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The Living Tradition
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Doc
Rowe - A National Treasure! by John Adams and Dave Herron |
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In 1931 H.G. Wells wrote In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century, intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it (Work Wealth & Happiness of Mankind). At the end of the last century the Victorian collectors saw a need to record for posterity the tapestry of music, custom, and song that they saw in danger of disappearing. Collectors such as Lucy Broadwood, Frank Kidson and Cecil Sharp would have been amazed and alarmed at the position at the end of the twentieth century; amazed at the wealth of material that has been amassed and alarmed at the dearth of provision for their legacy. No
properly funded centre exists in England to research and celebrate our
vernacular arts. No sustained funds or facilities have ever existed
in England specifically for research into our native traditions. Most research and collecting has to date been accomplished informally
by individuals generally unsupported financially. One such individual
is Doc Rowe. Arguably the most important English collector
since Kidson or Sharp, he has been documenting folklore, song, dance
and cultural traditions for the last thirty years, and has amassed an
archive of material on past and contemporary popular culture in Britain.
With its particular emphasis on annual traditional events (what some
call calendar custom), the collection containing a wide variety of media
- video, film, photography, and audio, has already been acknowledged
internationally as of major significance. How
major? Should
you have time to browse, you might like to inspect the 900 hours-worth
of viewing copies drawn from the 2,000 hours of master video tapes on
custom, song, dance and interviews that Doc has personally shot. Further
related material includes off-air, donated and purchased material and
some of this custom actuality material dates back as early as 1912.
There is 16mm footage largely from The Future of Things Past
(Wood Film / C4 1986) series that he worked on in 1985-6. Early
last year BBC2 televised a drama called Shooting the Past
in which actors Timothy Spall and Lindsey Duncan fought to preserve
an antiquated picture collection from American developers. The production
was peppered with haunting collages of photographic images and won public
response and critical acclaim. The archive depicted could be easily
matched by the feast of photographic material included in Doc Rowes
collection. The photographic record consists of a mind boggling 40,000
black and white negatives and over 1,500 colour negatives as well as
2,500 prints and 32,000 transparencies all filed according to location,
date and sequence shot. Negatives are filed in date sequence. Docs
own work is backed up by personal indexes to other photo collections
including the Benjamin Stone Collection, Cecil Sharps photographs
of Singers (in England and USA) and the photographs on song and dance
in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. In
addition, there is written and printed material (either as photocopies
or in published volumes), field notes and correspondence. There are
artefacts, posters, newspaper cuttings and video taped material. There is exhibition and display material consisting of mounted photographs,
ephemera and material objects developed from Docs work as a designer
and illustrator. His
records include computer-generated indexes to material in EFDSS Film
and Video Collection, and allied subject references to footage in the
National Film Archive and BUFVC collection. There are indexes to material
at CECTAL (Sheffield), the Morris Ring, and the Morris Federation. It
would take an army of librarians to sort through the 7,000 books, journals,
magazines and that does not include the personal diaries and letters
or Docs own printed material and manuscripts.
Add to that the various County, Museum and contact references,
as well as calendar custom indexes detailing regions, dates and types.
Over here are transcripts and texts from audio and video recordings;
over there are news cuttings and sources on custom, superstition, contemporary
legend, song and dialect. You can find regional texts, transcripts and
files for folk plays. Specific indexes and complete runs of major magazines
and Journals are available such as Folklore, Folksong Journal, Wordlore,
Lore and Language and English Dance and Song. Collections of Folk Life,
Oral History Journal and History Workshop Journal, sit side by side
with runs of Folk Revival magazines. Elsewhere, there are various manuscripts
and song collections, ephemera, Broadsheets, and posters on 20th
century popular culture and folklife. There
are items such as a Mummers Costume, Haxey Hood Lords wand
of office, a variety of ceremonial and ritual foods from events such
as doles, or charities. Ephemera
such as posters, souvenir items including key rings, tea towels, cups
etc. are on display as are a number of dance costumes. Negotiations
are also taking place to include other collections, which include song
and dance, storytelling and childlore. Of
the man himself. In
the early eighties he was based in Sheffield at the Centre for English
Cultural Tradition and Language (CECTAL). He then moved to London to
organise the London History Workshop Centre Sound and Video Archive.
It was the experience of working with these collections that has led
to the recognition of the significance of his own material and the necessity
of ensuring appropriate storage security and an improved level of access
and display. This
necessity was further underlined some time ago when Doc's London flat,
for many years the location of the collection, was flooded. Luckily
no damage to the collection resulted but a move was urgently needed.
Due to the generosity of Elizabeth Wood and the Elizabeth Robson estate,
the lower part of a Georgian house in Bristol was made available for
Doc to rent and house the archive collection and the removal of the
items to the new location followed. A further move, within Bristol,
is taking place at the time of publication, with assistance from the
newly formed Doc Rowe Collection Support Group, co-ordinated by John
Adams of Salford University and including some key figures from the
traditional arts field as consultants as well as many sponsors. It
is clear that this collection is now beyond the ability of one man to
manage. As a still energetic fifty-something, Doc has done his bit and
it is truly amazing that he has achieved so much without significant
assistance. But
why should this have been the case? In England, although there is increasing
interest in our national heritage and traditions, all too
often genuine local material is overlooked and supplanted by a synthetic
nostalgia product which perhaps more readily fits the requirements of
the heritage industry and the colour supplements. Often local or regional
traditions are simply picked up and appropriated in a way which often
trivialises (much the same as the media often do) treating them as quaint,
bizarre and outmoded. Towards
a national centre. Yet
these tools, in the hands of the discerning, have all the means to reveal
resolve and acknowledge the qualities of common life so lacking in our
contemporary culture. By collecting and making available archive material
for education, research and instruction, we can stimulate the folk
mode of expression and develop interest in local tradition generally.
Paradoxically the mixed media nature of the collection has proved to
be a disadvantage when searching for an organisation or institution
to provide a home. Since many institutions deal only with single media,
collections would be split according to group. i.e. books to the British
Library, audio to the National Sound Archive. Film archives are only
interested in the film and maybe the video. Likewise, sound archives
and photographic archives are not interested in the other media, although
television programmes would benefit from access to all of the collection,
be it audio, still or movie. One would have thought that in this multi-media
age a mixed-media collection would have little problem in this respect. It
is immediately obvious that, housed to give access and effectively marketed,
the whole collection could generate income from all branches of the
broadcast, narrowcast and print media, provide an attractive research
resource and allow us to expand our knowledge of our traditional cultural
past and present. An important additional benefit would be the
opportunity to return copies to the regions where material originated,
a natural outcome at a time when, following political devolution, interest
in regionality is growing. A
support group In
the short term, the support group has more pressing aims. The intermediate
storage of the collection is already underway, and this is being financed
by the equivalent of buying Doc a pint! scheme. If 75 people
are willing to give Doc, via the support group, the price of a pint
of beer per month for the next 12 months, he will not get the opportunity
to drink it but it will go to house the collection in its temporary
home while the permanent solution is negotiated. (Im sure he would
appreciate the occasional real pint if you bump into him!) A
second short-term aim is to bring Doc more firmly and realistically
into the digital age with some newer recording technology. Given Docs
knowledge, research ability and skills, it seems unrealistic - if not
perverse - to document the early part of the 21st century
on predominantly analogue technology. To this end, approaches are being
made to a variety of media equipment manufacturers and the support group
will be spearheading a campaign for the provision of the equipment and
the blank media. Doc Rowe is a national treasure in charge of a national treasure and his worth is well evidenced in the exponential growth of the support group. At the end of a century which began with well- intentioned people recording for posterity a culture which was seen as declining and dying, his enthusiastic and dedicated documentation has not only recorded a large proportion of the past for our potential interest and enjoyment but shown a more optimistic view - one which embraces and celebrates that culture as a living and organic form that is still capable of expansion - a Living Tradition
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Links, further information and recordings: If
you wish to contribute to the campaign to support Docs work and
help make moves to disseminate it, you can make a donation, either on
a regular basis by standing order or by a single donation. If a pint of
beer is valued at £2.00 (depending where you drink it) and you consider
it worthwhile giving Doc the equivalent of a pint each month, then you
could ask your bank to make a standing order of
£6.00/ quarter or more to: The
Doc Rowe Collection Support Group Alternatively,
you could send a cheque to: tel.
01 422 822 413
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