The 8th of November is always an occasion for celebrations within Gothic literary circles, marking as it does the anniversary of Bram Stoker's birth. And yet, at first sight, when you look at the details of Stoker's life it seems odd that he should have produced so many fine Gothic novels. Indeed, with Dracula, he produced arguably the most enduring and influential Gothic horror story of them all.

(Bram Stoker - mathematician, athlete, theatre manager and a creator of fine Gothic horrors)

The details of Stoker's life are interesting in themselves but give little insight into why his imagination should have produced so many dark, supernatural tales. He was born in Dublin on the 8th November 1847, the third of seven children. His childhood and youth were a paradoxical mixture of extreme illness (he was largely confined to bed until the age of seven) and vigour (he was a noted athlete during his time as a student at Trinity College Dublin, from where he graduated with a degree in Mathematics). It was during his time as a student that he became interested in the theatre and it is perhaps here that the darkness creeps in. For a while he was the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, co-owned by the author Sheridan Le Fanu whose novels such as The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864) contributed so much to the popularity of Sensation Fiction during the 1860s, and whose short story 'Carmilla' (1871), telling the tale of a predatory female vampire, was undoubtedly an influence on Dracula. It was while working as a theatre critic that Stoker first met the actor Henry Irving, a man whose charisma and brooding presence is often thought to have been in Stoker's mind when he created the character of the Count.

In 1878 Stoker married the celebrated beauty Florence Balcombe. One of her previous suitors had been Oscar Wilde and although Wilde and Stoker, who had known each other at Trinity College, fell out over the marriage Stoker was ultimately able to resume his friendship with Wilde in later years. Oscar Wilde, of course, went on to write one of the few Gothic novels able to bear comparison with Dracula - namely The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

(Florence Balcombe, society beauty and, from 1878, the wife of Bram Stoker)

Upon moving to London after his marriage Stoker became acting manager, and then business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, a post he held for 27 years. Through Irving Stoker met Arthur Conan Doyle, the future author of such Gothic tales as 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band' (1892) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). While he was at the Lyceum Stoker oversaw a stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's brilliant novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The play, which began its run on the 3rd September 1888, caused controversy due to its perceived similarities to the Whitechapel murders carried out by Jack the Ripper, murders which began at almost exactly the same time. The more you look into Stoker's life, and the more you look at the people with whom he built friendships and working relationships, the more you begin to see the all-pervading air of Gothic drama that fed into Dracula.

Of course Dracula rather overshadows the rest of Stoker's work as an author. To some extent this is inevitable, it is, after all, by some distance his most powerful work. Even so his other novels deserve respect. In particular I have always had a soft spot for The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a novel about an archaeologist's attempts to revive Queen Tera, an ancient Egyptian mummy. Like Dracula the novel offers valuable insights into fin-de-siècle themes such as the rise of the New Woman; Imperialism and the way in which the old world of tradition and superstition clashes with the new world of scientific progress. The book was also the basis for one of Hammer's finest and most under-rated movies - Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. The title may be daft, but with its striking lead performance by Valerie Leon and its distinctive visuals the film is most definitely a gem.

(The Jewel of Seven Stars - not as iconic as Dracula, but a fine book all the same)

There is, of course, plenty more to discover about Bram Stoker and Dracula in our major exhibition Terror and Wonder; and there is a wealth of information about Gothic novels and themes on the British Library's Discovering Literature website. There is also an opportunity to help conserve an iconic Gothic novel via Adopt a Book.

So, in conclusion, happy birthday Bram! For those of us who love Gothic literature he really was one of the finest exponents of the chilling tale and, on his birthday, perhaps we should raise a glass of something dark and red in his honour. Thank you for the novels, and thank you for all those dark, hauntingly beautiful memories.

 

In the British Museum collection there is a print dated 18 June 1782, showing two women driving a vehicle in front of a cosmetic shop. The vehicle is a gig, raised absurdly high on springs, so that the seats are poised above the height of the four horses pulling it. A monogram on the side shows the letter A, indicating that the lady driving is Lady Archer, the famous beauty (though hers was a beauty famously achieved with much artificial aid). The caption below states: The Portland Place A-R. Driving without a beau to R-D’s perfume warehouse P-LL M-LL

© The Trustees of the British Museum

The cosmetic shop has an improbably large bow window, curling round the corner of the building, and notices above the door advertise some of the products on sale within: Italian washes, Ivory teeth, Mouse Eye Brows etc and the Best French Roush.

It is widely supposed that during two or three periods of the eighteenth century, women satisfied the demands of fashion for high and thick eyebrows by shaving off their own and replacing them with false eyebrows made from mouse-skin. It’s an uncomfortable idea, but reasonably creditable within the context of other cosmetic and medical products of the time. However, the evidence for the practice is thin, and very specific in its nature. Apart from this cartoon the evidence is largely satirical poems, by Matthew Prior, Jonathan Swift, and an anonymous poem printed in the London Daily Post on 19 June 1736, containing the lines:

                    Or Nightly Traps insidious lay,
                    To catch new Eye-brows for the Day

The relevant poem by Matthew Prior, dated 1718, runs:

                    HELEN was just dipt into bed
                    Her eye-brows on the toilet lay
                    Away the kitten with them fled
                    As fees belonging to her prey

                    For this misfortune careless Jane,
                    Assure yourself, was loudly rated
                    And madam, getting up again,
                    With her own hand the mouse-trap baited.

                    On little things, as sages write,
                    Depends our human joy or sorrows
                    If we don’t catch a mouse to-night,
                    Alas! no eyebrows for to-morrow.

This is one of a series of mostly misogynistic poems that show women using false eyebrows, and false eyes, to retain their attractiveness in the face of increasing years. It dates from 1718, a few years after Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband (1707), which has a reference to false eyebrows:

Mrs Clerimont: … Oh bless me Jenny, I am so plane, I am afraid of myself – I have not laid on half red enough – what a dogh-baked thing I was before I improved myself, and travelled for beauty – however, my face is prettily designed to day.

Fainlove: Indeed, madam you begin to have so fine an hand, that you are younger every day than other.

Mrs Clerimont: The Ladies abroad used to call me Mrs Titian, I was so famous for my colouring; but prethee. Wench, bring me my black eye-brows out of the next room.

Jenny: Madam, I have them in my hand. 

Fainlove: It would be happy for all that are to see you today, if you could change your eyes too. 

Mrs Clerimont: Gallant enough – no hang it, I’ll wear these I have on … 

Black eyebrows, not mouse-coloured – though ‘mouse’ and ‘mousey’ as terms for the colour date from much later. Not that we should necessarily expect the material of manufacture to be specified here, but it seems likely that in this passage, in which Mrs Clerimont’s use of cosmetic eyebrows is being highlighted, the opportunity of a satirical reference to the source of the items would be taken up. 

Swift’s poem A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed (1734) contains the famous lines: 

                    Her eyebrows from a mouse’s hide
                    Stuck on with art on either side,
                    Pulls off with care, and first displays ‘em,
                    Then in a play-books smoothly lays ‘em. 

Corinna, Swift’s ‘nymph’, evidently takes great care of her false eye-brows, which are protected from attack during the night by vermin, unlike her plaster and hair-piece. The poem does not spare Corinna at all – she has a ‘crystal eye’, false teeth, a wig infested with fleas, ‘flabby dugs’, and plumpers – lumps of cork kept in the mouth to fill out the cheeks after rotten teeth had been removed. For all of the cosmetic aids, other than the eyebrows, there is ample evidence, including evidence of how they were made. Note also the reference to where the eye-brows are kept – a ‘play-book’, indicating that Corinna was an actress, who might be expected to wear larger than life make-up accessories. 

Lack of evidence is of course nothing more than lack of evidence; but at the time of the cartoon of 1782 there were several books available that gave details of how to dress false hair – The Art of Hair-dressing, and Making it Grow Fast, 1750, by William Moore; A Treatise on the Hair, 1770, by David Ritchie; Palacocosmos, or the Whole Art of Hairdressing, 1782. In comparison with what we know about how wigs were constructed, powdered and coloured, how beards were dyed, and the huge number of recipes for preventing or encouraging hair growth, not to mention how to prepare other facial cosmetics, the absence of information on how to prepare, style, fix and preserve mouse-skin eyebrows is noteworthy. 

This does pose the question – to what extent should we rely on satirical literature for documentary evidence of social history? When Prior’s Helen, in another poem, reproaches her maid Jenny for losing her box of false eyebrows, and claims: 

                    I can behold no mortal now,
                    For what’s an eye without a brow? 

We know that this is hyperbole and an accurate reflection on how many people feel about themselves without the aid of cosmetics. 

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is tipped beyond the realm of reality, but retains enough reality in it to create an ambiguity; the tone of the narration, the details of documentation, and the way these details are bound into the narrative give an air of authenticity . We know there is something believable in the highly fanciful tale – an ambiguity which Swift clearly enjoyed: witness the apparent glee with which he told Pope of ‘a Bishop [who] said, that Book was full of improbable lies, and for his part, he hardly believed a word of it. 

Satire, to work, has to be close to the truth; it goes beyond the boundary of truth, and in doing so, in defining that boundary, it tells us what is truth. Satire indicates what people thought, and how notable details make something recognisable. Corinna’s crystal eye (did so many women lose their eyes?) is an easy target and is focused on, just as was Richard Nixon’s nose and Margaret Thatcher’s handbag; but in the absence of other documentation how much can we rely on it as actual evidence of social history? 

Julian Walker 

Julian's latest book, The Finishing Touch: Cosmetics through the Ages is published by the British Library (hardback £10, ISBN 978 0 7123 5752 4) and is available from bookshops now, including shop.bl.uk/

October 2014 marks the 80^th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days. The novel draws heavily on his experiences while serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927, an important period in his formative political development. As with many first novels, publication was far from straightforward. Although Burmese Days was his first novel, it was not his first book. In 1933, Gollancz had published Down and out in Paris and London, Owell’s account of living in poverty which was notable, for among other things, as the first publication to appear under his pseudonym, George Orwell. He had previously published articles and reviews under his real name of Eric Blair. Orwell’s life-long literary agent Leonard Moore had placed Down and out in Paris and London with Victor Gollancz knowing the publisher would be sympathetic to the tenor of the book. It followed then, that Gollancz would be the obvious choice to publish Orwell’s first novel. However, Victor Gollancz was reluctant to publish Burmese Days because he feared publication would provoke legal actions of libel and deformation from colonial administrators. Victor Gollancz’s publishing concern was a relatively recent venture and he was naturally cautious knowing that an ill-advised publication resulting in legal proceedings could easily ruin his company. Reluctantly, he turned down the book as did the publishers Heinemann, and Jonathan Cape for the same reasons.

George Orwell. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Orwell then had a stroke of luck. Eugene Saxton, the chief editor at American publishers Harper & Brothers, was visiting London and Moore managed to arrange for him to meet Orwell. Fortunately for Orwell, Saxton agreed to publish the novel after requesting a few minor changes. So, somewhat unusually for an English author, Orwell’s first novel was first published in American rather than Britain on the 25 October 1934 in an edition of 2,000 copies. This was followed two months later by a second printing in December. Being an American publication, the novel was not liable for legal deposit therefore the British Museum Library (as the British Library was then known) did not receive a copy. Perhaps we can assume that Orwell was aware of this because on the 11 December 1934 he presented an inscribed copy of the second printing to the Museum.

From Burmese Days. British Library shelfmark Cup.403.s.21

In the meantime Victor Gollancz had been following the reception of the book with interest and when a rush of libel suits didn’t materialise reconsidered publishing the novel in Britain. However, cautious as ever, he insisted on a number of changes. He asked Orwell to check official directories to ensure that the names he’d used in the novel were not those of serving colonial officials. He also asked for references to Upper Burma to be changed to the less specific province of Burma. Orwell reluctantly agreed to the changes. Among the names he changed were; Dr Veraswami to Dr Murkaswami, the Lakersteens became the Latimers, and the Sub-divisional Magistrate, U Po Kyin became U Po Sing. The British edition also contained an author’s note stressing that all the characters in the book were entirely fictitious. The first British edition was published on 24 June 1935 in an edition of 2,500. The Library’s copy of the first British edition is held at shelfmark NN.24091. Later Orwell was to refer to the first British edition of Burmese Days as “garbled”. When the first Penguin edition was being prepared in the mid-1940s, Orwell insisted that the American edition should be followed which reverted back to the original names and this has now become the standard English text.

The British Library is home to the George Orwell pamphlet collection http://www.bl.uk/pdf/orwell-pamphlets-inventory-final.pdf for more information about this please see http://www.bl.uk/pdf/george-orwells-loft.pdf

Autumn ushers in chill winds, falling leaves and lengthening shadows. Mornings and evenings are darker, mists become heavier, spiders scuttle from dark corners and carved pumpkins appear in windows as Halloween looms. All of which makes it the perfect time of year to talk about ghosts and vampires and things that go ARRRRRGH in the night.

(Above: The entrance to Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. Photo by Tony Antoniou)

Where better to start when it comes to discussing autumnal shivers than the British Library's major new exhibition, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination. The exhibition explores two hundred and fifty years of Gothic literature, beginning with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and running through to the present day. The show provides plenty of insight into novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, Dracula and Rebecca but it also explores, among many other themes, the use of Gothic imagery by authors such as Charles Dickens and the Brontës; our fascination with hauntings; the rise of Gothic literature for children and the macabre appeal of the zombie as the monster of choice in the late 20th century. The exhibition also examines the influence of Gothic literature in other fields including fashion, music, art, architecture and, crucially, film.

Gothic literature and film owe a great deal to one another. The second most frequently portrayed fictional character in film and on television is Count Dracula (the most frequently portrayed is Sherlock Holmes - and given the nature of stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles and 'The Speckled Band' there is also a considerable amount of Gothic associated with Baker Street's finest). Max Schreck's shadow gliding up the stairs in Nosferatu (1922) provides one of cinema's defining moments; just as Christopher Lee's first appearance as Count Dracula in 1958 altered our mental image of Bram Stoker's creation for ever, changing him from the decayed aristocrat of the novel into a suave and imposing individual possessed of considerable charm. Subsequent adaptations of Dracula have continued the trend for reinventing the Count, portraying him as something akin to a romantic hero, as in Frank Langella's performance from 1979, or as a conflicted but noble figure effectively contracting a deal with the devil in order to save his people as in Dracula Untold, released in 2014.

(Above: Another iconic portrayal of the Count, this time by Bela Lugosi, seen here with a vampire slaying kit from the Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination exhibition. Photo byTony Antoniou)

Indeed Count Dracula provides a particularly striking example of how cinema adapts characters from Gothic fiction and reflects them back in new forms to highlight changing tastes and attitudes. One film company, Hammer Films, made several movies featuring Bram Stoker's immortal creation and each portrayed the Count in a different fashion. Hammer's first adaptation, Dracula (1958), played fairly freely with the source material, placing the action entirely in a somewhat vaguely defined mittel-Europe of forests, huts and taverns where the locals all go very quiet as soon as the newly-arrived stranger asks for directions to the castle. Certain characters, such as the fly-eating lunatic Renfield were removed altogether while the Count, played by Christopher Lee, is a model of charm, elegance and icy menace. He is also a curiously shadowy figure - dominating the film and yet only speaking thirteen lines of dialogue throughout. The critics were sniffy - with the reviewer in the Daily Worker claiming 'I came away revolted and outraged' - which highlights another common theme: Gothic has never been entirely respectable. It has always been too dark, too transgressive and too challenging to ever find a comfortable home within the realm of the drearily acceptable.

Subsequent Hammer films moved the Count away from his East European roots. Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) placed the Count in fin-de-siècle England, and set him against three debauched and hypocritical members of 'respectable' society. In this scenario the Count actually becomes something of a sympathetic character for a younger generation reacting against the staid traditions and restraints imposed upon them by their parents. In Dracula A.D. 1972 the Count prowled through contemporary London, turning the thrill-seeking hippies who haunted its more colourful locations to the dark side. The Count and decadence do seem to go together - somehow he is at home amongst the dandies and the aesthetes and those on the margins of society whether they date from the 1890s or the 1970s.

Like all of the best villains you can't keep the Count down. Dracula continues to stalk our television shows and cinema screens, not to mention our imaginations. He really is a monster for all times and seasons. A nightmare for all ages and places. Happy screaming.

Learn more about Gothic literature on our Discovering Literature website while the Events programme for Terror and Wonder can be found here. Enjoy, and please don't have nightmares.

 

 

 

It has become a truism to say that the First World War was ‘a poet’s war’.

If this easy declaration risks covering up the work of poets from later wars (yes: there were poets in the Second World War!), it remains very much the case that we continue to try to understand the experiences and consequences of the First World War through its poets. Indeed, it’s interesting that the concept of a ‘war poet’ appears to be a particularly British phenomenon, and one that dates from Owen, Sassoon, and other combatants of the 14-18 conflict. Of course other belligerent countries during the First World War had poets who wrote for or against the hostilities…but the collective term ‘war poet’ (as opposed to individual poets who write about the war) is not so easily translated into other languages or literary cultures.

Our new First World War One learning site features an excellent essay by Dr Santanu Das, who reminds us that First World War poetry is more than the trench poets that we perhaps first think of when we hear the word ‘war poet’, and stretched beyond traditional poetry collections to bleed (literally, it feels) into all walks of life: posters, post-cards, speeches…to  novels, films, and (of course) Blackadder. 

It seems to me that haunting all consideration of war poetry is Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. As Das writes, when on Easter Sunday 1915, Dean Inge read out ‘The Soldier’ from the pulpit at St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘he was at once creating and anointing a secular saint: the ‘poet soldier’’.

‘If I should die, think only this…’:

The opening salvo of the poem reminds us of the inevitable awareness of death that accompanies the desire of all war poets to both witness--and to frame--later understanding of what they have observed; Owen later developed the idea: ‘All a poet can do today is warn’.

This handwritten copy of the poem (see here for associated rights) was written by Brooke for Edward Marsh, who was an early critic of Brooke’s poetry and the editor of the anthology, Georgian Poetry, published in 1912. Marsh donated it to the Library at the British Museum in 1915. He explains in a letter accompanying his donation that the poems were written when Brooke was staying with him in January 1915 three months before his death of septicemia at Skyros in Greece. Marsh writes that the poems are ‘one of my most precious possessions’ which he can hardly bear to part with but for the fact that he thinks that they should become part of the Library’s collections.

This Friday 10 October, poet and writer Owen Sheers—whose own recent verse drama, Pink Mist, was  about soldiers serving in Afghanistan and the families who are left behind—will introduce an evening of a hundred years of war poetry with two guests: former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, and poet and writer Sabrina Mahfouz. From Owen and Sassoon to today’s conflicts, they will consider how the poetry of conflict has influenced their own work, and read from poets both known and forgotten of conflicts from across the world that have scarred our past century since the War to end all Wars ended in 1918. For more information about the event, see the British Library’s event pages; and to see Sir Andrew Motion read from the work of Wilfred Owen see here.

 

Literary walks round London have been popular since at least the 19th century. A personal favourite of mine - I offer it to most of my guests from overseas - is a walk round the homes of writers and artists who lived in Chelsea. Starting with Agatha Christie and ending with Oscar Wilde, the itinerary takes in, among others, Edith Sitwell, Thomas Carlyle (a National Trust house), Henry James, T S Eliot, Ian Fleming and Somerset Maugham (all four residents in the same block of flats, though not at the same time), Christina Rossetti and George Eliot. On a fine day, and with little traffic on the route, it is the perfect introduction to literary London. 

And when it rains? I recommend an indoor tour of a different kind, a promenade through books in which great literary figures give us their own introductions to London. Each of the writers named above left us pictures of the London they knew, and some of them are exhaustive on the subject. Henry James, for one, could keep the reader occupied for days. This is not just his non-fiction, like English Hours. The novella, A London Life, has a marvellous passage in which Laura Wing takes her American visitor to see the sights, starting with the Temple and St Paul's ("a disappointment") and finally making a "long, rummaging visit" to the Soane Museum, one of the least known of the city's attractions.

The sense of exploration - are they exploring the city or starting to explore each other? - is one captured by many writers. We can share the excitement as Benjamin Disraeli's Ferdinand arrives in London (in Henrietta Temple) or the ever more suffocating air as Oliver Twist is led down the dark and dangerous backwater that is Saffron Hill. Another of the writers on the Chelsea walk, George Eliot, left a heartrending passage in Daniel Deronda, which sees the desperate Mirah Lapidoth trailing the streets and contemplating suicide. Other newcomers - Christine, a French prostitute in Arnold Bennett's The Pretty Lady, or the post-war arrivals from the West Indies in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners - are lone figures trying to find their place among the multitude.

General view of London, drawn and engraved by T Bowles, 1794. Shelfmark Maps.3518.(14).

What makes every one of these books worth reading is that they are not merely a list of sights, or buildings, or an objective picture of the city. Each is a personal account, seen through the eyes of its characters and emotion is drawn from interacting with the city. In some of the best, observer and city seem to fuse into a shared spirit - try almost any passage in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (I suggest Elizabeth's bus journey up the Strand, which memorably captures Woolf's identification with London).  

Mrs Dalloway walked the streets of London in the 1920s, and the great advantage of literature is that we can be not just tourists, but also time-travellers. Writers and poets allow us to drop in on London past, present and future. If I had to pick one piece of writing that I feel transports me to another London that I can see, and hear, and smell, it would be the celebrated passage from Book 7 of Wordsworth's The Prelude, in which he explores the city wide-eyed, pleased to note "all specimens of man...Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese/ and Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns". Reading that, you might reasonably ask, "Has London really changed?". "Yes," answers Tobias Smollett, whose Humphry Clinker is open-mouthed at the rate of expansion and predicts that Pimlico and Knightsbridge could soon be joined to Chelsea and Kensington (horror!). Or Dickens, who witnessed the furious growth of the railways (Dombey and Son is vivid on this). Or Angela Carter, who observes in Wise Children that there is "a time that comes in every century when they reach out for all that they can grab of dear old London, and pull it down. Then they build it up again..."

Sunday Morning in the New City, Lambeth, from The Illustrated London News, March 1872. Shelfmark PP.7611.

There is so much great writing about London that it could take a lifetime to absorb it all. That is certainly how it felt to me when the British Library asked me to compile an anthology of the best poetry and fiction that might encapsulate everything London stands for in about 120 pages. Who should be in? Wordsworth, yes definitely. Dickens, of course (at times it felt as if the entire anthology could come from Dickens). And there have to be those who have shone a light on London that brings a particular time to life like no other, from William Blake to Peter Ackroyd, Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith. 

What I did not know at the time was the marvellous range of illustrations that would come out of the British Library's collections, though in retrospect, that should have gone without saying. The wealth of material about London in the basements at St Pancras must go down to floors that even the staff hardly know are there. If London - a literary anthology is able to encapsulate a fraction of that literary inheritance, it will have done well. No amount of walking the city's streets, however enjoyable, can equal it. 

Richard Fairman 

London: A Literary Anthology is published by the British Library (hardback £20, ISBN 978 0 7123 5740 1) and is available from bookshops now, including shop.bl.uk/

Guided by Artistic Director Tim Etchells, Sheffield-based theatre company Forced Entertainment celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year. Since its formation in 1984 the company has continually striven to find new performance and theatre forms with which to describe contemporary urban life, devising work through long months of improvisation and discussion.

The Forced Entertainment collection at the British Library contains more than 300 videos of performances and rehearsals. These were originally on analogue formats such as VHS but have since been digitized by the Library.

In anticipation of the company's anniversary year, the Library employed performance art graduate Coral Davies on a four-month paid internship to enhance existing catalogue entries, create new ones, digitize and re-digitize material, and generally give the collection a good tidy.

More recently, Tim Etchells was kind enough to consent to a new video interview in which he gives his thoughts on the Forced Entertainment collection and on archives more generally.

  

Forced Entertainment has a number of shows coming up, both in this country and abroad. Please see the company's official website for further details.  

A guest post by Dr Dick McCaw, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre.
Department of Drama and Theatre, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Let me introduce you to the materials in the archive of an organization with which I had the pleasure of working between 1989 and 2001. It was called the International Workshop Festival and the name describes pretty much what it was – a festival consisting of talks, workshops and demonstrations given by internationally recognised figures in the performing arts. These workshops were designed to offer professionals opportunities to find out about new developments in the performing arts, to reconnect with their training method, or to explore new approaches to training or composition. Some of the workshop leaders were professional teachers; others were eminent directors, actors, dancers and puppeteers, who would share their insights or questions about their respective art forms.

The archive has recently been donated to the British Library. The collection should give you an idea of what used to happen in each year (in the first few years it took place in April but after 1990 it was concentrated on the month of September).

So what does it consist of?

• Videos of workshops
• Videos of talks
• Audio recordings of talks
• Photographs from 1995 to 2001
• Programmes and publicity for each festival
• Articles, reports and other materials (including two T-shirts)

I joined the festival in 1989, one year into its existence, though I was already very aware of it since I knew the founder and Artistic Director, Nigel Jamieson, and a close friend had taken part in one of the workshops in April 1988.

Dick McCaw and Nigel Jamieson, 1994. Photograph © Simon Richardson

Nigel left to live in Australia in 1992 and since I had been managing the festival for three years, I was invited to become its second Artistic Director. One of my first decisions was to document some of the workshops, and in 1993 I met Peter Hulton of the Arts Documentation Unit with whom I was to work from then until the time of writing (September 2014).

The festival would begin with two weeks in London, after which we would undertake projects in a number of cities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We worked in Belfast, Bristol, Coventry, Derry/Londonderry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Nottingham. The London leg would typically consist of 10 week-long workshops and the same number of weekend workshops. We therefore needed a venue with plenty of studios and up until 1999 this was provided by the London Studio Centre. The 2000 festival was in the Jerwood Space and 2001 was at the Battersea Arts Centre. With five simultaneous workshops there is no way that all of them could be documented. Occasionally we would have a second person behind the camera but we probably only recorded about 15% of the workshops in any one festival. Peter did not record all the talks, and we would only sometimes remember to bring in a tape-recorder. So this archive offers a selective snapshot of some of our past activities.

In 1997 we received funding from the Arts Council of England to buy digital cameras and authoring equipment for what were then called CD-ROMs. The multimedia format of the CD-ROM offered Peter and me the opportunity to create a different kind of documentation. In addition to the video footage we could include photos and written commentaries. Our first DVD-ROM appeared in 2001 and the seventh and last was produced in 2006. All of our CD/DVD-ROM documentations are in the British Library archive.

Dominique Dupuy, Greenwich Dance Agency, 1996. Photograph © Simon Richardson

IWF was not unique as an organiser of training opportunities: in Wales there was the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth (formerly Cardiff Arts Lab), and based in Manchester there was the Physical State International. But we were the only festival and I found it important to foster its existence as a unique gathering for professionals at all stages in their careers. IWF was more than just an in-service training provider; it was also a social event. But now there is no organization dedicated to continuing professional development or training. Already IWF and these other organisations are a historical phenomenon.

The festival day was packed: before the workshops there were warm-ups, first with the singer Helen Chadwick, and after them there were wind-downs, most often taking the form of a Feldenkrais lesson with Scott Clark. After a pause for a beer we would then have an evening programme of talks. It was a 12-hour day, from 9.30 in the morning to 9.30 in the evening.

‘Archive’ is a grand-sounding word but often it consists of all the materials that have survived, quite often to be found under the bed or stuffed in a cupboard. This archive is no different. After I left IWF I lost contact with the festival management, and six years later it was no more. I have no idea of the whereabouts of the photographs taken by Simon Annand between 1988 and 1994, nor of any written documentations. Luckily, Peter Hulton had kept copies of video recordings between 1994 and 2001. I had some recordings of the talks, but this represents probably about 10% of the total programme. None of the projects after 2001 was recorded.

The photographs in this archive all date from 1995 when we were joined by the photographer Simon Richardson who would travel with us to every project. They are ‘seconds’ that he had kept in his studio. The prints might not be to the quality that Simon would display in an exhibition but they are the only surviving record that exists'.

Gojo Nasanosuke, London Studio Centre, 1998. Photograph © Simon Richardson

Just before I took all the printed material to the British Library, I laid it out on my bedroom floor so that I could easily make an inventory of it all. While away on a weekend break there was a water escapement from the flat above and my bedroom was flooded. The paper documents were badly damaged but thanks to the Library’s conservators all were salvaged, though the colour is washed out and they probably still smell a bit. As I say, an archive is what, by chance, has survived.

Apart from the printed documents there are Word documents which contain reports by Nigel or myself on each festival. There is a certain amount of correspondence, and funding applications. Nigel’s festival reports offered a fine-grained description and analysis of the year’s activities, and I followed him in producing these each year. I have never re-read these reports (some of which were really long) but remember writing them with some pleasure. They were an account of everything I had learned in that year. Someone keen on studying the management of a festival like IWF might want to dip into these files.

If you are interested in professional training and development, if you want a snapshot of what was happening at the more experimental end of the performing arts spectrum in the 1990s, you might want to spend a few hours browsing through these materials. I hope you have an interesting journey!

NB. The collection is listed on the Sound and Moving Image Catalogue under the collection number C1526.