A note on the following text:
"Imperilled Inheritance" was a project which grew out of the closure of the Institute of Dialect and Folklife Studies at the University of Leeds in 1984, against the backdrop of little protest and no fanfare. It began as a private initiative of the last of the PhD students, Craig Fees, to record and celebrate the Institute, and developed in the context of the exciting coming-together of a number of dispersed folklorists in the British Folk Studies Forum, determined to build together a new and revitalised folk studies field in Britain.
The project was originally earmarked for publication in a special issue of the Forum's Talking Folklore to be edited by Craig Fees and fellow PhD alum Roy Judge; but the text refused to be tamed, and outgrew deadlines and page numbers, and ultimately Talking Folklore itself, the final issue of which appeared in 1990. Steve Roud, a founding member of the British Folk Studies Forum and Librarian for the Folk Lore Society, proposed that the Folk Lore Society publish it; and with that and a heavy dose of pragmatism, Part 1 on Harold Orton and the English Dialect Survey was wrestled from the much longer text and appeared in 1991.
The text presented here has been OCRed from 1991 computer print-outs recently rediscovered while sorting through old boxes. Its incompleteness and the absence of in-text footnote numbers indicates that it was a draft, several drafts removed from being publication-ready.
- Craig Fees 1 September 2022
THE IMPERILLED INHERITANCE:
DIALECT AND FOLKLIFE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 1946-1984
Stewart Sanderson
Stewart Sanderson, a Malawi-born lowland Scot of missionary stock could easily have chosen a different career. Having taken a first in English at Edinburgh in 1951, he went off to research the 19th century Italian novel in Italy and while there was offered the job of senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Adelaide and the post of lektor in Italian at the University of Catania. He chose to accept an offer from the School of Scottish Studies instead, and committed himself to a peripheral discipline without roots in Britain, and with no certain future there.
The full reasons are no doubt complex but when he says that his interest in literature had "always been rather on social history and background", and that "missionary blood was in my veins", there is some indication. And as missionaries step out of one world into another which has not yet been opened up (to use an English Dialect Survey phrase), it gives the questions: What is that world to which he belonged, and what was the message he was bringing to Leeds?
The world to which Sanderson belonged, his invisible college, is fairly clear. Throughout his career he casts back to his mentors, some of whom he was fortunate enough to bring with him onto the Folk Life Advisory Committee at Leeds: Seamus Delargy of the Irish Folklore Commission, Iorwerth Peate of the Welsh Folk Museum, and a roll-call of Scandinavian scholars from what could almost be called the heroic age of northern folk studies: Dag Stromback, Ake Campbell. He belonged to the international world of folk and ethnological studies - co-secretary of Section H (Anthropology and Archaeology) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, becoming after joining Leeds.
Other committees
What was the message he was bringing? One part of it was about the scope, the boundaries of folk studies. Another part had to do with the spiritual underpinnings which, in Sanderson's case, could quite appropriately be termed religious with the Latin sense of "binding together".
At his most sweeping, or perhaps the word is poetic, he defined the study of folklore in 1957 as "the study of a certain kind of history; the intimate domestic history of a people.". More prosaically he defined it in 1960 as "the inherited popular traditions of a community, both oral and material."
He was convinced that it need be both oral and material - "I was certain that my mentors in Ireland and Sweden had got this right," he later wrote, "...since folk culture must be viewed holistically if it is to be interpreted adequately", and he used the term worter und sachen - word and object - almost as a personal talisman throughout the period of the founding of folklife studies at Leeds. By grounding the study of dialect and culture in objects one entered into the intimate world of everyday people, armed with and linked to the rich world of Language and Literature – a missionary from, but also a conduit bringing a spiritual wealth back: A missionary to the established disciplines as well.
The purpose one was fulfilling was both practical and spiritual. Looking at folk culture as a kind of gene bank, he said in 1960 "I believe that subsequent generations may need to know, and to draw fresh inspiration from the values of an older world than ours perhaps even more than our own generation needs to." This is a view he apparently sustained throughout the history of the folklife programme at Leeds. As he said in 1987, "I believe that no civilisation can feel confident about its growth and health in the future unless that growth is nourished by being strongly rooted in an understanding and appreciation of the past."
He could see not only the academic utility of folk studies in 1957 - "it will be possible to start on the distribution maps which should not only help us systematically to define various culture patterns in Scotland, but also...to study the culture contacts and loans in and around the North Sea area and North West Europe" - but in social utility as well. He could envision the use of vernacular architecture in the design of council houses not only to make them fit into the landscape but to "provide the kinds of living spaces that people instinctively want"; the study "of traditional communities may suggest better ways of giving stability to new planned communities"; a new Dvorak might arise out of the tunes and rhythms of collected folk music.
Behind this still is the sense that the recollection of folk culture is "an act of pietas" to past and future; that the folklorists' task is "preserving and bequeathing our national heritage"; and ultimately, although one belonged to the academic community, "our greater duty is not to academic techniques but to our fellow men and women."
Some of these views must have resonated within Orton, whose own views are discussed in Part 1 of these studies (e.g., pp. 48, 66); and made the cooperation and ultimate foundation of the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies possible. The humanity and the focus on the individual as the source and not simply the subject of knowledge is characteristic.
So, too, is the pragmatism which enters in and makes it possible to focus a broad view of folk culture into the narrow compass required for a practicable survey. The English Dialect Survey expressed this focus in one way; Sanderson - pointing out that the "folk" include "sophisticated urban dwellers" (and it was from Leeds that the study of urban industrial folklore and indeed the urban legend were fostered) - nevertheless confined its attention, for the purposes of a survey, to those elements of oral and material culture "especially of the pre-industrial and early industrial age before mass-communication and mass-production... For this is the part of our common heritage of tradition which is in most danger of vanishing without record." Rural and past, key elements of the English Dialect Survey itself.
Creating a teaching programme
Given the speed of developments, it is probably not surprising, as Sanderson said later, that he "was stretched very hard" over the summer of 1960. Not only was there the move from Edinburgh to Leeds and threads to tie up within the School of Scottish Studies and with his fieldwork, but he had contracted with Jeffares to complete a study of Hemingway (published in 1961), and he had the course to create: An all new set of lectures to write (having to rely "on sources many of which fall short of the standard demanded by modern scholarship"), and an ethos and purpose to establish: "The creation from scratch of an institute for research... in a country where there is no academic tradition of folk studies…"
The structure of the course was given. There was no folklife department as such; folklife was carried on each half of the School of English: English Language and Medieval Literature (English Language for short) and English Literature on the other. At the undergraduate level folklife was one option within the English Language or English Literature programme. At the postgraduate level -
The nature of the course had been determined by Sanderson, on the pattern established by Orton, with its emphasis on fieldwork -
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