Silent film footage of Rider Haggard, author of She, King Solomon's Mines, etc.

[Extollager]

Well, lookie here!

 

[BAYLOR]

Extollager Thanks for show us this.

 

[Extollager]

It's pretty dull footage -- but it is Haggard! It's remarkable how these things surface -- film or audio recordings of Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rider Haggard, Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, C. S. Lewis, et al. That seems to have been a more British than American thing. I don't know if that's an accurate impression.

 

[BAYLOR]

It's pretty dull footage -- but it is Haggard! It's remarkable how these things surface -- film or audio recordings of Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rider Haggard, Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, C. S. Lewis, et al. That seems to have been a more British than American thing. I don't know if that's an accurate impression.

To see and hear these great men. It's a wonderful thing.

 

[Extollager]

Too bad we don't (so far as I know) have any footage or audio of William Hope Hodgson.

 

[BAYLOR]

Too bad we don't (so far as I know) have any footage or audio of William Hope Hodgson.

Not even wax recordings of him?

 

[Extollager]

I don't think he was a celebrity in his day like most of the authors I mentioned were, in some degree.

 

[Toby Frost]

Thanks for finding this. He has a rather nice house and garden, although I would have expected to find him living on the plains of Africa. Interestingly, he looks almost exactly how I imagined Quartermain to look.

 

[Extollager]

Thanks for finding this. He has a rather nice house and garden, although I would have expected to find him living on the plains of Africa. Interestingly, he looks almost exactly how I imagined Quartermain to look.

Here's something about Haggard as farmer, from my article "THEIR BOTANIC MAJESTIES’ BEQUEST:TOLKIEN, MORRIS, POTTER, HAGGARD, LEWIS," published in the Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree some years ago:


[Beatrix] Potter was a dedicated farmer, as was H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925), whose books include not only one of the few fantasies that Tolkien admitted influenced The Lord of the Rings - - namely She: A History of Adventure - - and the Allan Quatermain romances, but agricultural studies based on personal experience and dogged inquiry. Reviewers were surprised, in 1899, when the author of notoriously bloodcurdling thrillers produced A Farmer’s Year. Not only “a chatty, homespun chapbook” about things Haggard saw and did as a Norfolk farmer, it was “a very informative handbook,” according to his biographer, Morton Cohen; it was meant to be, and was, a book that other farmers could learn from. “The advice Haggard gave was sound (some of it still is).”

He farmed 365 acres in the parishes of Ditchingham and Bedingham nearby. Of those acres, about 110 were rented by Haggard; the rest were his own property. He raised barley, wheat, beans, cabbage, carrots, kohlrabi, etc., and his livestock at the beginning of 1898 numbered 146 head, including cattle, sheep, pigs, and eleven horses. In A Farmer’s Year, Haggard muses about which trees are best as hedgerow timber, favoring hawthorn and oak. He had several acres of woodland that he surrounds with barbed wire to discourage trespassers, so as “to keep the place perfectly quiet, so that it may become the home of all sorts of birds and wild things.” He notes otters by the river and would like to set loose some badgers there, except that he fears they would come out and get into the gardens. In other words, he farms and wants to make money at it, but also maintains a wildlife refuge. Sometimes he has to have trees cut down, but he detests the sight; “it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man.” He makes butter, but, having toured a factory, writes of the disgusting composition of margarine, made from the imported fat of animals and flavored and colored to deceive. He describes sheep-shearing, and delights in the abundance of bees visiting bean blossoms (a poignant passage for readers in this year 2007 of reported “colony collapse disorder”). He has a kind word for moles, which are typically disliked by farmers, but, he believes, agents of good because they dig up fresh soil and thereby enhance fertility of the land. He looks at old parish registers, and records anecdotes of two toads, Martha and Jane, who lurk in his greenhouse. There was a third, Babette, whom Martha probably ate; with his own eyes he sees Martha shoot out her tongue to snap up a woodlouse on her head.

Haggard followed up A Farmer’s Year with a two-volume study, Rural England (1902), which drew on hundred of interviews “recorded in twenty thick notebooks” by Haggard and a companion as they surveyed 27 English counties and two of the Channel Islands over many months’ time. Haggard interviewed “landowners, land agents, public officials, tenants and labourers,” and compiled statistical information and prepared maps. Cohen says, “Rural England is an immense document, a permanent reference book for historians, economists, agricultural specialists… invaluable to the student of rural life.”

Dismayed by England’s agricultural decline due to cheap imported foodstuffs, a run of bad harvests, etc., Haggard urged Treasury-sponsored low-interest loans that would permit people who worked the land to buy their own small holdings, and advocated government support for light railways to enable the native farmer to get his produce to market economically. Farmers should form co-ops for producing butter, and education in rural areas should not alienate boys from the land. Perhaps his ideas here have affinities with “small is beautiful” proponents today. In 1909 Parliament at last passed a Development Bill that permitted the Treasury to help workers on the land, but its provisions were not enough to bring about the reforms Haggard campaigned for. A 1910 tour in Denmark resulted in another book on agriculture, in which Haggard became more radical, advocating outright government subsidy of small farms and laws that would interfere with patterns of feudal inheritance, despite his dream of a Haggard agricultural dynasty.

Haggard’s own experience was that farming under established conditions was not profitable. Despite this, he farmed all his life, with his writing subsidizing the farming. He bought a second property, Kessingland on the Suffolk coast. The sea was eroding his property so he experimented with varieties of grasses until he found something that worked. At Ditchingham he had a large flower garden and kitchen garden, and he grew greenhouse fruits and vegetables, and experimented with orchids, in “his African jungle transplanted to Norfolk.”

 

[hitmouse]

Interesting. Disagree with his recommendation of oak as a good hedgerow shrub. Grows too slowly. Hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple and dog rose are good planted in combination.

 

[Toby Frost]

That's really interesting. I wonder how many great authors were interested in gardening and farming?

And you win considerable credit for "Their Botanic Majesties Bequest".