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Cambridge goes mad for Marat Sade

17/8/2012

It was in the early spring of 1968 that a bunch of assorted students, friends and townies began to rehearse for a production of Marat Sade in Cambridge . Or, to give it its full title, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, written by Peter Weiss. See the following link for plot, if you can work it out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marat/Sade

We gave our all to the madness and chaos. Bruce Birchall, our alternative-style theatre director extraordinaire, strode around rehearsals thwacking his tall boots with a whip, de Sade style. It was a stirring, primeval experience, and when we performed at Peterhouse College, one friend in the audience reported, ‘At first I was seeing students acting lunatics. But then you really did become lunatics.’ Praise indeed.

These photos below are the sheets of contact photos for the production which I’ve managed to keep hold of all these years. Spot me looming in the third photo down, top row, third from the left – lots of long dark hair.

One of the poignant aspects of looking at these photos now is to ruminate on what became of those who took part. Here are some of our varied destinies: imprisoned as member of the Angry Brigade, human rights lawyer, initiated as shaman in Siberia, financial journalist, sent down from Cambridge for drug dealing, local radio commentator, advertising executive, writer (that’s me), died young of natural causes, computer scientist. Mixed bag. And now I’m sad, when searching out Bruce Birchall, to find that he died last year (1946-2011). Re the conversation about Bruce’s demise at http://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3627, I’m afraid the ‘poor personal hygiene’ comment really was true! You didn’t get too close. But he was a talented director, as acknowledged at http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/individuals/bruce-birchall/

Right, reminiscing over - who’s for a revival of Marat Sade?

If you have memories of this production, please leave your comments here. For better views of the photos, contact me via this website and I may be able to email them to you.

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The Serendipities of Family History

6/8/2012

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It’s a bright Sunday morning in the Welsh hills when I arrive in Bwlch-y-Sarnau, in search of my ancestors. This hamlet, in the parish of Abbeycwmhir, old Radnorshire, is where my 3x great grandparents came from. Edward Owens worked as a shoemaker until the lure of wider horizons, or perhaps a free pint, tempted him into signing up as a soldier in 1803, to fight in Wellington’s army. He served for 16 years, fighting at the battle of Corunna in the 81st Regiment of Foot, contracting hepatitis during the Walcheren campaign in the Lowlands, and finally sunning himself in Sicily in a veteran’s battalion. His feisty wife Maria didn’t simply sit at home but accompanied him on at least the last leg of his service, giving birth to one of their daughters in Pharo. Much about their life and movements remains a mystery, but we do know that they lived in ‘Blindman’s Cottage’ in Cwm Dhu, close to Bwlch-y-Sarnau, and that Edward’s father John had the cottage before him, with references that go back to 1769.

It’s not the first time that I’ve visited this parish, with its stunningly beautiful hills and valleys, and although I’ve combed the locality for any clues, I still hope to find a trace of something else. I just happened to be in the area on the previous day, so have seized the chance to come on here before I head home.

Blindman’s Cottage has probably been pulled down, as I’ve already established. On a previous visit, someone told me about a pile of stones thought to be from old cottages at roughly the place indicated by the tithe map as the site of their original home. It’s worth a look, so I trudge through fields, startling sheep and looking for traces of old walls, wells, or anything that could indicate earlier occupation. Nothing. Ah well, it’s still a lovely day – though by now white cauliflower clouds gleam luridly against a horizon the colour of stern Welsh slate. Rain on the way. I walk briskly back to the village with the aim of taking a turn around the Baptist Chapel graveyard before leaving.

Now one thing I noticed when conducting a survey for my recent book, Growing Your Family Tree, was how often serendipity plays a part in finding new evidence – the chance meetings, the way a book or a document almost falls at random into your hand – and some of these happenstances do seem to occur in churchyards. I’ve combed the graves round the chapel before; this family line has a strong connection with the Baptist tradition, and one of Edward’s sons (also an Edward) became the first in three generations of Baptist ministers, ending with my grandfather. So the chapel of Bwlch-y-Sarnau, which has been known for its radical and influential preachers, is where both Edward the shoemaker-soldier, and Edward the minister-to-be, received their teaching. Surely there must be something here!

I notice for the first time that the graveyard has a clutch of Rees tombs, and Edward the soldier’s own mother is reputed to be a Rees, though we haven’t pinned her down yet. It’s relevant, maybe, so I photograph all the names and dates. Not a lot, but at least something to take from my visit. But just as I’m on the point of leaving, a woman hurries in through the gate, swinging a large key. She’s going to open up! I’ve never seen inside, and although the chapel is an early 20th century rebuild, I’d still like to get a glimpse.

‘I’m only here to pick up the vacuum cleaner – I clean for them, see. And I have to go soon, the car’s playing up and my husband’s waiting and we’ve got to get it looked at. No, I don’t go to chapel here – I fell out with them, ‘ she concludes darkly.

But she beckons me in, moves me briskly towards a faded old photo swinging from a nail at the back. ‘That’s the original chapel, see. There’s the new one going up,’ pointing towards a second photo, hung straight and in a better state of repair. I photograph both eagerly. Not a lot, in some ways, but fellow family historians will recognise the thrill off finding a new little pearl to add to the string – something tangible, and precious, in the chain of associations that build up your ancestry.

She has more, when I tell her the name of the family.

‘Owens? Well there’s only one left hereabouts.’ She gives me the name and whereabouts of a woman who was born into an Owens family, and encourages me to drop in, before moving me briskly out of the chapel, dragging a vacuum cleaner behind her.

Shall I call in? The sky is darkening and I’d like to be on my way. Two and a half hours drive, thunder and floods are threatened. Oh yes then – why not?

There’s always the nervousness about knocking on a stranger’s door. But, as one of my informants said, ‘What’s to lose?’ Possibly your leg, if they keep a savage pit bull terrier, possibly a bit of pride if you’re sent away ignominiously.

I take the car up the long drive (no escape now) and within five minutes I’m welcomed in by a family of three – a lady (my Owens connection), with her husband and grown-up daughter. The daughter has been working on the family tree and gets out her laptop to check names and dates. The mother looks uncannily like my own mother – could such a strong resemblance arise between quite distant cousins? I hope so. We don’t know yet if our families do tie up, as Owens is a relatively common name in these parts, and it can be hard to establish links that may go back more than two hundred years. . It would be great for me to discover new relations and learn their stories, and the interest in their eyes shows that they’d like to be a part of the lineage that I and other cousins have established. They have stories of two generations of unmarried mothers, virtually imprisoned in the workhouse, but still holding onto their pride in the family name. I can tell them tales of surviving hardship to travel the world, emigrate to America, to write, minister and teach. I badly want to bring the lives together. But after the warmth of our encounter, it now comes down to the hard graft of looking dispassionately to see if the evidence is there.

Whatever the outcome, it’s been a great day for furthering the quest. Sometimes, if you just trust to the moment, you’ll make unexpected discoveries

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Images from the Silk Road: - Rainbow Silk

30/4/2012

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The Silk Road
I have made two trips along the Silk Road, and other visits to countries along its path - Syria, Turkey and Uzbekistan. I became fascinated by the mystique and history of this ancient trade route, and enchanted by its vibrancy today. In my book for children, Stories from the Silk Road, I told some of the legends recounted by travellers, and wrote about their colourful context. I also began giving illustrated talks about the Silk Road to arts societies and on cruises. From the many photos I took and pictures I gathered, I’d like to create a few little themed galleries and slide shows to share with you on this blog, starting with:

The Legend of Rainbow Silk
Silk patterned in rainbow shades is still the national material of Uzbekistan, and legends suggest how it first came into being. One is that the wavering, iridescent ripples of the design were inspired by gazing into a running stream. Another is that an irritable Khan or ruler commanded one of his courtiers, on pain of death, to provide some new novelty to please him. The desperate old adviser had resigned himself to execution, when on the last morning he woke with tears in his eyes – and saw a rainbow through his wet lashes!

In these images, you can also see silk in production by traditional methods in Uzbekistan.

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Choosing your Ancestors

9/4/2012

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How do you choose your ancestors?
How do you map out your family history? Do you go up one line of the family, or do you try to discover the whole circle of direct line ancestors whose DNA has influenced yours? What you choose, the heritage which you lay claim to, will affect not just the research you do, but your whole concept of your ancestry. I’ve written about this fascinating challenge in my book Growing Your Family Tree (Chapter Two), but I’ll give a brief outline here. This vital topic is given scant attention, apart from practical considerations of managing your research, but it has a rich significance which everyone involved with family history can explore for themselves.

Circle of Ancestors – This approach means that you set out to trace as many direct-line ancestors as you can. The circle doubles in size at each generation, from 4 grandparents, to 32 at your 3x gt grandparents, and 64 for your 4x gt grandparents. Stop right there, for a moment…the numbers go rapidly off the scale after this point. If you want to lay claim to your ancestry, to get to ‘know’ your forbears, and to sense them in their entirety as a group, then clearly you’ll need to set a limit. For me, 32 is about right. I’ve got just about all of them in place, and each one has a distinct identity, and often a lot more too in terms of personality and life events. I’m happy to take some back to 4x gts or even further if it’s an easy line to follow, or there’s some riddle that I want to solve such as ‘How did this branch of the family end up in this particular place?’

A Direct Line – The traditional method of genealogy was to trace a direct line of descent, usually through the family name. As most of us come from a patrilineal culture, where taking the father’s name is standard, this tends to reinforce the concept of a male line as equating with ancestry. There are no rights or wrongs here; every society in the world devises its own kinship system, and where the line of descent is perceived as coming through the father, it tends to strengthen the family identity along those lines. And, of course, it’s easier to research as a rule, in these societies. But it’s by no means universal, and there’s no overriding reason to take either the name or the father’s line as the given.

You might also, for instance, choose to research the female line, and if you can cope with the successive name changes that are likely to occur with each generation, you may find it rewarding to trace this very physical and genuine line of descent. After all, it’s said that as many as a third of children have a different father to the one listed on the birth certificate! I have a treasured pair of photographs showing five generations of my female line, from my maternal great grandmother to my daughters’ daughters. And I can trace it back another three generations to my 3 x gt grandmother, Maria Adie of Bedworth, in a family of ribbon weavers and miners. There, so far, the trail runs out – unless you know different?

The Family Tree – It’s great to have a goal to start with, such as following one line, or establishing your circle of ancestors. But as I’ve indicated, you’ll probably want to compromise here and expand there, so the ‘Tree’ form allows you to do just that. Its branches grow vertically and stretch out laterally as well. The Tree itself is a powerful symbol of the family, and in many traditions it’s seen as representing the source of individual human lives, and the spirit of an individual family as well. Modern software makes it easy to ‘grow’ your tree, and to view it in different ways.

Tree, circle, line: our family history is not just about gathering data; the forms we draw it in are powerful and have a psychological impact too. These are ancient and potent symbols, and go beyond their use in pragmatic diagrams. By contemplating and drawing up family patterns this way, my sense of connection with my family history has deepened, and become full of meaning. And although you will probably use one of these primarily, you’re likely to find that each has value, and that you can move from one to another as your interest develops.

Five generations of my female line, from gt grandmother Sarah Lee to granddaughters Eva & Martha

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Isle of Wight Festival, 1969

6/4/2012

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My only surviving photo of the Isle of Wight Festival, 1969

Isle of Wight Festival 1969
Or: The Rainbow Years
Were you there? If so, I probably didn’t see you. It was a seething scrum, after all. Did you watch Bob Dylan? Oh, was he that dot on the stage, almost out of sight, literally, even in the days when I didn’t need glasses? And did you enjoy hanging out with the love crowd of ’69? Hmm – in between the hunt to find food and an unpolluted toilet, I can’t say it was my most blissful experience.

But, hey, I do love to remember the festival that I hated! It was a journey of self-discovery, after all. The one where I discovered I didn’t like crowds, rock music and being stuck on small islands. And quite genuinely, my 60s memories are precious to me. I was there – I saw, I did. I am entitled to reminisce, with a groan.

It looked promising, on arrival. A pleasant green field to put up our tiny two-man tent, lots of space around. That didn’t last. My then-boyfriend, later- husband and I relaxed, allowed ourselves to become chilled out, probably spaced out too. Then tents began to spring up all around us, liberally sprinkled with lager-swilling inhabitants. Not the dope-smoking, happy hippies we were used to, or the students of our own normal habitat, but rough tough guys out to make a weekend of it using traditional methods of booze and fighting to enhance the experience. Nearby copses and ditches soon became unusable as green loos, and the excited chattering became a continuous twenty-four hour uproar. Despite my long hair and generally dishevelled appearance, I was actually an early-to-bed, prefers folk to-rock kind of wimp.

I only have short memory clips of the weekend but those that remain are certainly connected with moments of self-awakening. We started to go hungry. The organisers hadn’t expected such huge crowds, around 150,000 it’s estimated. They hadn’t provided enough toilets (‘nuff said already) or food. First basic insight: I don't like to live without loos or sustenance - why pay for the privilege of doing that? Once the local village shop had run dry of groceries, we watched as festival vendors hiked their prices higher and higher. The equivalent of £10 for a slice of fruit pie, for instance. I saw and noted how exploitation and greed flourishes even when the message is freedom, peace and love. That’s two revelations, and the third was more of a confirmation. I couldn’t really be bothered with the speck of Dylan on a faraway stage, droning out music I’d heard already and didn’t particularly like. I should have known that; I had queued overnight on a Birmingham pavement with friends a few years earlier just for the fun of it, to buy Dylan tickets which I didn’t then want to use. (And no, I didn’t sell them on at a profit!) Hmm – so I was a dead loss at a festival then, wasn’t I?

Fourth revelation: I couldn’t leave when I wanted to. When the crowds built up, it became impossible to get where you wanted, even just walking around, let alone trying to get off the island. Besides, my boyfriend was all for staying and he seemed to be enjoying himself. After the festival finished, we had to join a shuffling throng of refugees trying to make their way to the port and onto a ferry boat back to Southampton. It took hours. I remember then driving through Winchester (probably, we’d hitched a lift – though how we managed that with so many others around, I don’t know) and silently intoning the words of the song ‘Winchester Cathedral, you’re bringing me down’ to myself.

I’ve tried the Isle of Wight, festivals and camping since, though separately, never all together again, and have to say that my illuminations on that occasion proved to be correct. I don’t like any of them. I blurted out my antipathy for the Isle recently at a family get-together, only to discover that a certain tribe of in-laws hail from there. We managed to make a joke of it – just. My daughter has done the correct thing though and rebelled against her mother’s preferences. She’s a professional festival organiser. She cut her teeth on illicit entries to Glastonbury – once in a drum box, in a roadie’s van – and has organised music events across Europe and Australia. I’m very proud of her, just as long as I don’t have to go too.

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Forward>>

Cambridge goes mad for Marat Sade

The Serendipities of Family History

Images from the Silk Road: - Rainbow Silk

Choosing your Ancestors

Isle of Wight Festival, 1969

Cherry Gilchrist

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