Good to hear that local radio presenter Den Siegertsz is back, with a weekly Sunday lunchtime show on the non-profit Churnet Sound, sponsored by the local maker of Staffordshire oatcakes.
“Den’s new show will be on DAB in north Staffordshire and South Cheshire every Sunday from noon.”
No debut date yet, but coming soon. Churnet Sound broadcast from Biddulph Town Hall. It seems they also stream online, which is good for those for whom DAB is ‘bubbling mud’.
Always good to find a supernatural tale about Stoke-on-Trent. New to me is The Haunting of Stoke-on-Trent (2017) by Julian Middleton. 58 pages in paper (says eBay), 89 pages in paper (says Amazon UK) or 33 pages (says the Kindle ebook store). The back cover of the paperback on Amazon suggests the reason for the expanded page count… an added “special bonus story”. So my guess is it’s perhaps 15,000 words for the main tale.
The blurb suggests a children’s book…
When an earth tremor creates a gaping fissure in the middle of his street, Tom Hughes is horrified to witness a group of ghostly miners emerge from it. As a terrifying apparition looms over the distant hill of Mow Cop, and the miners create a path of destruction on their way to join it, it’s up to Tom and his sister Jen to save Stoke-On-Trent from certain doom…
And an Amazon reviews confirms. It’s a short children’s book, and is apparently written for easy comprehension by those in early middle childhood (Amazon suggests ages 7-9) who may not be regular book readers yet.
New on eBay (not from me), Goose going shopping. Via Getty, so you’re not also buying further usage-rights with the print. Unless you can find Getty’s source and establish that it’s now public domain.
“3rd April 1937: Mrs Lockyer from Stoke-on-Trent takes her pet goose out shopping. The bird has been taught to accept pennies, and has collected a large sum for charity.”
Here newly colorised. Another for a hypothetical “Surreal Stoke” exhibition.
Some new and local items for free on Archive.org:
The Two Universities Way: a green route to walk from Staffordshire University to Keele University (2012).
Mountain Bike Guide: Midlands (1994).
The Technique of Pottery (1962).
Staffordshire Poets (1928) (Poets of the Shires series).
Anglo-Saxon burial mounds : princely burial in the 6th & 7th centuries (partly a survey of Midlands mounds).
And I also found this commentary by the writer A.S. Byatt, recalling her Stoke great-aunt, and possibly also a Stoke headmistress…
“I made a story, ‘Racine and the Tablecloth’. It was written partly to defend Racine and ‘the gods in the blood’ against the schoolteachers who were encouraging my ambitious daughter to ‘be a gardener, if she wanted to’. She didn’t. She wanted to learn enough French to read Racine and go to university, but they wanted to persuade her that ambition was bad, competition was bad, French was for railway stations […] Into my story of my wrath and despair [at this attitude…] I wove an image of my great-aunt Thirza, who was photographed when she was over eighty, in her house in Stoke-on-Trent amongst her exquisitely bright tablecloths and cushions, embroidered on ivory satin, of the kind sold for wedding dresses. She was a mythical figure. my great-aunt Thirza. ‘She had blonde hair so long she could sit on it’ my aunt would always say. I believe that as well as following the linear shadowed ‘transfers’ (like neo-Platonic ‘forms’) [in her embroidery] she sometimes invented her own fruit and flowers, boughs and garlands. I have several of the cushions still. The silks are still bright. In my story my great-aunt Thirza stood for my ordinary origins, and her own bright work, for women making things in snatched time. But she was not allied with my levelling, ladylike headmistress, who haunts my dreams still: the nay-sayer, the antagonist, the fairy godmother who turned gold threads back into dull straw.” (Ovid metamorphosed).
Also on early education in the Potteries…
[In the early part of the Industrial Revolution affordable books for spelling, reading and writing – and their associated small paid-for single-teacher ‘dame’ or ‘penny’ schools – served] “a rapidly expanding middle class market, but they were so cheap and published in such numbers that it was not difficult for a working-class parent to get hold of something like Mayor’s English Spelling Book. The local newspapers in the Potteries for instance, regularly carried bookseller’s advertisements in the 1830s and 1840s for manuals on reading and writing at prices from sixpence to two shillings.” (Silences & images : the social history of the classroom).
Tolkien Gleanings #117.
* Currently up for auction, with good pictures, a 1955 J.R.R. Tolkien autograph letter. On completing LoTR, Tolkien perhaps rather jokingly reveals he was being “bullied” by a fellow academic into not having a happy ending, but then asks with seeming anxiousness… “Would you call it a happy ending? Auden on the whole approves of Vol. III (seen in galley)”. Bidding ends 24th September 2023.
* The Franciscan University of Steubenville now has a partial speaker-list for their Tolkien conference “A Long Expected Party: A Semicentennial Celebration Of Tolkien’s Life, Works, And Afterlife”, set for 22nd-23rd September 2023. Holly Ordway and Carl F. Hostetter are the keynote speakers. Back in March 2023 the call-for-papers asked for new work on the “less studied elements of Tolkien’s legendarium and recently published works”. One hopes that the recordings will find their way online for free, after the event.
* I’ve only just spotted the long podcast “Lewis and Tolkien: Imagination and Sexuality” (March 2023), which paired Holly Ordway with the C.S. Lewis scholar Michael Ward. For the .mp3 download, click on ‘… More’, then right-click ‘Download Audio’ and then ‘Save Linked Content…’.
* New in Welsh, “Cymraeg egsotig J.R.R. Tolkien”, as an embargoed pre-print in a repository. The embargo locks pop on 22nd September 2023. The title translates as ‘The Exotic Welsh of J.R.R Tolkien’, and the article is otherwise in print in Bangor University’s stylish Welsh-language magazine O’r Pedwar Gwynt ($ paywall).
* New on Archive.org for the first time, Tolkien’s The Old English Exodus (1982). A poor and grainy scan, with no OCR… but free.
* And finally, the French newspaper La Vie interviews Vincent Ferre in French. Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, and also overseer of the Tolkien Editions at the French publisher Christian Bourgeois. The interview has no news and is very much ‘potted Tolkien for the average newspaper reader who’s never encountered Tolkien’. But it looks like one of the better examples of the breed.
The Spyders of Burslem 