How it all began...

The annual cricket match between Matfield Cricket Club and Sherston's XI was held for the first time in 2006.  It was the brainchild of the late Bob Miller, a member not only of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship but of a number of other literary societies.

Bob was a remarkable man, who, despite his outgoing and jovial exterior, managed to hide a good deal of his light under a bushel.  The work of Siegfried Sassoon was one of many interests, ranging from golf to politics.  He even tried to found a club for bow-tie wearers! For his work in setting up the annual match, he was awarded life membership of the SSF in 2012 – an honour reserved for a select few - but sadly did not have much time to enjoy it, as he passed away in 2014 aged only 66. 

Not only was Siegfried Sassoon fond of cricket, but his friend and fellow-poet Edmund Blunden shared his love of the game, as did their mutual friend, the SSF President, Dennis Silk, who continues to attend the match, occasionally umpiring and often presenting the trophy.  It was at Fenners cricket ground in Cambridge that Dennis and Siegfried first met.  Siegfried continued to play cricket into his seventies, often as a member of the Downside Abbey XI.

Simon Knott, the captain of Matfield CC in the early years, was an enthusiastic supporter of the match, which, thankfully, continues, largely through the combined efforts of the present Matfield captain Peter Danby and his SSF equivalent Jeremy Lawson (Siegfried’s great-great-nephew).  "Deadly" Derek Underwood, now a local resident, has been another frequent supporter. 

The match was originally held on a weekday afternoon, which meant anyone who wanted to see it and was not retired had to take a day off work.  This did not greatly help attendances, but the move to a Sunday made it much easier for the SSF committee and other visitors to join the fun.  I say “fun” because I always enjoy it but inevitably some members are less enamoured of the game of cricket.  The new arrangement also makes it possible to combine the match with the fete weekend, with the Horticultural Society's marquee standing at the boundary opposite the refurbished pavilion.

The first match was recorded for posterity on an imaginative DVD made by Andrew Chapman, who played several times for Sherston's XI before moving to another part of England, making a triumphant return to the team in 2015. Andrew tells me that he hopes to repeat this exercise at some future date.

This year’s match was an absolute cracker, with the result decided in the final over when Sherston’s XI managed to get Matfield all out.  I generally consider a victory for Sherston’s to be little short of miraculous, bearing in mind that it is a scratch team with only half a dozen actual SSF members ever having played.  Chris Sutherby was a shoo-in for the Bob Miller Man-of-the-Match Award, for his century in the Sherston’s innings plus a fantastic one-handed catch to remove one of Matfield’s batsmen (the kind of thing you wish you could see an action replay of).

Although sometimes referred to as the "Flower-Show Match", it is not a faithful replay of the original, which, for those who are new to Sassoon, features prominently in his book Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.  Leaving aside the fact that the names of the characters and places involved are changed in the memoirs of Sassoon's fictional alter ego, George Sherston, the match on which he bases his account was played, not on Matfield village green but at Brenchley cricket ground a few miles away.

None of this alters the fact that the match has now gathered its own momentum and Matfield Cricket Club seem to look forward to it as much as the rest of us do.  If only everything else in life could bring us such simple and unadulterated enjoyment.

To Matfield with Love

My involvement with the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship has given me so many memorable weekends (not to mention the weekdays) over the years that it would be difficult to single out a particular experience.  However, our 2016 weekend in Siegfried’s home village of Matfield has to be a contender.

There were three separate, but connected, events on 16^th-17^th July.  We began on Saturday with the annual village fete.  To tell the truth, Jack Sturiano and I started somewhat earlier in the day, by paying a visit to Matfield’s parish church, where Siegfried’s brother, Hamo, is commemorated by an excellent information board; their mother, Theresa, lies buried in the churchyard.  For the casual visitor, the grave is difficult to find, partly because the ground has subsided beneath the memorial cross, and partly because the inscription is at the base of the cross, necessitating the removal of excess grass in order to read it.

This is only the second time the SSF has attempted to run a stall at Matfield fete.  On that earlier occasion, our efforts were dampened by monsoon conditions (which quickly cleared at 4pm, after all the stalls had been packed away).  This time we had the benefit of a small marquee, kindly shared by the Local History Society, whose exhibition of photographs of the village and some of its Victorian and Edwardian residents attracted great interest from visitors, many of whom paused to share their stories and memories of the Sassoon family.  These included Mrs Pollard, a great-great-granddaughter of Richardson the groom.

Pentons and Lawsons meet for the first time at our stall

Among our own number we could boast several close connections with the bard of Matfield.  Lorna Lawson, Siegfried’s great-niece, opened the fete at the special request of the organising committee, commemorating the centenary of the Battle of the Somme with a short speech.  Lorna’s husband Tim and their son Jeremy were also present, as were Enid Wells, a former resident of Weirleigh (Siegfried’s birthplace), and her son Adrian – who was actually born in the house.  Newer members of the SSF include Anne Penton, a great-niece of Siegfried’s great friend, David Cuthbert Thomas.  

Anne and her husband Tim made a welcome contribution to our programme of “pop-up” readings, as did several pupils of the local secondary school, Mascalls Academy.  We were impressed by the youngsters’ appreciation of the poems they read, especially since the youngest was only eleven years old (but she read like a seasoned old trouper). As is usual with our impromptu readings, we were not sure how many of the passers-by understood what we were doing, but heads certainly turned.  Sam Gray and Meg Crane managed to take over the PA system at one point, though it must be admitted that it was barely more effective in terms of reaching a wider audience. Meanwhile, back at base, Enid was listening to the test match commentary on a portable radio, unwittingly recreating that famous photograph of Dennis Silk, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon on the porch at Heytesbury House.

There was so much interest in our activities on Saturday afternoon that we anticipate picking up a few new members as a result.  It’s always good to have the locals on board, and they won’t be disappointed after they’ve attended a few of our events and read our wonderful bi-annual Journal.   

And then there was our annual dinner – not so well-attended this year, but extremely enjoyable nonetheless.  The Wheelwrights Arms, right next to Matfield Green, kindly accommodated us on Saturday evening and we enjoyed a gourmet meal and good conversation enlivened by what I thoughtlessly referred to as an “inter-course reading” by Enid Wells of a passage from Siegfried’s Journey.  It was some years since we had dined formally at the Wheelwrights, and the management has changed in the meantime, but the food was not in any way a disappointment.  Jack's photograph shows a crowd of relaxed and cheerful people who have well and truly enjoyed their day.

Blighters

Have we heard enough about The Battle of the Somme?

I ask the question because it seems to me that the media – and perhaps the general public – seem to be obsessive about the Somme.  When you hear the word “Somme”, it is generally synonymous with the slaughter of 1 July 1916.  Yet however many times the details are explained to us, albeit in a dumbed-down fashion, we seem unable to get over that initial gut response. Many people still believe that “a million men were killed on the first day of the Somme”, which is far from the truth.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that the Battle of the Somme was a minor incident that should only be seen in the context of the war as a whole.  It was surely a catalyst, and that is why it has become symbolic of the enormous loss of life – wasted life, if you like – that occurred in Europe between 1914 and 1918.  However, when Sassoon was witnessing the battle, he did not see it in quite the same light as we do now.  It's true that it became well-known very quickly, partly thanks to the film, made by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell, that circulated in cinemas and brought home to non-combatants at least some of the horrors their friends and family members were facing on the Western Front.

The first public viewing of the film occurred as early as 10 August 1916, while the Somme campaign was still going on - it would not draw to a close until November.  Not everyone was happy with the decision to show it in cinemas.  A bishop referred to it as "an entertainment which wounds the heart and violates the very sanctity of bereavement", whereas Lloyd George called it "an epic of self-sacrifice and gallantry".  While it was doing the rounds of the cinemas, King George V, together with Prime Minister Asquith and Lloyd George, toured the battlefields with words of encouragement for the troops, and this too became the subject of a film.

The King Visits His Armies in the Great Advance was followed at the beginning of 1917 by The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks, a real propaganda coup which showed how, in November, Britain had begun to use tanks on the Somme, a devastating blow to enemy morale.  Sassoon's reaction to the film is well-known because of the poem he wrote about it: "Blighters". Written at Litherland, the poem reveals Siegfried's contempt for those who, without understanding what he and his comrades have been exposed to, apparently enjoy watching the scenes of slaughter on screen.  

I always think of the poem as being somewhat unfair, particularly in the way it seems to target the female half of the audience, whom he calls "harlots".  What were the public to think, when all they knew of war was what the government cared to tell them?  Was it the falseness of the message that Siegfried objected to, rather than the reception it got from cinema-goers?  

Whatever the answer, we have heard a lot about the Somme in recent weeks, and there is more to come, with a whole BBC2 series on the topic beginning next week, introduced by Peter Barton, who introduced us to some of the more technical aspects of the battle in War of Words, the recently-repeated documentary on the war poets which renewed my admiration for Siegfried Sassoon but also made me want to go back to the work of some of his contemporaries, prose as well as poetry - books like Bernard Adams' Nothing of Importance, particularly notable for being the only memoir of the war to have been published while it was still going on.  Peter Barton himself co-produced War of Words with Sebastian Barfield.

The new series, The Somme 1916: from Both Sides of the Wire is in three parts and will, as the title suggests, consider the experiences of the opposing armies. It looks set to give us some insights that could be as shocking as any of the revelations contained in the Chilcot Report.  Yet if more people had read Sassoon, perhaps we would not have needed Chilcot at all. Is it hopeless to believe that humankind will ever learn the lessons history has to offer us?

 

The Talybont Experience

"We go this way," said my husband, pointing out the route of the Henry Vaughan walk, just before going back to our guest house to fetch something from the boot of the car. "See? Just down there. It's straightforward." 

It sounded straightforward.  How was I to know he was holding the map upside down?  I reckon he did it deliberately.

When we caught up with one another about 15 minutes later, we headed up the old Bryn Oer (or Brinore) tramway track that once carried horse-drawn trucks of stone from local quarries down to the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal at Talybont-on-Usk for transport to Pontypridd and Newport. After a short while we arrived at the "Henry Vaughan Garden". The information panel gave the impression that this was meant to be along the lines of a 17th-century physic garden, but I could not see any plants other than grass. There was a very nice seat carved out of a tree trunk, and the stumpy base of a wooden structure - I think it must have been a bench - that had either been vandalised or simply rotted away.

In some places, the trail was difficult to follow because the swan motifs that marked the way had either been removed or had perished.  In my innocence, I had assumed that the route would take us to Henry Vaughan's grave at Llansantffraed Church, but it went nowhere near.  I suppose that the reason is the A40 which cuts off the church from the Talybont community it originally served. Nowadays only a handful of houses are within easy walking distance of the church, and the layby that provides the only parking place can get very congested when there is a special event taking place, as there was on Saturday evening.

"The Albatross meets the Swan" is a slogan that has been used locally this year to mark a series of events recognising the 200th anniversary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work Biographia Literaria, at the same time commemorating Coleridge's visit to Wales in June 1794.  Like Siegfried Sassoon, Coleridge had dropped out of Cambridge (Henry Vaughan dropped out of Oxford) and, in the company of a friend named Joseph Hucks, he set off on a walking tour. Having been rejected in love by Mary Evans, a London Welsh girl, he decided to walk around her homeland; I do not know whether this was a coincidence. 

Interior of Llansantffraed Church

Coleridge eventually ended up in Bristol, where he settled for a while.  In 1795, he gave a lecture that was attended by the Welsh pseudo-bard Iolo Morganwg, a man whose reputation as a charlatan has been repaired in recent years by academic recognition of the more positive aspects of his activities, so much so that his home town of Cowbridge now has a "Iolo Morganwg Trail" and a school named after him. Coleridge's words made a big impact on Iolo, and thus an indirect impact on the cultural development of Wales, just as the Welsh landscape and people are said to have made an impact on Coleridge's own work.

Henry Vaughan died a hundred years before Coleridge met Iolo. Thus "The Albatross" (Coleridge) could never have encountered "The Swan" (Vaughan was known as "The Swan of Usk") in person. But he travelled through the Usk valley so beloved of Vaughan, and did so when walking was not such a fashionable occupation as it is now. The concert given on Saturday evening was planned by the Brecknock Society as a homage to both Coleridge and Vaughan, a combination of music, song and poetry "celebrating God, nature and Man".

Coleridge's poetry was not heard, the reason given being that he had written very little of it when he embarked on his Welsh odyssey. Several of Vaughan's poems were read, by two local enthusiasts, Robert Wilcher and Mervyn Bramley.  The music was performed by Dr Bramley's son - lutenist James Bramley, by the soprano Hannah Medlam, and by the Unicorn Singers under the direction of Stephen Marshall.  It included works by Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams, composers who straddled the turn of the 20th century and whose work would have been well known to Siegfried Sassoon, but also by earlier composers such as Dowland and Purcell (the latter died in the same year as Henry Vaughan). A highlight was Stephen Marshall's own arrangement of verses by local poet Jeff Rees, on a Welsh mythological theme.

If you would like to support Llansantffraed Church and the work being done locally to encourage interest in Henry Vaughan and, indirectly, in Siegfried Sassoon, you can find further information here: http://www.brecknocksociety.co.uk/docs/friends-of-llansantffraed-church-form-v3.pdf .  

Siegfried versus Ali

I do not, of course, refer to an imaginary boxing match between our hero and the recently-departed Muhammad Ali. Such a contest would be extremely one-sided, Siegfried's reach being of little assistance against the sheer speed and skill of such an opponent; he would be lucky if he lasted a round against the "Black Superman".

No, I was thinking more of a comparison between the two men as cultural icons who became serious political figures because of the moral stance they took in two very different wars. Many of you "baby boomers" reading this will still remember Cassius Clay, the young man who started boxing at the age of twelve, won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics and went on to become heavyweight champion of the world at twenty-two.  Those who do not remember "the greatest" in his heyday - or at all - may find it hard to understand why he was so widely admired and simultaneously reviled by different sections of society, especially in his US homeland.

He was born during the Second World War, one of five children, brought up a Baptist in the city of Louisville, Kentucky (hence he earned the nickname "The Louisville Lip", among many others). Even after being knocked to the floor in two of his early professional bouts - one of them with Britain's beloved Henry Cooper - he remained unbeaten and soon came up against the champion, Sonny Liston, a man with a criminal record and Mafia connections, who, some suspect, was using ointment on his gloves to temporarily blind his opponents. Clay fought through it to emerge victorious, and quickly established himself as a man with a big mouth, who defeated his opponents through a combination of outstanding physical prowess and psychology.

Like Sassoon - though at the same time quite unlike Sassoon - Clay was a poet. Prior to his match with Liston, he came up with a 14-line verse that culminated:

   "Yes, the crowd did not dream, when they put up the money, 

   That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny."

Before winning back his title from George Foreman in 1975, he claimed:

   "I can run through a hurricane and don't get wet.

   When George Foreman meets me,

    He'll pay off his debt."

Call it doggerel if you like, but can you name another boxer who would not have been ashamed to produce original verse?

Less than a year after winning the title, Clay shocked the world again by converting to Islam and changing his name to Muhammad Ali.  Following one of several successful defences of his title in 1967, it all came to an end, seemingly forever, when Ali was convicted of draft-dodging and sentenced to five years in prison. His explanation for his actions was quite simple:

"My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father... Just take me to jail."

Despite this, he was denied the status of conscientious objector.  After a successful appeal in 1970, but having lost his licence to box, Ali had begun to take on the status of a popular hero.  Those who had found him arrogant and offensive in his youth saw that there was another side to him.  His refusal to fight began to win him popularity, especially among the younger generation, so that, by the time his conviction was overturned on appeal, many were disappointed to see him defeated, for the first time in his career, by Joe Frazier, whom Ali had dismissed as "too ugly to be champion".

But Ali bounced back.  In 1974, the 32-year-old won back his world title, and he managed to hold on to it for four years, despite several close calls. Sadly, his career lasted too long; he was still fighting, and losing, in 1980. It was then that he began to display the first tell-tale symptoms of Parkinson's Disease, which he would continue to battle for the next thirty-plus years.

Michael Parkinson, who interviewed Ali on British television several times, says that an appearance by Ali guaranteed his chat show an additional two million viewers, but at the same time admits that he didn't ever feel he had got to know the boxer properly.  Like most of us, he found it hard to tell when Ali was being serious and when he was playing a psychological game with his audience.

President Obama, on the other hand, is a long-time admirer and said that Ali "shook up the world" and "fought for us" (meaning America's black population).  "He spoke out when others wouldn't," added the president.

When you look at it that way, Ali is almost unique - a sportsman who had a much wider appeal than merely to sports fans. Call him an entertainer, call him a political activist, call him a philosopher-poet if you like. George Foreman said of their encounter, "Little did I know I would be facing something greater than a boxer."  How does one account for this level of popularity?

To compare Muhammad Ali with Siegfried Sassoon would be like comparing chalk with cheese.  One was brash and loud, the other diffident and self-effacing, but both were men of principle. Moreover, both were full of contradictions.  And both left an indelible mark on their times.

Other people's authors

Do the names James and Leo Walmsley mean anything to you? Don’t worry if they don’t; you’re in good company.  Representatives of the Walmsley Society (who were present in numbers at the Alliance of Literary Societies recent conference) are well used to having to explain who they were and what they did, just as I am in the case of Barbara Pym. It doesn’t mean that other people are ignorant, simply that they haven’t as yet been fortunate enough to have come across the work of these writers.  Those that do know them, however, may feel privileged to belong to an elite group.

I should think anyone who has been to Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire is likely to have come across the watercolours executed in the early 20th century by James Ulric Walmsley.  Originally an architect by profession, he lived in the area for sixty years but did not hit the big time until nearly the end of his life, when one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy.  It is his son Leo, however, who interests me more.  A near-contemporary of Sassoon, Leo was two when his family moved to Robin Hood's Bay in 1894. During the First World War he joined the Royal Flying Corps and, like Sassoon, was awarded the Military Cross for his service in East Africa.

Leo was the literary half of the father-and-son partnership.  In the 1930s he began his popular "Bramblewick" series, and produced many more books, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as an autobiography and a play. His books were popular with the general public and were read far beyond his home area. The Walmsley Society was launched in 1985, nearly twenty years after Leo's death - he did not live nearly as long a life as his father.  This makes it twice the age of the SSF, and its continued existence gives me great hope for the future.

Yes, the world is full of unknown authors who should be more famous.  There is no shame in not having heard of most of them (except, perhaps, in the case of a work colleague of mine who had never heard of the Bronte sisters and was only familiar with “Wuthering Heights” through Kate Bush’s song – and he didn’t even know the tune.  But he won’t be reading this blog.)  How many delights are lost to us through not having enough time to pick up every book in the library!  And how many great novels do we read purely by chance, even though their authors never become household names?  I can think of many I’ve picked up over the years, thinking, “I probably won’t like this, but I’ll give it a go”. We love to share our recommendations, don’t we? 

Sadly, the Charles Williams Society was not represented at this year's ALS conference, and I hear it is about to be wound up, which seems a terrible shame after so many years.  Williams was one of the Inklings (oops, nearly referred to them as the Inkspots, quite a different bunch of folk!)  The society now hopes to amalgamate with the thriving Oxford C S Lewis Society, which proclaims that it "is interested not as much in Lewis as a man as in the world he inhabited and the intellectual and spiritual colleagues he knew and admired", a statement which intrigues me more than somewhat.  If ever there was another writer whose connections make his life a window on his times, it is Siegfried Sassoon, and I've always thought that is a great advantage in attracting new members. 

The fact is, however, that C S Lewis has more than one society in his name.  California and New York each have their own, and then there is the "C S Lewis Society" - called simply that - which was founded at Princeton University in 1975, not to mention the C S Lewis Foundation, an educational charity.  A writer like Lewis, or Dickens, or Tolkien, or Jane Austen, can so dominate as to have thousands of members in his/her literary society while others go from year to year with a small core of loyal members. The Richard Jefferies Society, for example, has an international but still relatively small membership, yet it has been going since 1950, and appears not to be in any danger of meeting the same fate as the Charles Williams Society.

Victorian novelist Charlotte M Yonge also has an enduring presence in the world of literary societies, despite all the author's works being out of print. They still manage to hold two meetings a year and issue a newsletter. Other somewhat obscure authors with their own societies include 19th century Dorset poet, William Barnes (an influence on the much more famous Thomas Hardy), 20th century journalist and farmer Adrian Bell, 18th century poet Robert Bloomfield, travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabethan dramatist Fulke Greville, and Moonfleet author John Meade Falkner.  Put them all together and what have you got? An alliance to end all alliances, one which promises to outlive all conflict.

Bronte Country

If there is one novelist from the UK that everyone has heard of, it is probably Charlotte Brontë.  At least as famous as Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, Charlotte was welcomed into London literary circles by Dickens himself, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray and others, though she was notoriously shy and once spent an hour or so hiding from unexpected visitors behind a curtain in the Gaskell drawing room.  And if there is one thing everyone knows about Charlotte Brontë, it is that she had two sisters who were also writers and died young.  In fact, she had another two sisters who died as children – probably due to the lack of care given them by the Clergy Daughters' School where four of the five girls were sent. There was also a brother who drank himself to death, with the complication of various addictions.

It is a gloomy story by anyone’s standards, and Charlotte would compound the felony by dying in childbirth aged 38, when she was just embarking on a happy married life. Put them all together, however, and the Brontë sisters are an incredible phenomenon.  It is hard to think of another literary family who achieved so much in such a short period.  One of my favourite books as a child was Pauline Clarke’s Carnegie Medal-winning novel, The Twelve and the Genii, in which an 8-year-old boy stumbles across the Brontës’ box of toy soldiers, around which they wove fantasies that proved a catalyst for their careers as writers of fiction.  The "Genii" of the title are of course the Brontë children, of whom the soldiers have a distant memory.

Whatever the reason for their fame, the Brontë sisters have become almost synonymous with English literature and with the county of Yorkshire, where I have just been attending the annual conference of the Alliance of Literary Societies (which the SSF and WOA will be jointly hosting next year).  Haworth Parsonage was their family home, though it was not the sisters’ birthplace; they moved there from the village of Thornton (now subsumed by the metropolitan borough of Bradford) when Charlotte was aged about four.  In recognition of the 200^th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth, the 2016 conference was hosted by the Brontë Society, about which there have been a number of unsympathetic media stories in recent times.  Is there such a thing as bad publicity for a literary society?  I don’t know but I would not like the SSF to suffer in the same way at the hands of the newspapers. 

On the other hand, it seems that the Brontë Society’s worst crime has been losing touch with the locals.  Apparently residents of Haworth do not feel a close connection with the Society’s aims and activities.  Here I can thoroughly sympathise, after experiences at Heytesbury and Matfield, where most of the locals welcomed the SSF with open arms but others seemed to see us as interlopers.  (Thinks: Why, oh why didn't I just leave it to them to start a literary society in honour of Sassoon?)  I can understand why it might appear so; to have strangers turning up who know little about your town or village except that a famous writer was born or died there could be annoying.  In the case of a place like Stratford-upon-Avon or Haworth, thronging with tourists throughout the summer months, there might be additional inconvenience involved, such as increased traffic, parking difficulties, noise, and the sheer congestion in the narrow streets. Matfield and Heytesbury would be very different places if they had the same cachet.

The "Bronte Village" at Haworth

Haworth as a community has changed considerably over the centuries.  Thanks largely to Mrs Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and perhaps also to the plot of Wuthering Heights, we have come to think of it as a remote village in a “wild” and “bleak” landscape, whereas in fact, by the time the family moved there, it was a thriving industrial town, with a larger population than it now has. It cannot be denied that the Yorkshire moors are a strange (though beautiful) landscape, in which one could easily lose one bearings and, failing modern communications, could end up like the toddler who followed his father out of the house during a snowstorm and whose death became the subject of a melodramatic contemporary poem. This was one of many literary efforts pouring forth from Haworth during the mid-19^th century that were enumerated by afternoon speaker Ian Dewhirst.

Some members of the Gaskell Society felt that Juliet Barker, in her excellent opening talk, was unjust to the Gaskell biography.  I don’t; she made it clear that she thinks it a wonderful book, and was not slow to point out that Gaskell had never written a biography before, which excuses some of the flights of fancy that affect its reputation but at the same time make it far more readable than most literary biographies. The proof of the pudding must be that, despite the sometimes uncomplimentary portrait of them painted by Gaskell, both the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Charlotte’s husband Arthur Bell Nichols went on to thank her unreservedly for the work she had done in rescuing Charlotte’s memory from popular misconceptions.

As usual, the dinner – held at the White Lion - was another opportunity for individual societies to advertise the wares of their respective authors by reading passages from their works.  So many wanted to do so that the ALS Chair, Linda Curry, was forced to draw names out of a hat in case we ran out of time. On this occasion, I eschewed the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in favour of an extract from Sassoon’s 1936 letter to Max Beerbohm, describing events at Heytesbury during the abdication crisis.  I sensed that some of the references in this very funny passage were going over many people’s heads - but at least no one appeared to be asleep.

One thing that never ceases to amaze me about the ALS is how many of its member societies are for authors I've never heard of - and I think of myself as well-read.  I intend to follow up on this comment in the next post.