Katharine Briggs Awards

On Tuesday12th November I sauntered into London, and more specifically to Cecil Sharp House, for the folk culture awards of the year. 

Katharine Briggs (1898-1980) was an extraordinary researcher, folklorist and storyteller. She gained her PhD with a thesis on Folklore in seventeenth-century literature (Folklore in Jacobean Literature) after the Second World War and wrioe many books on fairies and folklore, including The Anatomy of Puck and its sequel, Pale Hecate's Team (1962), An Encyclopedia of Fairies (1976), as well as a number of children's books such as The Legend of Maiden-Hair or Hobberdy Dick (her first published book), and Kate Crackernuts. A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language: Part A: Folk Narratives (1970) was re-published in three volumes in 2011 as Folk Tales of Britain, and is described by Philip Pullman in its introduction as the fullest and the most authoritative collection of British folktales that exists. In 1969 she was awarded the Doctorate in Literature, and made President of the Folklore Society, a post she held until 1972. Upon her retirement, an annual lecture and book prize was named in her honour. It was this award that I was going to see.

However, before the book prize was to be given out, we were to be treated to the lecture by Doc Rowe. And we'd see the Folklore Society's coveted Coote Lake Medal awarded to Professor Ronald Hutton for services to the study of the subject.

The lecture was fascinating and focused on the transmission of folk culture through time. Rowe developed an early interest in traditional song, stemming largely from 1950s BBC radio broadcasts. Performing on the folk club circuit as a singer from 1963, he met BBC producer Charles Parker, who – with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger – was working on the BBC Radio Ballads (1957–64). He has since cited Parker and the "Ballads" as amongst his strongest abiding influences. Rowe went on to work with Parker, MacColl and Seeger on a variety of folk-song and drama related projects.

An equally formative experience for Rowe was a 1963 visit to the May Day 'Obby 'Oss festival in the Cornish town of Padstow. He has returned every year since to continuously document the tradition. It also triggered a wider focus on seasonal events and popular cultural traditions. Over the subsequent decades, Rowe has attended and recorded a wide range of Britain's annual calendar customs. Since the 1960s, Rowe has focused on collecting and celebrating folklore, oral history and the vernacular music and traditions of Britain and Ireland. In 2002, Rowe was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from the University of Sheffield, and in 2005 received the English Folk Dance and Song Society's Gold Badge for his documentation of traditional song and dance. Rowe has been a committee member of the Oral History Society, the Traditional Song Forum and the Folklore Society, which - in 2007 - presented Rowe with its Coote Lake Medal for his research into folklore. 

Recipient of this year's medal was Professor Ronald Hutton - a familiar face from many TV appearances - and undoubtedly Britain's most noted folklore academic. I first met him over a decade ago when he was a guest on a BBC Radio 4 show that I co-wrote called The Museum of Curiosity. He specialises in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion, and modern paganism. A professor at the University of Bristol, Hutton has written over a dozen books and he holds a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.

Finally there was the Katharine Briggs Award itself which - despite a strong longlist - was won by Tabitha Stanmore for her book Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic. An excellent book and a very worthy winner. And it was a genuinely lovely evening where I caught up with a number of friends and fellow folklorists, as well as artist Ben Edge. 

Roll on next year!

Barkbie?

Some while back I mentioned the process of edaphoecotropism whereby a plant - usually a tree - absorbs and grows around an obstacle in its way (see here). There are several good examples near me where a young sapling has grown through a fence and then gradually embedded the fence within it as it's grown.

Well, today I saw this story on Facebook (link) and it made me smile. Here's what the poster - Dan Lambert -  said: 

'In 2012 our Granddaughter put her Barbie doll in a hole in our tree and left it there. The tree began to swallow her. Today, all that's left are her feet on one side and part of her head and arms on the other side. She went viral on a few sites when i posted her pix. has been on the local news, and even has her own facebook group called The Barbie Trees, with fans from 10 countries watching her slow demise! We live in Greenbrier, Tennesseee USA. She hasn't got long left now!'

The Barbie Trees Facebook page.

Yet another (rusty) Dragon

 

This is the dragon horn that I would later re-vamp to use for the Rags and Witches show (see here).

Rags to Witches

On Saturday 2nd November the Wycombe Creatives group staged a Halloween-themed fashion show. What was different about it is that every outfit and every prop was made from recycled or repurposed clothing and other materials. Huge congrats to the brilliant Wycombe Creatives Team and especially to the wonderful JULIET HAMILTON who was the driving force behind the event and also the costume designer and maker. She's a force of nature. Or supernature. 

But why did we do this?  

Firstly to help raise funds for Wycombe Arts Centre and Wycombe Refresh. 

But secondly because of this ... 

There are currently enough clothes on Earth to clothe the next six generations. The fashion industry produces around 100 billion items of clothing each year, which is nearly 14 items for every person on the planet. 

The fashion industry emits around 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year; that’s more than the combined emissions from the global airline and shipping industries and about the same as the total emissions of the UK, France, and Germany. 

We are buying at least 400% more clothes than we did just two decades ago ... but 40% of these clothes don’t even get worn. The average UK wardrobe contains 152 items, with 57 of them rarely or never worn. 95% of all textiles can be reused or recycled and yet we send around 350,000 tonnes of clothing (worth £140 million) to landfill every year in the UK. In 2020, 2.6 million tonnes of returned clothes ended up in landfills in the US alone. 

Only around 25% of donated clothes actually get sold in the shops. The remaining 75% are either sent for recycling or to landfill, or more often exported to countries in Africa and Asia. The massive amounts of clothing landing on their shores has decimated their native textile industries, and the associated waste is polluting rivers and soil. We are a very wasteful and polluting society and what we do now - for better or for worse - will affect the lives of our children, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren. 

But it's not all bad news ... the message is getting out there. 

Clothing sales dropped by 25% in 2020, the largest decline on record. At the same time, second-hand sales had a 200% rise in traffic and eBay reported a 1,211% increase in sales of preloved items (it makes clothes buying cheaper too!). 

And Harpers Bazaar recently reported that brands are designing ‘seasonless’ collections and Gucci announced last year that they would be reducing their five annual collections down to two in ‘a return to the essential and getting rid of the unnecessary’. 

Make do and mend, people! 

Recycle. Repurpose. Re-imagine. Be creative. Be unique. 

Be yourself.