“Legend has it that the villages of Puddletown and Briantspuddle, which used to contain the word ‘piddle’, changed their village titles to avoid embarrassing Queen Victoria whilst she was visiting.” So says the newly-published Little Book of Dorset. Is it true?
Posts tagged “John Fowles”
The Damned: Shirley Anne Field by the Jubilee Clock in Weymouth
PLACES in Weymouth and Portland used for the shooting of Sixties Hammer shocker The Damned are to feature in a unique mini-break.
The Damned: Oliver Reed and gang on King George III's statue in Weymouth
Cameraman and director Nick Gilbey will show tourists around spots haunted by Oliver Reed as a dapper seaside psychopath, and explain how The Damned’s stuntman earned his brandy when he crashed his Jaguar XK120 through the Ferrybridge railings and sank.
Dorset is rich in movie locations, and Nick is planning to cover four films: The Damned, Far From the Madding Crowd, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Comrades.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” said Nick. “My interest dates back to when I was a boy in the Sixties and they were filming Far From the Madding Crowd. It was so exciting. It was like the circus had come to town.”
Nick works as a cameraman, mostly for the BBC, and with his wife Sheila runs the historic Abbots House restaurant with rooms in Charmouth. He has directed films on subjects including drag-racing, Westcountry food, railways, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and Martha Brown, the last woman to be hanged in Dorset. So he is perfectly placed for his impending foray into cultural tourism.
Comrades – about the Tolpuddle Martyrs – was premiered in Bridport and there Nick spoke to its director Bill Douglas. When The French Lieutenant’s Woman was shot in Lyme Regis he saw Meryl Streep coming out of the Royal Lion Hotel, in modern clothes, which set him thinking about how John Fowles’s supposedly un-filmable novel could be adapted. And Nick can tell you how apparently simple sequences in Far From the Madding Crowd in fact involved locations miles apart. One example: Gabriel Oak playing his flute by the memorial in Devizes sets off for Weatherbury (Puddletown) via Eggardon Hill, Encombe, Friar Waddon and Bloxworth.
“It’s incredible logistics just to show the Dorset landscape,” said Nick. “Far From the Madding Crowd is one of the very last films that went to that kind of trouble, apart from a few others like David Lean’s.”
Loan DVDs of Nick’s four chosen films will be sent to guests two weeks before the first mini-break, which is scheduled to run from Monday, June 7 to Thursday June 10.
For more details about pricing, booking, etc, click here.
Editor’s Note: I used to work with Nick Gilbey at the BBC, and I wrote most of the script for his Wordsworth and Coleridge film, so I am bound to feel warmly towards his new plan.
But it also seems to me to be exactly the kind of enterprise that West Dorset has been crying out for ever since the Wakeham Associates report of 1995 (prepared for West Dorset District Council) called out for more cultural tourism ventures across the district.
Lyme Regis fossil hunter Mary Anning acclaimed as top British scientist – and secret inspiration for John Fowles
THE LYME REGIS fossil hunter Mary Anning has been named by the Royal Society as the third most influential female scientist in British history.
The move comes as yet another book is published about Anning, once an almost entirely forgotten figure.
The Canadian novelist Joan Thomas has written a novel – out next week – called Curiosity.
“The material was so rich,” Thomas is quoted as saying in The Winnipeg Free Press. “I knew hers was a story that would resonate today on many levels.”
It seems indeed that Anning’s time has come.
The Royal Society’s list of the top ten women in British history who have had the most influence on science has just been compiled to celebrate the Society’s 350th anniversary and its commitment to the advancement of women in science.
Anning’s name is potent in this respect because, as the Society’s citation reads in part, “Anning’s gender and social class prevented her from fully participating in the scientific community of early 19th century Britain, and she did not always receive full credit for her contributions.
“Despite this she became well known in geological circles in Britain and beyond, although she struggled financially for much of her life.
The Royal Society’s judging panel consisted of Professors Lorna Casselton, Athene Donald, Uta Frith and Julia Higgins, all Fellows of the Royal Society, and Dr Patricia Fara, an eminent historian of science.
Anning’s finds included the skeleton of the first ichthyosaur to be recognised, the first two plesiosaur skeletons ever found, the first pterosaur skeleton found outside of Germany, and some important fossil fish.
Her observations – as the Royal Society notes – also played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilized faeces.
The implications of all these discoveries are among the aspects of Anning’s life that fascinated the novelist Joan Thomas. Put simply, fossils made people question the Christian story of creation. How could it be true if fossils showed there had been on life on earth before the Bible said there had been?
Thomas thinks Anning’s modern-day fame stems from the international symposium, organised by John Fowles, that was held in Lyme Regis in 1999. This was attended by such influential figures as Sir David Attenborough, who described Anning at the time as “a very remarkable woman”.
While Fowles himself, Thomas says, described Anning as the “secret inspiration for the character of Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
The front cover of Joan Thomas's book is from a watercolour, imagining what Dorset might once have been like, by the geologist Henry De la Beche
Thomas’s book is subtitled “A Love Story“. It imagines another Lyme Regis fossil collector Henry De la Beche as the object of Anning’s affections. De la Beche also features in The Lymiad, an anonymous poem from 1818 soon due to be published by the Trustees of Lyme Regis museum – which is sited, in a final twist, exactly where Anning used to live.
LYME REGIS Philpot Museum’s Trustees have issued an unusual invitation: to subscribe to the first publication of The Lymiad, or Letters from Lyme to A Friend at Bath, written during the Autumn of 1818.
There’s a most interesting story behind it.
In 1978 the artist Laurence Whistler gave this bound manuscript of a poem, some 80 pages long, to the Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, where it is on display. The author John Fowles had at this point just started his ten-year stewardship at the Philpot as Honorary Curator. From the outset he regarded The Lymiad as one of the museum’s most precious possessions – for its verve, wit, and satirical humour; its vivid evocation of the manners and pastimes of a small Regency resort; and above all for its acute observations of the town, its people, and their preoccupations.
Sadly, John Fowles died in 2005, so he never saw his dream of The Lymiad’s publication brought to fruition. Now the Museum’s Trustees have re-visited the project, in consultation with Mrs Sarah Fowles, his widow, and plan to launch a new edition of the manuscript; not a facsimile of the original, but designed as it might have appeared had it been published in 1819 – some 200 pages, soft-back, but with stitched pages and card covers marbled in the Regency manner.
The edition will contain:
- An essay by John Fowles on “Lyme in the early 1800s’, published in 2003 from his original introduction
- A general introduction and textual note by John Constable
- A transcription of the text
- Editorial notes by John Fowles, John Constable and Jo Draper, the former curatorial consultant at the Museum.
- Illustrations from the Museum’s rich collection
The cost of the entire project is estimated at £4000. Some funds have already been raised, and it is hoped to raise the balance by 100 individual subscriptions of £20, the names of all those subscribing to be recorded in the publication.
For further information on this fascinating project contact Mary Godwin, the Museum’s Curator, on 01297-443370, or e-mail curator@lymeregismuseum.co.uk
*In 1997 the manuscript caught the attention of Dr John Constable, then Professor of English Literature at Kyoto University. Over the next few years he checked and studied the transcript and wrote the introduction.
In his words: “The Lymiad emerges as a highly political and a thoroughly Whig poem, with some leanings towards the left of that party though stopping short of Radicalism itself.”
In view of Lyme’s political history, some may be surprised that “it stopped short of Radicalism itself”!
ONE OF Lyme’s best-known residents, the playwright Ann Jellicoe, will be guest of honour at a luncheon in aid of the town Museum on 4 February at the Alexandra Hotel when she will talk on “Trials and Triumphs: a Life in Theatre.”
A long time supporter of the Museum, and at one time co-curator with her friend, the author John Fowles, Ann Jellicoe trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. She was a central figure at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the sixties, taking the theatrical world by storm with The Knack: it subsequently played, and still plays, all round the world, and was made into an award-winning film which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
She will also talk of her work in developing Community Plays: a new form which aims to involve as many people from the whole community as possible, working together in setting up and acting a very large caste play about their own town. Many Lyme residents will remember her very first Community Play The Reckoning in 1978. Written and directed by Ann Jellicoe, it told the story of the part played by the town in the Monmouth Rebellion. Its huge success led her to set up the Colway Theatre Trust with its subsequent development of Community Plays throughout the West Country and beyond. In 1984 came the second Lyme play, The Western Women, about the remarkable role played by women in the Siege of Lyme. For this work she was awarded the OBE.
Ever the innovator, she gave a one-woman dramatised reading of The Western Women at the Marine Theatre two years ago. Of this performance, given when she was 80 years old, the Town Mill’s journal said: “This was genius…such an evening is very rare and we were privileged to be part of it.”
Ann Jellicoe has been at the cutting edge of theatre in this country for the past 50 years. She has a fascinating tale to tell, and guests will have a unique opportunity to question her on all aspects of her work: writing, acting, directing, or creating theatre of the people, for the people, by the people.
Reservations, £25 per person, must be pre-booked by lst February at the latest so that catering arrangements can be finalised.
For further information please contact me, Margaret Rose on 01297-445503.
Margaret Rose is Chairman of The Friends of Lyme Regis Museum