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. The absence of in-text footnote numbers indicates that it was a draft, although the occasional "fn" and the set of references at the end indicate that it was one or at most two steps away from a final draft, and preparation for potential publication.
- Craig Fees 1 September 2022
THE IMPERILLED INHERITANCE:
DIALECT AND FOLKLIFE STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 1946-1984
The Folk Life Survey (1960-1964)
In 1960 the University of Leeds opened the first degree-level course in folklife studies within a British university, and with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation initiated the Folk Life Survey, a research project and organisation based in the School of English with a remit to systematically and comprehensively collect ethnographic information within Yorkshire. It was then to extend its work to the rest of Northern England, and – should it become appropriate - to be the folklife equivalent of the University’s English Dialect Survey (which had just completed a rigorous and specialised ten-year dialect survey of 300 sites in England and Wales). Indeed, the Folk Life Survey was conceived very much on the model of the English Dialect Survey, which could be said to have begun with Harold Orton's Survey of Northumbria n Dialect before the war, expanded into the Survey of the Dialects of Northern England after the war, and became the English Dialect Survey by default and with the collapse of a Philological Society initiative in the early 1950s.
There were certain essential differences between the English Dialect Survey and the Folk Life Survey which made the latter in some ways a far more radical and urgent undertaking than the former. However skeletal, the English Dialect Survey at least had an academic framework to build on: a body of descriptive grammars of specific English dialects prepared by professionally trained dialectologists; the vast scientific efforts of the 19th century, which included A.J. Ellis' survey of dialectal features across England and Joseph Wright's monumental English Dialect Dictionary. Folklore and folklife studies in England by contrast, had consistently been the province of amateurs and, despite many initiatives and much good preparatory effort there were no ethnographic monographs on specific locales or regions, no systematic and scientific surveys of the folk culture of England nor even of selected aspects. There was no standard scientific terminology, no agreed system of notation, no dialogue about method and theory at the professional level, no body of nscientifically reliable information upon which a folklife course or folklife survey could be based. On top of this was a mountain of literary material relating to "folklore" which could not be ignored and which formed part of the body of the existing "scholarship", but which was in fact a largely undigested mass of fact, hearsay, prejudice, fantasy, and speculation.
Primary among the similarities between the English Dialect Survey and the Folk Life Survey was the academic climate surrounding the study of local and regional English Culture: "Folklore" could not be used in naming the new endeavour at Leeds because of its lack of academic credibility, just as informants for the English Dialect Survey had to be assured that they were not being made objects of ridicule and were best approached by researchers who were themselves dialect speakers.
In short, when John Widdowson wrote of the Folk Life Survey that it was "The most significant step forward in the re- establishment of folklore as an academic discipline in England..." he was indulging, perhaps unconsciously, in understatement. It was more the equivalent of stepping into a dark continent littered with skeletons and grim warnings.
The Academic Climate
Something of the academic climate in which the Folk Life Survey developed is indicated in E. Estyn Evans' remark that as chairman of a new department of geography at Queen's University in Belfast he "was able to introduce archaeology and social anthropology inside my own department and had the satisfaction of watching them become independent departments...'Folklore', however, was not academically respectable, and the best way to advance folklife studies seemed to be by extramural lecturing and by promoting in the community the idea of a Folk Museum on Scandinavian lines..." Coming around from behind, as it were.
More directly relevant, however, might be the case of the English Folklore Survey of University College London, which was initiated in 1955 - five years before the University of Leeds' Folk Life Survey. University College London was in many ways the logical place for the academic discipline of Folklore in England to be born. As President of the Folklore Society Sona Burstein noted in 1958, there had been a "long tradition of friendship and co-operation between the Folk-Lore Society and this College"; the Folklore Society had housed its library in University College London since 1911, for example.
In the academic year 1949-1950 the bonds between the College and the Folklore Society were strengthened further when the Secretary of the Folklore Society, Mrs. Hilda Lake Barnett, donated £1000 of her own money to University College "for the upkeep of a room in the College for the Folk-Lore Society [to be a folklore research room and the Society's headquarters] and a collection of up to three thousand books on folklore"(fn). This, in today's terms, would be something in excess of £16,000. In 1951-1952 she increased this benefaction by a further £500, or £6,540 in current terms, "to assist the College in arranging in the Library the books of the Folk Lore Society's Library and of the Coote Lake Folklore Collection."
In 1952-1953 she began a new series of gifts which were not directly connected with the Folklore Society and which had a much more far—reaching aim: £500 (£6,350 in current terms) "for lectures on Folk-lore subjects" in 1952-1953; £1000 (£12,700) "for the study of folklore" in 1953; and, anonymously, £14,500 (£180,629) in Government securities "for the promotion of the study of folklore" in 1953-54. In accepting the latter after a great deal of discussion the College gave itself the right to spend all or part of the capital sum as well as the interest. Thus, during the five years between 1949 and 1954, Hilda Lake Barnett gave University College London £17,500 (£222,365) to support or promote folklore studies, of which £1500 (£22,688) went towards projects related to the Folk Lore Society and £16,000 (£199,678) for lectures in and "for the promotion and encouragement of the study of Folklore in its widest sense at University College." By comparison, the Gulbenkian grant to the University of Leeds Folk Life Survey for the five years 1960-1965 was £3,500 or £700 per annum which, in today's terms, would be about £34,500 at an average of about £6,900 per annum. Taking the salary of the full-time Director of the Folk Life Survey and lecturer in folklife studies and a second full-time lecturer in the last two of the five years into account as well, the expenditure at Leeds on folklife studies was "less than £14,000 over the five years, or something in the region of £137,000 in current terms.
Behind the gifts from Hilda Lake Barnett, and especially the final three, was a vision of a new era in English folklore studies in which it finally achieved academic respectability and departmental status within a University. Her enthusiasm, and indeed her sense of urgency, were prompted by developments in Scandinavia, in Ireland, and within the newly established School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. Mrs. Lake Barnett was also motivated by her unhappiness with plans within the Folklore Society itself, which in March 1952 appointed a Folklore Survey Committee "To investigate the prospects of a survey of English folklore." This committee was actively pursuing a course which Mrs. Lake Barnett did not feel could be sustained and of which she did not approve, and she felt that rapid action on the part of University College to establish its own Folklore programme might serve to head it off.
The history of what ultimately developed into the Survey of English Folklore began with a meeting of November 6, 1953 between University College London and the Folklore Society. The College was represented by the Provost, Ifor Evans; the Secretary, E.A.L. Gueterbock; Prof. A.H. Smith; and Dr. McLellan. The Folklore Society was represented by its President, Dr. Margaret Murray; and by its combined Hon. Secretary and Hon. Treasurer, Mrs. Hilda Lake Barnett. Dr. Murray opened the meeting by pressing the College "to institute postgraduate studies in folklore". The College took the line that a course leading to a certificate or diploma would only be possible once "we had made substantial progress in the teaching of the subject. This in turn would require additional staff which the College could not afford at the moment, or at any rate the training of some of the existing staff, possibly in Scandinavia." In response to this Mrs. Lake Barnett pointed out that £500 had already been donated for a course of lectures which, once given, might provide an indication of how many undergraduates would wish to pursue folklore at postgraduate level and so demonstrate the demand for and viability of folklore as a regular course of study. As for the lack of funds within the College for training "and for other purposes in connection with folklore", she immediately presented the Provost with a chegue for £1000 ("She obviously realised that her generous donation has eliminated the financial difficulties of getting some training in Scandinavia" wrote the Secretary afterwards). A month later, in response to the Provost's statement that the College was grateful to accept but was not permitted to use outside funds "to promote activities which subsequently became a charge on College funds," Mrs. Lake Barnett removed such objections by donating the further £14,500.
The College accepted but had no clear idea what to do with the money. It turned to Prof. A.H. Smith to draw up a programme which would meet Mrs. Lake Barnett's desires and acquit the College's moral and legal responsibilities to her.
Smith, Head of the Department of English and Director of the English Place-Name Survey, had made it clear following the November 6 meeting and Mrs. Lake Barnett's challenging £1000 donation that Folklore was not a priority for him. "I do not wish to take any active part myself in either teaching or research," he told the Provost, and in a longer memorandum on Folklore Studies, addressing the question of who could be sent to train in Scandinavia, wrote "both Professor Sutherland and I must certainly look first to the essential needs of our own department before we can think of taking someone for what is bound to be a peripheral subject." He could not recommend a course leading to a certificate or diploma until folklore had proven itself academically and until it had been demonstrated that there was student demand for such qualification, the best way forward being to encourage research and to provide research students "such teaching as is needed from time to time for special purposes." He would arrange a series of lectures as per Mrs. Lake Barnett's wishes during the course of the following academic year, but expressed his reticent enthusiasm for anything further by couching it in three significant conditions: "I myself will give all my support..." he said, "to any proposals [1] that can be carried out within existing resources of the College,(fn) [2] which are practicable, and [3] which will establish and maintain the high quality of research in folklore." [numeration mine].
The Secretary, E.A.L. Gueterbock, notified Smith in May 1954 that the Court of the University had agreed to accept Mrs. Lake Barnett's donation of £14,500, and that she had paid this money to the College. "You will remember," he wrote, "that Mrs. Lake Barnett has been continually pressing us for a statement about what the College intends to do...I feel that now that we have accepted the money we are morally bound to have a programme for using it." Smith prepared a plan which corresponded closely to the various memoranda Mrs. Lake Barnett had sent to himself and to the College, and in December 1954 he published the announcement that "University College London, under the direction of the English Department, have made plans to institute English folk-lore studies at an academic level, particularly with a view to organising the collection of folk-lore material and its systematic analysis." Mrs. Lake Barnett had written to him in August: "This will be the first University in England to acknowledge the existence of folklore, won't it?", and this appeared to be the case.
The following April Prof. Smith and J. McNeal Dodgson, a recent University College graduate and secretary of the English Place-Name Society (which Smith directed) travelled to Scandinavia on Mrs. Lake Barnett's training money to attend and take part in various seminars, to talk with recognised experts in the Scandinavian folklife studies world, and to study "the actual processes of organising the survey of 'live' material..." Having decided to follow the basic principles of the Scandinavian folklife surveys, and to rely principally on conducting the survey of 'live' material through postal questionnaire, Smith formally announced the launching of "A Survey of English Folklore" in May 1955. It was to be under the guidance of himself with the assistance of Dodgson. He published a formal call for voluntary collectors and informants, and in a report to the Provost in the same month noted:
We are in fact hoping to recruit some collectors from the students of this and other colleges and they will receive some instruction in the procedure...This is clearly the opportunity for some useful academic training in field-work for students. But it is also quite clear that some field-work will have to be carried out by Mr. Dodgson, Mr. P. Opie (whom I hope to have as a part-time assistant for one year at least)(fn), my new research assistant (if and when appointed by the College) and myself...
Over the course of the first year, 1955-1956, a portable tape- recorder was acquired and used; five questionnaires were issued and sent to the growing list of correspondents; there was a series of seven intercollegiate lectures, a series of public lectures, and "seminars on method for students of the University who have joined the Survey as collectors" given by Ake Campbell; and the Survey "made itself responsible for the production of an annual bibliography of folklore in England" for the International Folklore Bibliography in Basle. By the beginning of the following year Dodgson felt ready to begin the preparation of an index based on the Scandinavian, Irish Folklore Commission and School of Scottish Studies models, had begun the search through literary publications, and announced for 1957-58 another series of seminars for students helping as collectors with the Survey.
This was an impressive-looking start, despite some sniping from within the Folklore Society itself (which by 1957 had still not been given the room for which Mrs. Lake Barnett made the donation in 1949). Lacking, however, was the core of commitment to Folklore Studies within University College itself which would have enabled Folklore not only to flourish on the basis of Mrs. Lake Barnett's money but to take root. As the work related to compiling, posting, corresponding and indexing the questionnaires mounted and as Dodgson put into effect the indexing of literary and manuscript sources it became increasingly clear that the University was not going to make the additional resources available which were necessary in order to do the job well. As early as his 1958 report on the work and progress of the Survey Dodgson spoke of the pressure on staff and the difficulty of coping with the amount of work to be done. By May 1964 his feelings were explicitly bleak, as reflected in responses to a C.I.A.P (Commission Internationale des Arts et Traditions Populaires) Questionnaire on Folk Studies in Europe:
The Survey has retained no professional field workers. The work so far carried out has been disappointing in its results, unsatisfactory in its execution and in general largely a waste of time. This is of course the pessimistic view of Mr. Dodgson, whose other occupations in this University make it impossible for him to devote more than a fraction of his time and energy to the Survey, a situation which breeds frustration and anxiety.
"We are not a teaching organisation," he wrote later in the year in response to a query from S. R. Burstein of the Folklore Society, "Folklore studies do not form part of the English course; there is therefore no syllabus and no examination." There were no students involved in any way, and for the C.I.A.P. Questionnaire he emphasised that the Survey "trains nobody." It was "an ancillary of the Department of English," and folklore as a subject was "academically independent of English Language and Literature but administratively subsidiary within it." Quite simply, "The Survey lacks the staff to handle this kind of correspondence project properly." He concluded, perhaps with a sense of irony, "If C.I.A.P. can provide the Survey of English Folklore with several thousand pounds sterling per annum indefinitely and a staff of fully trained research assistants, I have no doubt that the Survey would proceed at a much faster pace."
It may have been his answer to Miss Burstein, relayed to Hilda Lake Barnett, which moved Mrs. Lake Barnett in November 1965 to once again complain to the College about the use being made of her money. The new Secretary of the College wrote to Prof. Smith about this familiar problem. In looking for a solution the Secretary pointed out that the College had the right to use either the interest or the capital of Mrs. Lake Barnett's benefaction:
Would it be a good plan to use the money to pay one, or even two, research students to work in your Department on some worthwhile topic, preferably for a Ph.D., but perhaps even at postdoctoral level [an idea put forward by Dodgson]? If they made anything of their research this would indicate that the subject was worth pursuing at an academic level, and we would be justified one day in trying to create a permanent post in it [This in 1965!]. If they proved a flop, we could say that we have honestly tried, and the work does not fit into the academic scheme of things. Either way, we should at least have shown willing, and some publications of a sort ought to emerge...I would be grateful for any other ideas which might make Mrs. Lake Barnett feel happy at the way her money is being spent.
This small and familiar crisis was followed by the employment at the beginning of the 1966-67 academic year of a full-time research assistant, Tony Green, who had trained under Stewart Sanderson at Leeds and was therefore the first trained folklorist to work on the Survey. Despite (or perhaps because) of his enthusiasm, industry and ability he found it a futile job in a hostile and indifferent Department: there was no guidance, no support and no funding. There was no administrative or Departmental will to enable the work to succeed, and having brought the Survey as close as it had ever been to rigour and productivity he left at the end of the 1966-67 academic year, the year in which A.H. Smith died.
When Smith died "we had to distribute the various jobs he was running among the survivors," according to Dodgson, and he himself moved over to the English Place-Name Survey where he was immediately happier. Once Tony Green left, the Folklore Survey passed to a recently employed lecturer, who handed it on to another lecturer the following year. Under the latter, who had his own research interests, the Survey became "quiescent" and by June 1970 it was "in abeyance". It had never employed a fieldworker (neither full nor, it would appear, part-time); it had employed only one trained folklorist as a research assistant, towards the end of its life; and its results (according to Dodgson himself) were never fit to publish. It had consumed money, it had consumed time, it had consumed goodwill and a considerable amount of hope, but it had not consumed College funds, and it had not actually required the College to recognise (as opposed to acknowledge) Folklore Studies. At the end of fifteen years and the expenditure of the 1991 equivalent of almost £200,000 in private money, Folklore at University College London returned to the state in which it had been before the Lake Barnett donations. Despite the time and effort it had consumed, and despite the money, the Survey of English Folklore had contributed virtually nothing to scholarship and virtually nothing to the development of academic folk studies in England.
The experience in folk studies generally in England was that it was the older and more entrenched disciplines which opposed its incorporation into the academic canon most fiercely. In this sense, the Folk Life Survey was perhaps fortunate in being suggested and introduced into a growing and changing School of English at the beginning of a period of growth and experimentation in the University sector generally. An unfortunate aspect of the period ~ and a factor which became increasingly significant as time went by - was that the financial side of University life was entering into a downturn from which it can never really be said to have recovered. But in terms of its initial acceptance as an academic discipline within the University of Leeds, the Folk Life Survey was again fortunate in that it was conceived during a period of growth and expansion in the interest in folklore and folklife particularly within the museums world. Buchanan, writing in 1965, referred to the preceding decade as probably "the formative period in the development of the subject in these islands."
In 1955, for example, the Government of Northern Ireland offered £20,000 plus £2000 per annum running expenses for a Northern Ireland Folk Museum: The Ulster Folk Museum was subsequently established by Act of Parliament in 1958, an estate of some 136 acres was purchased as a site in 1961, and the museum itself, with an active research programme, opened in 1962. The Ulster Folklife Committee, with some funding from the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, was created in 1953 and began publishing the journal Ulster Folklife in 1955; in 1961 the Committee reconstituted itself as a charitable organization with the title of the Ulster Folklife Society. The University of Reading's Museum of English Rural Life, which had begun planning and collecting material in 1951, opened to the public in 1955. Iorwerth Peate noted in 1957 that the Welsh National Folk Museum in St. Fagans (1948), with a professionally trained staff, had set up a Welsh Folk Life Survey Committee. In 1961 the Society of Folk Life Studies was formed, and in 1963 began to publish its journal Folk Life. In presenting the case for the creation of a postgraduate diploma in Folklife Studies for the training of museum personnel to the University of Leeds in 1963 Stewart Sanderson was able to draw on support from the Welsh Folk Museum, the Ulster Folk Museum, the London Museum, the British Museum, the Museums Association, the National Museum of Ireland and Professors in relevant departments, and successfully carried his case. "The growing interest in folk museums in England" was one of the arguments which Prof. Harold Orton and Prof. Norman Jeffares made when putting their "Proposals for the Inception and Development of Folklore Studies within the School of English in the University of Leeds" to the University in November 1959.
The impetus and proposals for folklife studies at the University of Leeds came from within. Harold Orton, Professor of English Language and Medieval English Literature, and A. Norman Jeffares, Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of English, presented their "Proposals for the Inception and Development of Folklore Studies Within the School of English in the University of Leeds" in November 1959.
I think it would be fair to say that Orton, whose name came first on the "Proposals", was the prime mover, and that Prof. Jeffares, as Head of the School and as Professor in one of its two divisions offered his support, and indeed the Proposals called for the proposed new lectureship in folklore studies to be borne jointly by both Departments. But it was Orton who had been engaged in direct dialectological study for the past forty years, and who was keenly aware that to fully understand the language spoken in a locality one needed to be intimately familiar with the conditions of local life and work, with tools and their constituent parts, with customs and beliefs. The English Dialect Survey had, to a certain extent and simply by the nature of the material, been a folklife survey well, and the proposed Folk Life Survey had "always been regarded as a necessary continuation and extension of the work already done in the field of dialectology."
The marriage of dialect and folklife studies was accepted practice in Scandinavia, and especially at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where Harold Orton had been lektor in English and where much of the most influential and pioneering work in 20th century dialect and folklife studies had been carried out. The University of Uppsala's Institute of Dialect and Folklore Research had been founded in 1914 on a much deeper tradition that "a systemic study of a nation's dialects should go side by side with the study of the same nation's folk culture and traditional way of living." [Dag Stromback 1952, 131] It was on this belief and from within this academic tradition of "Worter und Sachen" (language and tradition) study that the School of Scottish Studies developed around the Linguistic Survey of Scotland in the early 1950s. And it was within this tradition that Proposals for a Folk Life Survey were proposed at Leeds by the Director of the English Dialect Survey, in November of the year in which systematic collecting for the national dialect survey was completed. With one phase of work complete, another complementary phase, could begin.
The Proposals, quite understandably, pictured a Folk Life Survey much in the mould of the English Dialect Survey and of the Leeds dialectology programme. Ronald Kay has characterised Orton's approach to teaching as "devised for the narrow purpose of training a handful of future scholars who would later pursue linguistic research": The Proposals speak of the need to "start both survey work and teaching", the latter being seen in the Proposals as a two-tier system. At the undergraduate level "it should be aimed at stimulating the imagination of students"; at the more advanced level, "teaching should be aimed at training fieldworkers and research students." Teaching was secondary to research; it was necessary "in order to create a cadre of trained workers, who can be employed on survey work, or in folk museums, or (in the case of outstanding students) in advanced research."
That the times were changing, that the relationship between Research and Teaching within the University economy was shifting dramatically was not yet apparent. The students, in effect, were there to maintain the research tradition of the Department into which they were entering, with early teaching designed to engage and tickle out the most promising students for the real work of the Survey.
The Survey itself was also conceived on the familiar model of the English Dialect Survey, which had begun locally and with limited resources, become a regional survey and then, with full resources of the University and considerable external backing, became a full-scale national survey. Beginning in Yorkshire, the Folk Life Survey could expand to cover the North of England. The prospect of becoming a national survey was implicit, but unstated; becoming more explicit once the programme was in operation.
The Method of survey which Orton and Jeffares proposed was strikingly similar to that of the Survey of English Folklore, both with roots in the Scandinavian model. The first task "would be to examine and index printed and manuscript source material". The second, on this foundation, would be to launch a two-armed survey - "direct fieldwork by collectors with recording machines for folk-tales and oral narrative"; and "postal questionnaires, mainly on Worter und Sachen" lines, for custom, belief and practice." It was assumed in the Proposals that a representative survey of Yorkshire folklore, assuming adequate staffing, would require ten years at the outside. There should be an Advisory Committee with external and internal (University) members; and there should be regular publication of results.
The staffing of the Folk Life programme was also conceived around the needs of the survey, with a Director - carried in this proposal on both Departments in the School of English as a lecturer, who would do some of the collecting for the survey; a "trained and experienced" research fellow, to assist; and a secretary. Collecting could be carried out by postgraduate research students and voluntary collectors, "where these could be found." Orton and Jeffares thought the cost of the Survey for equipment, materials, publication, library and fieldwork expenses, would be £1085 per annum, though it isn't indicated where they thought this might come from.
The Director
The University accepted these proposals in broad outline, creating the post of lecturer in folk life studies to parallel an extant lectureship in dialectology. This, in itself, was a major event, as the history of the Survey of English Folklore (and subsequent history) will show. The University also accepted the concept of the Folk Life Survey and in appointing Stewart Sanderson lecturer in folk life studies simultaneously invited him to become Director of the Survey.
In their Proposals, Orton and Jeffares defined the requirements for the Director as "a fully trained and experienced folklorist, a man of drive, a competent fieldworker, organiser and administrator." It would have been difficult to find someone with better qualifications than Stewart Sanderson, who had graduated with a first from Edinburgh University, who had been among those who founded the School of Scottish Studies, becoming Senior Research Fellow and Archivist in charge of creating the archive. He had trained in Sweden and Norway, worked in the Nordiska Museet, and published the results of his own folklife and folklore fieldwork. He counted among his friends and acquaintances the leading lights of folklife studies in Europe and Britain, and he brought to the new Folk Life Survey an awareness of his place in a great academic tradition. He told the Yorkshire Dialect Society in March 1966, a month after his appointment had been officially decided,
[I]t is just because students in Scotland, in the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere, know so little about the patterns of English folklore and folklife that I find myself here today. The folk-traditions of these countries cannot be adequately explained without reference to comparable traditions in England; and here in Yorkshire and in the North Country, where the streams of tradition run deep and strong, we see the greatest hope for our subject...The institution of this lectureship with the duties it entails, marks the realisation of one of our fondest dreams.
This enthusiasm is evident among comments made about the early School of Scottish Studies where, as at Leeds, the task was the "creation from scratch of an institute for research in these subjects, in a country where there is no academic tradition of folk studies..." There were bound to be in Edinburgh (as in Leeds) "problems both of direction and of staffing", but he believed, with a group of others, "that personal interests were less important that the main task." The main task being fundamentally the same in Scotland in the early 1950s as it was in Yorkshire in the early 1960s: "a systematic investigation of contemporary English folk tradition, and the creation of an archive of reliable material for study." In a 1961 research proposal he referred to it as "an act of pietas,..to place on record the tales and songs, proverbs and legends, beliefs and customs which the community shared, together with accounts of their daily life and work, of their material culture, and of their social traditions." But it was also a thoroughly practical act as well, in a country where the "source materials are badly organized, are rather suspect and sometimes lack authenticity". In order to establish an academic discipline, it was vital to create a foundation of reliable information. Before teaching could properly begin, good and accurate texts were needed. Before anything else, an active and productive research programme was essential.
The University of Leeds provided the teaching staff and the facilities from which a Survey could be launched and within which an Archive could be built. The funds for the Survey itself came from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which announced in July 1960 a grant of £700 per annum for three years (for a total of £2,100) "towards the cost of a folk-life survey of oral and material traditions of Yorkshire." It was not the £1085 per annum suggested in the Orton/Jeffares proposals, but it was sufficient to enable Stewart Sanderson, taking up his appointment as lecturer in folklife studies on October 1, 1960, to prepare the foundations for the Survey: to buy tape recorders, cameras, a tape-repeater unit for transcription, and the miscellaneous items required in an archive to create, process, and store the materials generated by a survey. It enabled him to create a register and index system, "built up on the model devised by Swedish scholars in the University of Uppsala and the Nordiska Museum, and used with minor modifications in such institutions as the Irish Folklore Commission, the Welsh Folk Museum, and the School of Scottish Studies [and also the Survey of English Folklore]". The first year, 1960-1961 was pretty much consumed in the preparation for the Survey to come.
The new lecturer in folklife studies in the School of English began the year, however, with five undergraduates and one postgraduate, a number which increased dramatically over the next few years (proving the student demand which was still being questioned at University College London).
[Describe programme]
Early in 1961, about halfway through the first year, Stewart Sanderson set down his views on the needs and future development of the folk life programme at Leeds in his "Memorandum on the Folk Life Survey". What he described in terms of method was very much what Orton and Jeffares had set out in their Proposals. But there were also elements which, in retrospect, were danger signals of things to come or which belonged to a project which would not materialise, for which the money would not be found. A start had been made, for example, on excerpting relevant printed and manuscript sources, but he was proposing "that an excerpter be employed temporarily, under supervision, to undertake the bulk of the task." Neither this nor the "full-time Research Fellow" materialised. The latter was required because "The Director's regular teaching duties preclude prolonged spells of fieldwork": an indication that the balance between teaching and survey work was weighted towards the former.
[Publication]
But the potential of future conflict would have been masked by what was asked for and received:
(fn)"for the maintenance of a room in our library which would house the Coote Lake books and be a research room for the Folk lore Society and also be their headquarters." "The College did agree to accept this gift of £1000 for the purposes set out but could not undertake to provide a special room at the moment owing to accommodation difficulties."
- (1949-50) University College Annual Report, p. 16.
- (1950) Calendar, University of London, University College, p. 475.
- (1951-2) University College Annual Report, p.124.
- 1952-3) University College Annual Report, pp.19, 79.
-(1953-4) University College Annual Report, pp.83, 84.
- (1952-3) REPORT BY THE PRINCIPAL, University of London, p. 25.
- (1953-4) REPORT BY THE PRINCIPAL, University of London, p. 27.
-(1954) The Times July 1.
- 1958) Evening Standard 17 March.
-(1966-67) "Obituary: Prof. A.H.Smith", University College London Annual Report.
-(1956) "This Day and Age - Openings for Amateurs", The Amateur Historian, 2:11, p. 345.[The Survey of English Folklore]
-(1958) "A Survey of English Folklore", The Amateur Historian 3:7, p. 302.
-(1958) Sunday Times 28 January.
-(1958) Nature 8 March.
- (1958) Trees and Life, 21:3, p. 202.
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