Tour of Broadwater Cemetery - August 2017

RICHARD FORTEY WINS 2016 LITERARY PRIZE

From the left: Angus Maclennan, John Price and Richard Fortey

The Richard Jefferies Society and The White Horse Bookshop Writer's Prize has been awarded to British palaeontologist, natural historian, writer and broadcaster Richard Fortey for The Wood for the Trees (William Collins). From a short list of five, the panel judged that the book best met the criterion of reflecting themes or topics broadly consistent with Jefferies’ writing.

Connections and Inspirations: the Influence of Richard Jefferies on Writers and Poets

RICHARD JEFFERIES SOCIETY 

STUDY DAY

SATURDAY 24 June 2017

Connections and Inspirations: the Influence of Richard Jefferies on Writers and Poets

Readings from Richard Jefferies and Alfred Williams

Birthday Lecture 5 Nov 2016

Event: Tewkesbury and John Moore

Ben Tubbs Adventures published for the first time

Ben Tubbs Adventures is Richard Jefferies’ earliest extant work of any length, probably written in his late teens.  It is a quest novel of voyage and adventure, and his first essay in a genre to which he was naturally drawn. It was probably influenced by the greatest quest story of them all, Homer’s Odyssey, one of Jefferies’ favourite books as a boy.

It is likely that Jefferies wrote it for his personal amusement and the entertainment of family and friends. For students of Jefferies, the novel is of interest.

The humour and Ben’s pranks in the early chapters of the book are juvenile and immature but fitting for a boy’s story. The descriptions of the slaves on the slave-ships are racist in the extreme and painful to read. However the later chapters, that treat Ben’s adventures in America, show some sparks of Jefferies’ real writing talent. He describes the prairies with great sensitivity.

The book is published for the first time (April 2016), in paperback (200pp)and is available through the Richard Jefferies Society at a cost of £8 plus postage (rrp £12). Go to:

http://richardjefferiessociety.org.  There is an excellent introduction by Andrew Rossabi and this is worth reading in its own right.

Ben Tubbs Adventures (Petton Books: Norfolk, 2016). ISBN: 9780956375179.

NEW PUBLICATION - AVAILABLE NOW

The Farmer’s World (Petton Books, Feb. 2016) is now available. The book comprises all the articles (nearly 90) by Jefferies published in The Live Stock Journal and Fancier's Gazette in the late 1870s, along with a masterly introduction by Professor Eric Jones.

The articles are forthright, almost campaigning, often urging readers to reconsider their conservative ways, to be innovative, to seek commercial opportunities and to tackle waste. ‘Middlemen’ were regularly disparaged, traditional methods of distribution questioned and imaginative schemes suggested to bring producer and consumer closer together. Jefferies also displayed a surprising ability in figures and a good grasp of mechanical engineering, explaining with clarity the workings of newly invented farming machinery. The essays collected here demonstrate Jefferies’ expertise in trade-paper journalism and contrast sharply with his later, lyrical work. He was a modernist of his time, and declares: ‘agriculture has become far too wide for the brain of any one man’.

The soft-back book can be purchased from the Richard Jefferies Society for £10 plus postage. 

The Presence of the Past: Richard Jefferies, the Middle Ridgeway and landscape change

Richard Jefferies Society Birthday Lecture

Saturday 25 October 2014 - 2.30-4.40pmSubject: The Presence of the Past:  Richard Jefferies, the Middle Ridgeway and landscape change
Speaker: Prof. Patrick Dillon

Venue: Liddington Village Hall, Church Road, Liddington, SN4 0HB

Admittance: Free

Walking the Icknield Way and the Ridgeway by Hugh Thomson

Hugh Thomson has spent many years travelling through and writing about Peru, Mexico and the Indian Himalaya but turned his attention, this time, closer to home. Travelling along the Icknield Way, he passed the great prehistoric monuments of Maiden Castle, Stonehenge and Avebury, before ending at the Wash near Seahenge. His journey took him through Jefferies Land and Liddington Castle. Hugh will take us on an exploration of our local ancient landscape along a 400 mile journey from coast to coast. In his book, Hugh casts unexpected light – and humour – on the way we live now. Copies of the book will be available to buy on the day that Mr Thomson will be pleased to sign.

Harmony by Julian Anderson

The Richard Jefferies Society has written to a young British composer congratulating him on his opening composition for the first night of the BBC Proms (12th July).

 The new work entitled Harmony, for choir and orchestra, by Julian Anderson lasted 5 minutes, was commissioned by the BBC and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. The piece was inspired by Richard Jefferies’ autobiography The Story of My Heart and words taken from it included:

 The clock may make time for itself; there is none for me...The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference?

The interview and composition was broadcast on BBC radio 3 and can be played at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036jm00

Richard Jefferies Society Birthday Lecture 3rd November

Richard Jefferies was born on 6th November 1848. Each year the Richard Jefferies Society celebrate his birth with a Lecture as part of the Annual General Meeting.  This year Rebecca Welshman from the University of Exeter will speak on the subject of "Imagining Archaeology: nature and landscape in the work of Richard Jefferies."

The details are as follows:

Memorial event 16th March 2012 Eltham Churchyard

Richard Oliver Launcelot Jefferies (18th July 1883 – 16th March 1885) memorial – ceremony at St John’s Churchyard, Eltham on Friday 16 March 2012 at 2pm

Birthday Lecture

Richard Jefferies: An Anthology by Hugoe Matthews and Rebecca Welshman.

This new anthology of extracts from Jefferies' writing is selected by Hugoe Matthews and Rebecca Welshman. It aims to highlight his broad, exploratory, and sometimes unpredictable nature in his works. The authors have focused primarily on short quotations which read well independently, and longer passages which demonstrate the context, the quality of the writing, or the flow of Richard Jefferies’ thoughts and observations. Where possible the selections are chronological and show a shift in the emphasis of his work from the 1870s, which focused largely on practical subjects such as farming and rural life, to his later work of increased sensitivity and perception of the natural world. Thereby they have sought to reveal the organic continuity and calm objectivity of Jefferies’ writing, which was present from his teens and addressed a diversity of subjects during an extraordinary era of change, illuminating both the man behind the words, and the times in which he lived. The Anthology is published in a case-bound, thread-sewn book of 266 pages.

The book was published on 6 November 2010 to celebrate 162 years since the day the author was born.

ISBN: 978-0-9563751-2-4. Price £20 (plus postage: £2.50 UK) It can be ordered via the Richard Jefferies Society.

Richard Jefferies’ science fiction book: basis for Birthday Lecture on 6 November

Professor John Carey (pictured above) will be giving this year’s Richard Jefferies’ Birthday Lecture on Saturday 6 November at Liddington Village Hall starting at 2.30pm, 162 years after Swindon’s most celebrated writer was born and raised at Coate Farm in 1848.

Adventures in the Vale of the White Horse

Exactly 100 years after Kate Tryon’s first visit to Swindon, to see the places that Richard Jefferies wrote about, her memoir of the occasion has been published by the Richard Jefferies Society.

60 YEAR OLD CINE FILM ABOUT RICHARD JEFFERIES FOUND IN A LOFT IN ESSEX RETURNS HOME

 A cine film, made by the Film Production Unit of the Swindon Public Library Film Society in 1948, has found its way back to Swindon. The film, produced as a tribute to Richard Jefferies one hundred years after his birth, was found in a loft in Essex by Philip Mansbridge among films about trains.

RICHARD JEFFERIES “SPIRIT COUNTRY”

RICHARD JEFFERIES “SPIRIT COUNTRY”

An illustrated lecture by Roger Vlitos, photographer.

Liddington Village Hall, Saturday 11th October 2008: 2.30pm

MULBERRY TREE --COATE FARM

 

170 year old fruit tree snapped in two by winds

Richard Jefferies famous mulberry tree was another casualty of the high winds that blew across central England in the early hours of Monday (24 September 2007) morning. The old tree, thought to be about 170 years old, was snapped in two and lost its main branch (see picture).

The tree forms the main focal point in the back garden of the Jefferies house and museum at Coate and was planted by Richard Jefferies father.Richard Jefferies sent many hours sitting under this tree and even composed a poem to it* when it lost a bough during his lifetime.Now others are penning their tributes to the tree and it is hoped that the wood from the fallen trunk can be seasoned and turned into something equally beautiful and memorable.

Jean Saunders, secretary of the Richard Jefferies Society said:"We are all heart broken to see the tree in its present state. However battered it may be, we will still love it and treasure it. The fruits are delicious and children have danced around it this year singing 'here we go round the mulberry bush'. To be on the safe side, we are taking cuttings but hope that the tree survives another century or two".

~~~ 

*  Richard Jefferies wrote his poem about the mulberry tree around 1871, but it did not appear in print until the year after his death. It was published in the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard on Saturday 16 June 1888 under the title of 'The Tree of Life'. 

Oh, mulberry tree, oh mulberry tree

Dear are thy spreading boughs to me.

Beneath their cool and friendly shade

My earliest childhood laughed and played,

Or, lips all stained with rich red fruit

Slept in the long grass at thy root.

Oh mulberry tree, oh mulberry tree !

The yellow moonlight shone on thee.

A few low words--a gentle sigh,

A tear within the upturned eye.

“I love—my fate to thee resign"—

A nameless thrill, and she was mine.

The mid-day sun in splendour blazed,

And all who stood around me praised.

The deed was done, the fame went round,

My brows with laurel leaves were crowned

My first—my proudest victory

Beneath thy boughs, oh mulberry tree.

The tears of Heaven were falling fast,

Mourning the memory of the past.

I knelt beneath the broken limb

In rain and night, and wept for him.

I saw the tomb -- the planks laid there,

To slide the coffin to its lair,

"Ashes to ashes", this the end,

My first, my last -- my only friend!

The morning stars grew pale and few,

In chilly draughts the east wind blew,

Lifting the black and frost-strewn leaves

In rustling eddies to the eaves.

Deceived no more with life's vain lies,

And all things equal in mine eyes,

I wait--still near the mulberry tree,

The dawning of eternity!

Whoe'er shall pluck the mulberry tree,

Bitter and sweet its fruit shall be;

Such --joy and misery still at strife,

The berries of the Tree of Life!