Lally MacBeth’s The Lost Folk urges us to take care of our most precious traditions before they disappear
Before diving into this compendium of people, collections, customs, objects and worlds connected to folk culture, its title needs to be tackled. Why is the material within it, much of which survives in some form, described as “lost”?
For Lally MacBeth, it’s about “the danger” of this stuff disappearing. I get it. In a society where digital culture prevails and overwhelms, there is a clear concern that analogue, handmade archives may not survive.
But in the last 15 years, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Ben Wheatley’s films, TV shows such as Detectorists, and albums by artists from Shirley Collins to Goblin Band have kept folk traditions and songs in the air. The use of the term “lost” risks romanticising or fetishising the past. It implies that whatever is “lost” can then be “found” by canny saviours. Attention then moves to the rescuers’ efforts rather than the materials themselves – an approach that doesn’t align with MacBeth’s more honourable intentions.
The author’s interest in folk collecting comes from personal roots. In her introduction, she recounts a summer afternoon tidying her late great-aunt’s family archive, which her grandfather had dumped in a damp garden shed.
Among the rat droppings, she found meticulously catalogued boxes and a programme for the 300th anniversary production of John Milton’s courtly masque Comus, held at Ludlow Castle in 1934. Next to the programme was a photograph from the same year (a reproduction of it sits proudly in the middle of the book), revealing that MacBeth’s great-aunt’s Shropshire-born-and-bred mother was one of its actors.
Discovering later that this was England’s biggest pageant in the 1930s, attended by 28,000 people over six days, inspired MacBeth’s manifesto for how we should approach folk. “It is sitting in our churches, swinging from our pubs and dancing through our streets; it is patiently waiting to be discovered and appreciated,” she writes.
In 2020, MacBeth founded the Folk Archive (its Instagram account has a whopping 93.9k followers). In 2021, she established with her partner, composer Matthew Shaw, Stone Club, which runs film clubs and events and sells merchandise around a fascination with standing stones. An artist and fashion historian, she has a sweet, earnest and welcoming writing style.
Personal connections fill the book’s loose, whirligig chapters. MacBeth credits accidental sights, random trips and chance conversations for providing her material: “I think of it like a Victorian crazy patchwork quilt, a slow process of finding and selecting all the odd pieces that fit together and then stitching them into a story,” she writes.
Readers seeking a more rigorous, academic approach may find this frustrating, but it’s often surprisingly refreshing, encouraging us to comb dusty charity shop shelves and trawl rural market towns ourselves, with eyes on stalks, to find gold.
The Lost Folk is at its best when it highlights people and practices that MacBeth believes should be better known in folk culture. She includes fascinating, quirky collectors such as Elsie Matley Moore, who created an archive in watercolours of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire stained glass, and Chris Jenkins, whose hand-drawn maps of ancient sites were saved in 2020 after a social media request.
Folk is ‘sitting in our churches, swinging from our pubs and dancing through our streets’
Later on, we meet benevolent individuals such as dance teacher Sally Murphy, who adapted folk and country dances for wheelchair users in the 1970s, and Ferguson’s Gang, a group of women in the 1930s and 40s operating anonymously under brash cockney pseudonyms who helped to save mills, town halls and coastlines across Britain.
MacBeth rightly highlights communities of colour, whose customs don’t feature as often as they should in British folk chronicles (more of this would help deflect folk from accusations of nationalism and nativism). She celebrates the St Fagans National Museum of History in Wales for including Hindu goddess effigies made by migrant communities, folk singer Angeline Morrison’s resources for the English Folk Dance and Song Society, which feature traditional songs that include Black British people, and early Caribbean carnivals in the UK.
She notes how the popularity of Victorian minstrelsy influenced blackface in Morris dancing, and assesses Britain’s most prominent early folk song and dance collector Cecil Sharp damningly: “sanitised, classist, racist and very, very male”. Sharp’s influence was more nuanced in my assessment; despite some clear prejudices, he supported progressive education and prison reform and introduced traditional songs into schools, which helped so many folk musicians of the mid-century revival to learn them.
MacBeth isn’t particularly keen on the traditional methodologies of a cultural historian. “Sources are king, and woe betide you if you haven’t recorded them properly or, worse still, don’t have a source at all,” she writes in a section about storyteller Ruth Tongue, considered by some critics to be more of an inventor than a collector.
If this approach inspired MacBeth, take the stories in this book as calls to action rather than gospel. Revel in her lovely inclusions of shell grottos and miniature villages alongside cottage industry-made badges and tea towels that celebrate places and traditions. “Is there a pub in your village with a magnificent sign? Photograph it! Does your town host a summer carnival? Record it!” she gushes. In her infectious enthusiasm, proper joy can be found.
The Lost Folk: From the Forgotten Past to the Emerging Future of Folk by Lally Macbeth is published by Faber (£20). Order your copy from observershop.co.uk and receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply
Photograph courtesy of Alamy
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