I’m not sure how I came by my copy. My father did enjoy Reader’s Digest magazine,
and I remember second-hand copies around the house, but we would not have
purchased the book new. I probably
picked it up at a jumble sale in the mid-1970s, by which time it had lost its
dust jacket. Whatever its origin, I am
glad I obtained one when I did, as judging by Rough’s article they now fetch a
decent price.
Like the readers mentioned in FT,
I enjoyed browsing through its 550 closely-printed and beautifully illustrated
pages, and it helped open my eyes to the strangeness embedded in Britain’s history. The middle section, the regional guide,
passes lightly over the capital, its chapter opening with ‘Hell is a city much
like London’ (unfortunately attributing it to Blake rather than Shelley); as a
citizen of the Great Wen, here was an opportunity to sample those enigmatic
regions north of Watford Gap.
It was not alone in helping to form my interest. On the fiction front, Alan Garner’s novels and
the damp menace of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight made a particularly strong impact – a contrast to my pleasant
suburban upbringing. Such books, and
others, like the abridged version of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (which I chose as a school prize for English in
1974) and Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil and
All His Works, not to mention odd copies of Man, Myth and Magic that came my way, helped to lay the foundation
for my enthusiasm when I picked up an early copy of Fortean Times in the Society for Psychical Research’s library, back
when the Society was located in Adam & Eve Mews, Kensington.
My eclectic and largely undirected reading
was accompanied by other rural activities.
I developed a fantasy of one day owning a smallholding, which thankfully
eventually subsided. During this period
I subscribed to Practical Self
Sufficiency magazine (later Home Farm)
and joined Working Weekends on Organic Farms (better known as WWOOF), the
organisation still going strong today.
Members gave their labour in exchange for bed and board, fresh air, good
food, and the transfer of knowledge I rarely needed again.
Of course I acquired John Seymour’s The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency,
and was delighted to meet him and his family when I stayed with some people I
met through WWOOF who lived in teepees on his Pembrokeshire farm. William Cobbett provided a longer historical
view of rural life, though I was happy to discount his negative view of
drinking tea compared to beer, the economics having changed radically in a
couple of hundred years.
This backward-looking, nostalgic, hippyish
counterculture view of the countryside was accompanied by media which often
showed its darker side, the sorts of films and television programmes that crop
up in Bob Fischer’s The Haunted
Generation column in FT. Musically, while at school and college I was
a regular at the Sunday night folk club held at the Bird in Hand pub in Forest
Hill, south London. My record collection
contained a large proportion of folk, and folk rock, LPs (the Topic record
label is fondly remembered).
Although I didn’t realise it at the time,
I was suitably haunted. Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain
was one strand in my developing interest in forteana, but an important one, and
as other commentators in Rough’s article were quick to point out, while not
always reliable, over the course of 50 years it has stood the test of time
well. Those who want to delve into the
mysteries of our landscape and the stories told about it could do worse than
pick it up and start browsing.
While the Fortean Times article noted how odd it was for a staid publisher
like Reader’s Digest to produce Folklore,
Myths and Legends of Britain, this was not their only foray into the weird
and wonderful. It was followed in 1975 by
a second multi-author volume, 50 pages longer, bearing the self-consciously
quirky title The Reader’s Digest Book of
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories That are Bizarre, Unusual, Odd,
Astonishing, Incredible … but True.
Sadly, it does not have the coherence of Folklore, Myths and Legends.
It must have sold well, though, as my copy is the third edition,
published in 1989, yet it never generated the same degree of affection as its
predecessor, now worthily commemorated in Fortean
Times.
References
Folklore,
Myths and Legends of Britain, London: Reader’s Digest, 1973.
The
Reader’s Digest Book of Strange Stories, Amazing Facts: Stories That are
Bizarre, Unusual, Odd, Astonishing, Incredible … but True, London: Reader’s
Digest, 1975.
Rough, Billy. ‘A Story Without End: Fifty
Years of Folklore, Myths and Legends of
Britain’. Fortean Times 427,
January 2023, pp. 28-35.
