Fans of British folklore are championing a campaign to safeguard a unique archive cataloguing traditions from Britain and Ireland. The collection – of more than 20,000 books, 4,000 tape cassettes and 3,500 hours of reel-to-reel audio – has been amassed by one man. David “Doc” Rowe is a 79-year-old folklorist who has travelled the UK since the 1960s, visiting calendar customs such as the Straw Bear Festival, the Krampus Run or the Hunting of the Earl of Rone.
Director Rob Curry and actor/director Tim Plester set up the crowdfunder, which has been supported by Eliza Carthy, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. The co-directors previously collaborated on two acclaimed documentaries about the British folk scene – Way of the Morris and The Ballad of Shirley Collins. They started work at the end of lockdown on a film about Rowe and his annual odyssey around the rituals of Britain, then expanded the project to help him find a permanent home for his archive.
“There are few collections of working-class histories of the British Isles,” says Curry. “The opportunity to save one of this scale is worth anybody’s money.”
The archive is currently stored in a former pharmaceutical unit in Whitby, North Yorkshire, a repository that puts Plester in mind of another British institution. “Doc is like Doctor Who. His storage facility has a small door into this Tardis-like space, and going through his archive is like travelling through time and space.”
Like the Doctor Who show, many events recorded by Rowe are extremely creepy. The trailer for Plester and Curry’s documentary evokes the current love of folk horror, dramas that use the aesthetics and style of folklore, such as this year’s cult hit Enys Men and the TV series The Gallows Pole.
“We do embrace that Wicker Man element as filmmakers,” says Curry. “There’s a theory that the British love folk horror because we were the first country to industrialise, so we are most disconnected from our agrarian roots.”
Plester says that, as a child growing up in the village of Adderbury, he was terrified by the morris men’s fool, a performer who interacts with spectators during a dance. “He prided himself on scaring us – it’s part of the bag of these traditions. They’re an opportunity for anarchy, for communities to take back the streets for a day.”
You can read more in an article by Alice Fisher published in The Guardian at: https://tinyurl.com/3zeaeynf.