Eddie Cass

The James Madison Carpenter Collection of British Folk Plays

In this, the last of my series of papers on collectors of British folk plays, I come to a man who has a direct personal interest for me. Thomas Fairman Ordish (1855–1924) whom I spoke about in my first presidential address was well before my time but a man whose aspirations I admire (Cass 2010, 1–10). Alex Helm (1920–70), dealt with in my second presidential address, was of my time but I never met him, although I did correspond with some of his colleagues in the early days of my own interest in the pace-egg plays of Lancashire and Yorkshire (Cass 2011, 1–15). James Madison Carpenter (1888–1983) is a man I feel I know. After all, I have spent the last ten years working with colleagues first on an online catalogue of the above collection, and currently on a critical edition of the texts to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. Although he remains the “heroic failure” in terms of the concept I have sought to explore in this series of presidential addresses, I have come to admire him greatly during the time I have worked with his material. Carpenter was prone to compare his collections with those of earlier scholars and, if we were to do the same today, then it is the case that we have far more folk play references available to us than Carpenter could have dreamt of. Nevertheless, the two hundred and eighty or so texts he collected in the field remain an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the British folk play—and they have never been superseded as a collection. The forthcoming volumes of the critical edition of his work must represent the most important British performance folklore publication of our time.

T. Fairman Ordish and the British Folk Play

The reason I first joined The Folklore Society in the 1960swas because of an interest in folk drama and in the pace-egg play in particular. My interest had been sparked off by a reading of T. S. Eliot’s (1963) TheWaste Land and, at his recommendation, of the once well-regarded book by JessieWeston (1920), From Ritual to Romance, a title that, despite being discredited academically, remains in print in several editions. Over the past forty years, I have been loyal to this interest. Folk drama remains my main folkloric interest and it is in this area thatmost of my academicwork is based. When choosing a topic for my series of presidential addresses, the choice was reasonably easy—the subject matter virtually chose itself. In this lecture, and in the two following, I want to talk about three individuals, each of whom assembled important collections of folk play material. These individuals—T. Fairman Ordish, James Madison Carpenter and Alex Helm—collected folk drama material over a period that started in the late 1890s and continued until 1970. Despite this long time period, and the fact that two of the collectors were English and the third American, their views on folk plays were remarkably similar, views now considered to be mistaken. For this similarity of views, and for a second reason to which I will allude later, all three men can be said to be failures, albeit heroic failures. Nevertheless, despite the fact that I describe them as failures, they are still the pillars onwhich I choose to buildmy series of lectures—and onwhich, as I shall attempt to show, much contemporary folk play scholarship is built. I start with the first of my flawed heroes, T. Fairman Ordish. Thomas Fairman Ordish was born in 1855. He was one of six children in a family that must have been reasonably comfortable financially as the father, Thomas Ordish, was a wholesale stationer. Although Ordish was educated privately, he did not go to university but began work at the age of fifteen as a “Clerk in the Book Trade.” However, by 1880, the year in which hewasmarried, he was employed as a clerk in the Patent Office where he was to spend the rest of his working life. Ordish married Ada Lamcraft, the daughter of a stationer, presumably a woman he met through his father’s connections. Ada was six years older than Ordish and they had one child, a daughter, Eliza Lydia. For all Ordish’s working life, the family lived at various addresses in London, but moved to Herne Bay on his early retirement through ill health in 1918. He died in a nursing home in Leytonstone, Essex in December 1924. He was buried in Herne Bay. Ordish’s work at the Patent Office can hardly have been too onerous as he was able to devote a large part of his leisure time to a variety of academic pursuits, despite the fact that he was not a trained academic. One of his principal involvements was with the London Topographical Society, founded in 1880, with Folklore 121 (April 2010): 1–11

Alex Helm (1920–1970) and His Collection of Folk Performance Material

In my first Presidential Address last year, I explained how I came to the study of folk plays and the rationale behind what was planned as my series of addresses. On that occasion I spoke about Thomas Fairman Ordish and the collection that is held under his name in the archives of The Folklore Society. I am delighted to be able to say that work on the digitisation and transcription of this archive continues (Cass 2010, 1–11). Today, I want to talk about the second of my “heroic failures,” Alex Helm (see Figure 1). Alex Helm was born in Burnley, Lancashire on 2 March 1920, the only child of a family of weavers. Ian Helm, Alex’s son, believes that his grandfather became self-employed at some time, but he knows little about his work as his grandfather died about the time of Ian’s birth. After primary school, Alex Helm attended Burnley Grammar School where, as Christopher Cawte told me, he was taught history by a teacher who was a local historian with an interest in the customs of the Burnley area. It is likely that this teacher, who may have aroused Helm’s interest in both history and folklore, was Walter Bennett, who wrote a four-volume history of the town (Bennett 1946–51). However, in a letter to Roger Marriott dated 11 February 1958, Helm said that he had first been taught to dance by Irene Fisher. Fisher became Joint Honorary Secretary of the Preston Branch of the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) in 1928 where she was responsible for the teaching of dancing in the area. She was awarded a Gold Badge by the society in 1959 (EDS 1961, 110). She was clearly influential in encouraging what was to become a determining interest in Helm’s life and work. Helm’s early ambition was to be a veterinary surgeon but he was persuaded by his parents to become a teacher. He then trained for the profession at St John’s College, York, where his principal subject was Physical Education and his subsidiary subjects were English and Gardening. He had already acquired a good working knowledge of French and German before going up to St John’s. [1] However, and more importantly for us, it was here that he developed his printing and bookbinding skills. He also continued his folk dancing and he went on folk-dance tours of the Yorkshire Dales. These tours were organised by Leta Douglas, who was gym mistress at Settle High School; she published two collections of Yorkshire Dales dances in the early 1930s (Douglas 1931; 1934). Apparently, folk-dance classes were run regularly in the Dales since the local police sergeant told the Leeds Morris Men that his wife had attended them; this made life easier for them when they arranged their first tour in the area in 1953. Folklore 122 (April 2011): 1–15

James Madison Carpenter and George Baker: An Analytical Description of an Artistic Relationship

Abstract Between 1933 and 1935 James Madison Carpenter, an American from Harvard College, assembled a large collection of folk plays as part of his important folk performance material. During the course of his work in the Cotswolds Carpenter met George Baker, a rural labourer and a talented cartoonist and sketcher. Carpenter asked Baker to prepare some illustrations for a planned book on folk plays. This paper explores the cooperation between the two men and discusses the reasons why Baker’s depiction of the characters in the Cotswold plays are more successful than the images of characters from other plays.

Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids. A Journey through the English Ritual Year

of the joke-tellers and the context of social rules and regulations, but only together with the availability of a proper target do the jokes become significant—and funny. A good joke verbalises the forbidden incongruities and, even more importantly, does that through using a conventional target in order to minimise the efforts of the listener who needs to get enough information to enjoy the punch line. Jokes and Targets, being an excellent piece of scholarship, helps to further clarify why certain targets have become conventional and what are the rules that govern target choice. (This review was made possible by grant 8149 from the Estonian Science Foundation.)

The Lower Heyford Folk Play: James Madison Carpenter's Use of Dialect in his Cylinder Transcriptions

Abstract James Madison Carpenter came to Britain twice, in 1928 to collect sea shanties as part of the work on his PhD at Harvard College, and again between 1929 and 1935. During this last visit, Carpenter assembled a collection that is probably the largest of British folk performance material to have been collected in the field at that time. In 1972, the Library of Congress purchased Carpenters whole collection. Alan Jabbour of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress travelled to Booneville, Mississippi, in order to collect the material and, during the course of his visit, he interviewed Carpenter at length. From the interview we gain an insight into Carpenters methods of collecting, which were advanced for the time.

RESEARCH ARTICLE: FOCUS ON TRADITIONAL DRAMA

This article reports on the discovery of a copy of The Peace Egg Book , a previously unknown chapbook printed in Manchester, UK. The chapbook, which has an Irish text, is set within the contexts of printing and of the Irish community in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester. The textual links between The Peace Egg Book and the Belfast Christmas Rhime Books are analysed, as are the parallels to an Irish-influenced oral tradition set out in a manuscript of 1842. The article establishes the importance of the chapbook in linking together Irish and Lancashire traditional play chapbooks.