For all the literary expositions on the causes and events of the 1831 riots, the most engaging and inspiring surely has to be Keith Morgan’s poem ‘Warren James: Freedom Fighter’. The poem came into print in his collection Albert’s Dree Wi’ker the year before Ralph’s book and continues to be performed by Keith to this day. Recently Ian Right (above) published The Life and Times of Warren James: a freeminer from the Forest of Dean (now in it's 3rd revised edition). Ian is also one of a small group of enthusiastic volunteers who have come together with the aim of keeping the memory of James alive by establishing an annual Warren James Day on the 8th June (the first day of the ‘riots’). We are told more details of the day will be revealed over the coming weeks.  Warren James place in the history of the Forest may be secure for some time to come. ​

In 1944 Leonard Clark returned to the Forest to find his beloved Chestnuts Wood clear-felled: “There, to my horror, I saw a bald hill with just a thin ring of trees on the top. My eyes flooded with tears. So this was all that remained of my Chestnuts Wood” (A Fool in the Forest, p11). Startling as this present-day scene is near Worrall Hill, thankfully it’s a long overdue harvest of chestnut coppice – so soon new shoots will be sprouting, and in just a few years chestnut trees will be reaching for the sky again and resounding with bird song in spring. Leonard Clark wrote three fantastic books looking back at the Forest of his youth. In those books, and in many of his poems he brilliantly evokes the deep and rewarding relationship we can have with nature and landscape, ever changing as it is. Successful author, poet, editor he is also a hugely important figure in the history of Forest of Dean writing – someone to inspire the next generation of Forest writers?  

Very sad news that Dick Brice has passed away. A talented and much-loved poet, songwriter, and performer he started his musical career as a teenager playing the ukulele, performing George Formby songs with a school friend around local youth clubs. Dick qualified as a teacher and work took him away from the Forest for a while, but he later returned to the area. By then Dick and wife Di were singing in a four-part harmony group, performing traditional English songs, touring around pubs and clubs. Dick would occasionally write music for old broadsheet verses and stories to turn them into song. With the demands of family life making touring for the couple more challenging Dick began to perform on his own, and in the early 1980s he was asked to appear alongside local writers Winifred Foley, Harry Beddington, and Keith Morgan on the iconic Forest Talk album. Dick cited this as the beginning of him writing songs in dialect and about the Forest. Several solo albums followed. Whilst his songs about the landscape, people, places, and culture of the Forest, both comical and more serious, were hugely popular locally and further afield, Dick’s material was far from limited to local topics. Having the pleasure of seeing Dick perform you might just as easily hear his musical rendition of a W. B. Yeats poem as you would hear him sing about one his great loves: sailing. When Dick took early retirement as a schoolteacher, he taught evening classes in sailing and navigation. He would also occasionally deliver yachts by sailing them to their new owners. In 2021 Dick had his first collection of poems published by local imprint Yorkley Press. The collection featured some of his most popular songs in verse form, such as perhaps his most loved local ‘anthem’ The Land Between Two Rivers. There were new poems too, and Dick continued to write more following the book’s publication. As Dick made clear, he was by then in his ‘90th decade’ so perhaps inevitably several of the poems were reflections on mortality. Dick has left us with a treasure-trove of music, songs and poetry that encapsulate so much of what we love, laugh about and sometimes lament on losing, about the Forest of Dean. He was a much loved, and hugely talented man, a Forester who will be deeply, deeply missed. 
 
The video is a recording of Dick reading his poem The Turn of the Tide. Dikc very kindly contributed to our last series of podcasts and you can hear him discussing his career and writing over on the podcast pages here.  

​This enchanting story for younger children follows a gang of boys who befriend and rescue a Welsh dragon trapped deep underground in the Forest of Dean. The young boys are iron miners, and as the author points out in his introduction, children were still employed in mines in the nineteenth century despite legislation passed in 1842 banning boys under 10yrs of age from working underground (it outlawed women and girls of any age working underground). Author Keith Thomas explains how he was inspired to write the book by an artefact on display at Clearwell Caves:  
 
“I was a close friend of Ray Wright who was the owner the caves and opened them up to visitors. In one of the display cases there are the remains of a pair of tiny children's shoes found during explorations of the deep underground iron mine levels. These would have belonged to one of the children working there. I pictured the children who had to work in such terrible conditions and it saddened me to think of their lives.”
 
 
Despite the real-life background to the story and its setting which is almost entirely underground, it is a million miles from the type of gritty ‘misery lit’ genre more often associated with Victorian working lives. It is instead a lovely story of friendship and adventure as ‘billy boys’ Tom and Matty, and their gang of juvenile workmates struggle to work out how they can get their new-found friend Bodkyn out of the mine.

​The Forest of Dean writer whose work has been seen by the most people by some way, with audiences in the millions, must surely be Dennis Potter. The Singing Detective is back on TV, launching with a triple bill last night on BBC Four. If you missed it you can still watch on iPlayer – but it’s for a limited period only (29 days from today - 1st Dec) so don’t leave it too long! It’s being shown again as part of the British Film Institute’s 100 BBC TV Gamechangers, and how fitting that it should be one of Potter’s dramas in which the Forest played a crucial part. As the afflicted author Phillip Marlow lies in a hospital bed, memories of his Forest of Dean childhood intermingle with the plot and characters of his hard-boiled detective fiction. Marlow suffers from the same dreadful chronic condition that Potter did - psoriatic arthropathy – and there are many other elements of the story that are drawn from the author’s life. But, as Potter pointed out, incidents in the author’s life are the raw materials on which he draws, and we should not draw too many conclusions from what appears.  Local extras featured as well as local locations and you can hear Forest location scout, ex-teacher John Belcher talking about that here: 

The current screening marking 100 years of the BBC was preceded with actor Alison Steadman reflecting on her experience of filming, and, as she points out weeks of rehearsal prior to filming – a luxury rarely afforded TV actors today. Like many of the programmes from the past that make up the Gamechangers list, there are moments in The Singing Detective that may well jar with contemporary viewers, but worth remembering this is television from another time, depicting the attitudes of society at the time – and indeed in this case is arguably a critiquing of them. As Steadman points out, television was made differently then too, longer in the marking, as well as the work itself  taking its time to portray characters and scenes, and tell its story. So, if you’ve not seen it, or it’s been a while, block out some time, sit back and enjoy a true masterpiece – from the pen of one of the Forest of Dean’s finest and most important authors.

In the early 1990's Bernard Kear produced two wonderfully illustrated books based on his memories of growing up in the Forest of Dean during World War Two. Scenes of Childhood Vol 1 (1992) and Vol 2 (1993) depict and describe a childhood of freedom - camps in the wood, rope swings, fun and games - but also of daily chores to help out  -  collecting firewood, digging the garden, gathering apples for cider - and the tough realities such as the slaughter of the family pig. All of this is set amongst a backdrop of sharply observed and lovingly rendered depictions of nature and landscape. In addition to the lively and intricate narrative illustrations, there are also stand alone embellishments at the bottom or the corner of pages: a sprinting rabbit here, a stand of toadstools there, woodpeckers, snails, wild primroses, ferns, all beautifully detailed. No surprise then that Bernard's last book was focused solely on this area of interest for him: it was called A Love of Nature in Paint and Print.  Along with ceramics made by Bernard, the artwork for the book will be going on show at a special exhibition on the 19th November in Lydney. This will be a  great opportunity to see at first hand the work of a talented late Forest artist (and accomplished author), and to get your hands on a copy of his lovely book - on sale at the event.  ​

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When a teenage boy is found dead in the river Tossy everyone in the tight-knit village of Coedafon assumes that he accidentally drowned trying to retrieve his snagged fishing tackle. When this is quickly confirmed by a hasty Coroner’s enquiry that would seem to be the end of it: the unfortunate death of, it turns out, a disliked and unpopular boy. But…not so for Meg Marsden and her scarred War-veteran husband Andy, recently moved to the village to convalesce and indulge their love of fly fishing. For them, something doesn’t add up. And so begins what becomes a gripping whodunnit.

Foul Hooked, written by Islay Manley, is set in a thinly disguised version of Brockweir, the ancient village on the river Wye at the edge of the Forest of Dean. Though not exact in every detail the fictional village where nearly all of the book’s events play out replicates the basic topography and some of the places of the real village and its surroundings. The author and her husband Herbert lived in Brockweir after the War, and like the book’s fictional sleuths they too enjoyed fishing on the Wye. Herbert was employed as a Wye valley river bailiff. After his death sometime in the 1950’s Islay moved away, presumably only then writing this fabulous, and foul, story set there.

Since the start of the Reading the Forest project our team have been rediscovering authors and books with strong connections to the Forest of Dean. Some of these have been known about by local historians and book collectors – though we’ve often been able to dig deeper and discover more about them. But some authors we’ve come across had seemingly been totally lost to the Forest’s collective memory. One of these was Ada M. Trotter, author of Forest of Dean set novels Heaven’s Gate (1886) and Bledisloe (1887). Over the past few years one of our team has become…well, to be honest quite obsessed with finding out all he can about this Aylburton-born writer and journalist. He has been slowly adding his findings to Trotter’s author profile page on the Reading the Forest website, though admits that he’s way behind in sharing all the fascinating info he’s found out. One thing though as eluded him all this time and that is finding a picture of the author. Whilst during the course of his research he’s come across photos of her sister (a prominent US Suffragist), her brother-in-law (Ross-born Geologist, Edward Claypole), and one of her brothers, he’s not found a picture of her anywhere – until now!

One of his regular ‘Ada M. Trotter’ searches on e-bay just last week turned up a copy of an 1894-5 annual of the Girls Own Paper – a journal for girls and young women that she regularly contributed to. And amongst the seller’s images of the book was one of the inside covers, and it featured photographic portraits of the contributors. Needless to say, our Trotter enthusiast (obsessive!) successfully bid on the book and recently received delivery. So here, at last, is Ada M(ary) Trotter, author and journalist, born in the Forest of Dean, emigrated to Canada and later lived in the USA.

Meanwhile, images (sketches, portraits, photographs) continue to elude us for S.M. Crawley-Boevey, Margaret Mushet, William S. Wickenden, P. J. Ducarel, H. G. Nicholls, Mabel K. Woods, and Catherine Drew. So, if you have or know of a picture of any of these – we would absolutely love to see them!

Poly Morland is an award-winning documentary maker, journalist and author. She came upon Berger’s book by chance whilst clearing out her mother’s house in the summer of 2020. Picking up the dusty paperback copy that had fallen down the back of a cupboard decades ago, she instantly recognised one of the photographs: it showed the very same rural valley where she now lived. ‘Not only was this my home, my valley’ she writes, ‘but I too knew the doctor, his successor, the woman who serves this community today’.  Unsurprisingly perhaps, when she contacted her, Morland’s doctor knew of Berger’s book, indeed it was part of the reason she too became a doctor: yes, they should meet.  And so began their collaboration on this wonderful new book.

A Fortunate Woman owes a great deal to its predecessor in regard to its approach and structure. It’s exact setting is never explicitly named, though of course, as the anonymity in the original was blown by a sensationalist tabloid newspaper piece, today a simple online search will divulge the identity of ‘the valley’ that Eskell and now Morland’s doctor serves.  Where Eskell became ‘Sassall’, Morland’s doctor is never named – pseudonymously or otherwise. In both cases this gives their authors licence to exploit techniques more akin to the writing of novel in order to explore the inner lives of their subject. Based on close observation, interview, and in Morland’s case extracts from the personal journal of her doctor, yet not adhering in every detail to exact biography, the authors are free to combine and reconfigure incidents in order to better get at underlying truths. These are of course the stories of individual doctors, replete with biographical detail, yet they are not biographies as such. Rather, the part-anonymity of their protagonists allows these to be stories of doctors more generally; professionals in a role whose motivations and approaches to their work owe as much to more general institutional, social and geographical circumstances, as they do to individual personalities.
 
Both books use anonymised patient consultations and histories as a means to explore the doctor-patient relationship in depth, as well as particular approaches to clinical practice. Alongside the personal histories of the doctors, it is these case histories that provide much of the narrative drive. They also, at points, provide moments of heart-stopping drama. Some of Morland’s descriptions of the GP’s inner thought processes and decision making when faced with rapidly emerging life and death situations are breath-taking. We see a doctor who perceives these situations in all their human dimensions and implications rather than merely as detached professional challenges.
 
Berger and Mohr’s book is now 55 years old, and as GP Doctor Gavin Francis wrote in the introduction to the 2015 reissue of A Fortunate Man, it is now ‘a memorial not just to this exceptional individual but to a way of practising medicine that has almost disappeared.’ It is a book that is to be honest showing its age, not just in terms of the transformation of medical practice, but also in the wider social and literary context of its writing. Berger as author is a commanding presence in the book, untroubled by later academic theories that brought into question the authority of such an unequivocal authorial voice. Its author is almost as much protagonist in the book as ‘Sassall’ is in the life of his rural community. Reading A Fortunate Woman, Morland is also very much precent as author. Whilst her relationship to the doctor, Berger’s book, and the wider issues facing contemporary primary care are clear, they are also far more lightly held by the text, never interfering with the presence and story of the doctor and her patients. 
 
Berger’s intense focus on the doctor precluded, as he himself acknowledged, any significant mention of Eskell’s wife Betty who was not only a vital support to Eskell personally (Eskell suffered from depression) but also professionally in helping to run the practice. He was also supported in reality by a cast of pharmacists, district nurses and other professionals – not that you would know it from the book. Reading A Fortunate Man today it is to read a book of its time: the politics, the cultural assumptions, the social concerns expressed through the cases. Without wishing to over emphasise this, it is too, a book written about a male professional, by a male writer. They share a great deal in terms of social circumstances and outlook too, as well as cultural tastes. As Eskell’s late son pointed out, his father relished the many dinner party conversations on art, books and music with the likes of Berger and his friends. This was a period in which both medicine and literature were still dominated by the voices of men. In contrast, the experience of  reading Morland’s book today is then one of being blasted by a gust of fresh, clear, contemporary air issuing from its writing and sensibility.

It was really important to Andy that the book also looked right, explaining that, “If it looks good then kids will pick it up and then they’ll read it”. The spreads were designed by Sarah Fountain and are beautifully laid out with a river, modelled on the Wye, depicting the timeline which flows through the pages of the first chapter.  Helping him achieve the right look was illustrator Ursula Hurst, who Andy says, “Understood exactly what I was after”.  The book contains a wealth of photos, and pictures, many provided by local people and groups.  There are wonderful original illustrations by Hurst throughout, particularly notable is a Tolkienesque map of the Forest at the beginning.  Andy worked collaboratively with Hurst sending her ideas of the type of images he wanted to use and sharing examples of his other books. He is certainly pleased with the results declaring that, “I was able to get [the book] exactly how I wanted it.”
Andy Seed is the author of over 30 books including the international bestseller The Clue is in the Poo and The Silly Book series, winner of the Blue Peter Book Award in 2015. His titles for adults include the hugely popular All Teachers Great and Small series.  He left teaching to become a writer in 2000,  but he hadn’t really thought about writing professionally until after a chance conversation with poet and children’s author Wes Magee.  Magee, who was also a teacher turned writer, supplemented his writing with school visits and by happenstance visited the school where Andy worked around the time he (Andy) had started writing some poetry for children.   Magee encouraged him, “He said, ‘Send it to an editor, what have you got to lose’”.  Andy started his writing career creating content for an educational website and writing educational worksheets to pay the bills, but on his second attempt, his poetry was accepted by a publisher.  This was followed in 2003 with his first non-fiction children’s book.  Besides his writing, Andy has followed in Magee’s footsteps and he now specialises in school visits promoting reading for pleasure and says his books are the style they are because they’re very good at getting kids reading.

Andy is passionate about children’s literacy and says it should be at the heart of education, “It’s a building block, going through the stage of enjoying books, stories, having books read to you, physical books and the great thing about a physical book is you can borrow it, you can lend it, you can share it, you can take it off the shelf, it’s there’.  He also argues that reading is an engine of social change and social mobility stating that, “There’s a beautiful correlation between the physical number of books in a house and the educational attainment of a child and that’s regardless of the social group”.  For Andy it’s essential that children have reading role models and he is concerned that children are increasingly seeing their parents using screens, whereas in the past they might have been reading newspapers, books or magazines and therefore normalising reading. 
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It was Andy’s family that first introduced him to reading for pleasure.  His grandmother bought him his first novel, Stig of the Dump, which he describes as, “one of those books that has a kind of magic in it… you’re transported in the story”, and which he read late into the night under his bedcovers by torchlight.  Dr Seuss also strongly influenced him as a child with The Cat in the Hat introducing him to word play; a device he frequently employs in his own writing. 

​Many of Andy Seed’s books are factual books, which is a genre he was also attracted to as a child stating that, “The book that really I went back to time and time again is The Guinness World Records because I just love facts, stats… that got me into factual books and that’s probably why I write them”.  Yet, despite being an enthusiastic reader as a younger child, Andy fell away from reading when he went to secondary school becoming a bit of a tearaway and, according to his website, getting up to lots of naughty pranks.  However, a memorable English lesson was to change that and, with it, the direction of his life.  He explains, “The usual English teacher was away and we had… the hardest teacher in the school… and he was really cross that he had to cover this other teacher’s lesson”.  The substitute teacher told Andy’s class to get on with some work while he marked some books and, finding that he did not have anything to keep himself out of trouble, Andy took a book off the bookcase at the back of the room, “I got this massive thick… book out of the glass cabinet… it was awesome, absolutely awesome… I’d picked up the Iliad… and I was grabbed, absolute grabbed by it… I just got back into reading”.  Andy went on to read Homer’s second ancient Greek epic, the Odyssey and he still describes both books as his favourites.  His renewed love of reading lead to him experiment with writing, much to his English teacher’s surprise, “I wrote this story… she couldn’t believe I’d written it because up to that point I’d just messed around”.  As Andy points out, when it comes to his writing career, “It’s all down to the books really”. 

The Story of the Forest: A children’s history of the Forest is available from the Forest of Dean Local History society’s website: www.forestofdeanhistory.org.uk/ as well as local outlets including Taurus Crafts and Choice Cards in Lydney and the Dean Heritage Centre in Soudley.  You can find out more about Andy Seed on his official website: www.andyseed.com.

And...Andy's busy right now completing his latest book all about the fascinating wildlife of the Forest of Dean.