanse of mist and silhouette. If J.R.R. Tolkien had not found inspiration in the Norse and the Welsh sagas, standing on a Somerset hilltop looking into the sea of mist that covered the Levels might have prompted thoughts of mythical creatures.

Tolkien writes of Huorns and Ents, trees that are sentient, trees that have the capacity for thought and speech and movement and action. After the destruction brought to their lands by the wizard Saruman and his armies, there is a sense of ecological justice in the revenge the trees wrought upon their erstwhile destroyers. In The Lord of the Rings, the coup de grace at the Battle of Helm’s deep is administered by the huorns :

Where before the green dale had lain, its grassy slopes lapping the ever-mounting hills, there now a forest loomed. Great trees, bare and silent, stood, rank on rank, with tangled bough and hoary head; their twisted roots were buried in the long green grass. Darkness was under them. Between the Dike and the eaves of that nameless wood only two open furlongs lay. There now cowered the proud hosts of Saruman, in terror of the king and in terror of the trees. …

The Orcs reeled and screamed … Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again.

The Two Towers, Chapter 7, Helm’s Deep

There were moments more mysterious, strange trees moving through a countryside, eliminating all trace of the evil that had been among them:

… in the middle night men heard a great noise, as a wind in the valley, and the ground trembled…. But in the morning … the slain Orcs were gone, and the trees also. Far down into the valley … the grass was crushed and trampled brown … but a mile below the Dike a huge pit had been delved in the earth, and over it stones were piled into a hill. Men believed that the Orcs whom they had slain were buried there; but whether those who had fled into the wood were with them, none could say…. The Death Down it was afterwards called, and no grass would grow there. But the strange trees were never seen in Deeping-coomb again; they had returned at night…. Thus they were revenged upon the Orcs.

The Two Towers, Chapter 8, The Road to Isengard

Watching the black shapes that loomed and disappeared as I drove through the fog, it would not have been hard to believe in battling trees.

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An exceptionally long life?

Posted on 24th September 2018 by Ian

The windmill pictured above was a cause of mystery!

We moved here to the village of High Ham in Somerset in February 1967.  Our house is the last in a line of council houses built in 1926.  Beyond our house, the road passes between open fields before reaching Stembridge windmill, the only thatched windmill in England.  It had stood semi-derelict for years, before being restored by the National Trust in the early 1970s.

In the village, it was believed that the mill and its house and cottage had been left to the National Trust by Professor Bellot in memory of his son.

It had been assumed that the son concerned had died during the First World War and a search of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website produced a quick result, Bellot not being the most common of names:

In Memory of

Lieutenant BRYSON BELLOT

1st/1st, North Somerset Yeomanry

who died age 24

on 27 March 1918

Son of Hugh H. L. Bellot, D.C.L., and Beatrice V. Bellot,

of High Ham, Somerset.

Remembered with honour

Bryson Bellot is the first name amongst the eighteen from our little village who died in the Great War.

Finding Professor Bellot’s Christian names on the CWGC website meant being able to search for him on the Internet and a Wikipedia page confirmed, “In 1969 Professor H. H. Bellot left the windmill, cottage and garden to the National Trust in his will”.

It seemed that Professor Bellot must have been a great age when bequeathing the mill to the Trust; in his nineties, at least because his son had died in 1918 at the age of 24, so had been born some seventy-five years before Professor Bellot’s death.

Who was this man who had lived to such a great age in our village?

Papers held by the Somerset Archives in Taunton suggest there was deep involvement in village life, but how did Professor H.H. Bellot remain around for so long?

The answer became clearer on the website of University College, London.  Professor Hugh Hale Bellot had been born in 1890, he could not have been father to Lieutenant Bryson Bellot.  The UCL website even has a photograph of the man who was once our neighbour.

The University of London has a catalogue of the papers left by Professor Bellot, they include: “Photograph of Bryson Bellot (Bellot’s brother) in a military uniform” and “Bryson Bellot: Documents and letters of Bellot’s brother who died in Abbeville on March 17, 1918.”  So Professor Hugh Bellot was brother, and not father, to Lieutenant Bryson Bellot.

Bryson Bellot’s father was, however, also Hugh Bellot.  An obituary for the Royal Historical society shows that Professor Hugh Hale Bellot (1890-1969) was son of Hugh Hale Leigh Bellot (1860-1928).  The DCL (Doctor of Civil Law) after H.L. Bellot’s name in the casualty records should have been a hint, Hugh Hale Bellot was a history lecturer, a search for Hugh Hale Leigh Bellot reveals him to have been a barrister and law lecturer.

Professor Bellot must have been a interesting figure in our little village: an obituary for a former pupil describes him as “Professor H. Hale Bellot, an old-fashioned gentleman and a rather anachronistic figure, even in 1953”.

Of course, the real mystery is how a prominent academic family from Surrey came to be living down our road.

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Autumn comes to the Levels

Posted on 22nd September 2018 by Ian

The chief memory from primary school geography is the time when I turned the country around.

In those times when making photocopies was a rare phenomenon confined to large institutions where xerox machines could reproduce cloudy images, tracing paper was the way to transfer an image from one place to another. The class was given the task of reproducing a map of Britain in their exercise books. This required placing a sheet of tracing paper on the relevant page of a school atlas and holding it firmly in place while following the outline with a pencil. Once the map had been traced, the paper was turned over and, using the side of the lead, we scribbled over the line we had drawn. We then placed the tracing the right way up on a page of the exercise book and drew along the lines we had drawn. The lines scribbled on the reverse allowed enough lead to be on the paper for the lines to appear on the blank page. It was a very simple process, except when you scribbled on the same side as you had traced and then turned the paper over to draw the line from the reverse side – a process that led to Wales and Cornwall being to the east of the country and East Anglia and Kent facing westward.

Perhaps it was an omen that geography would not be a strong subject, for the only other fact that I can recall from those days is that our part of Somerset was in a “rain shadow”, the upland areas to the west and south-west of the county received a lot of relief rainfall, meaning that there were only thirty inches of rain each year in the heart of the county. Going to school on Dartmoor, where the annual rainfall was sixty inches a year or more brought an appreciation of how relatively rain-free our area was.

Rain-shadowed, it might be; dry, it is not. The autumn storms of the past week brought rain that arrived sideways. Autumn and winter on the Levels might be mild compared with the seasons elsewhere, but they are marked by a pervasive dampness. People who lived on the moors in times before modern heating and dehumidifiers would talk about there being a year round moisture in their walls, about the damp being in everything.

The grey misty rainfall, that seems sometimes to enfold you, is the price of living in the west of the country. Had the tracing been correct, we would have faced icy blasts coming from the east; dampness is easier than ice.

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Bob Harris knows

Posted on 20th September 2018 by Ian

The gentle tones of Bob Harris were on the radio this evening. Undoubtedly, a Google search would tell me what age he is, but I prefer him to remain forever the indeterminate age he was when he presented The Old Grey Whistle Test almost half a century ago. The advantage of radio is that in the imagination he can remain the figure he was on those BBC 2 television programmes on those late nights in the early 1970s.

Some years ago, I bought a triple CD collection of music issued to mark the fortieth anniversary of the programme (it was also available on vinyl, for the purists who really wanted to recapture the feeling of the times). What seemed significant was that much of the music featured no longer received airtime, and some of the artists would be entirely unknown to Twenty-First Century listeners. Does that mean it was not good music? Does that mean they were not good bands?

In the times before downloads and streaming, when one artist can release an album and occupy most places in the top twenty of the charts because every track counted separately, the charts were compiled from shops recording the number of sales of physical discs. The top selling singles would appear on the playlists of BBC Radio 1 and the groups might be invited to appear on Top of the Pops. To have your record played by the likes of Tony Blackburn and to be on television at seven o’clock on a Thursday was to be a success. By those measures, the people who played on Bob Harris’ programme were not successful. They did not make singles that sold in hundreds of thousands, nor was it likely they would ever have appeared among the sort of acts that attracted viewers each Thursday.

So does a lack of sales, a lack of television appearances, a lack of commercial success, mean that they were not good bands? Does it mean that they will not be remembered when programmes from the archives are broadcast?

Perhaps what makes a band “good” is not a democratic matter, not a matter of sales being like votes that determine who is best. Instead it is a matter of discernment, a matter of the quality of the music and the lyrics, a matter of the cultural significance of the band, as well as its place in the charts. If you didn’t know what was “good”, you could always count on Bob Harris to give you some ideas.

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