The radical instability of The Once and Future King

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess's interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess's list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests.

This is the final episode of Series Two, and our guest Elizabeth Elliott is helping us explore Camelot in The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Published in 1958, The Once and Future King adapts the famous stories of King Arthur and his Round Table. 

Beginning with the childhood of Arthur in the first book, The Sword in the Stone, White’s version of the familiar stories are complex examinations of leadership, nobility, romance and war. Of White’s novel, Burgess writes, "This is not remote and fabulous history: the lesson of the breaking of the Round Table is for our time."

So says the YouTube blurb for this video.

I love T.H. White's writing, but The Once and Future King is what literary theorists call an unstable text. We can't even agree how many books there are in the sequence. Is it four, or should The Book of Merlyn, which wasn't published until 13 years after White's death, be included to make it five? Is it for adults of children? The first book, The Sword in the Stone, is surely written for children and shows White's love of John Masefield, but the later books seem far more adult in their tone and themes.

And then there is his rewriting of the first two books. I'm far more familiar with the original versions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. Maybe we all construct our own personal versions of The Once and Future King?

Anyway, this is a good discussion of The Once and Future King and some of these issues.

V.S. Pritchett reviews the Sword in the Stone in 1938

V.S. Pritchett (1900-97) was still reviewing for the New Statesman in his late seventies when I started buying it in the sixth form.

Here he is back in 1938, welcoming the publication of T.H. White's The Sword of the Stone in his review for The Bystander:

The Sword in the Stone, by T. H. White (Collins 8s. 6 d.), is mixed, but, on the whole successful, fantasy about anachronisms and it contains two chapters at least which are the funniest things I have read for a long time. Mr. White's game is to tell the adventures of a boy called the Wart, at his father's mediaeval castle, in terms which lie somewhere between the language of Grimm, Wodehouse, and the College of Heralds. 

This kind of thing may produce the vulgar comedy of the schoolboy howler or passages of wicked genius Mr. White has both here is an example of the latter. A possible origin of fox-hunting is suggested—

Sir Ector said: "Had a good quest to-day?"

Sir Grummore said: "Oh, not so bad. Rattlin' good day in fact. Found a chap called Sir Bruce Saunce Pite choppin' off a maiden's head in Weedon Bushes, ran him to Mixbury Plantation in the Bicester and lost him in Wicken Wood. Must have been a good 25 miles as he ran." 

The two high spots are the witches' duel—run strictly on what I take to be Camelot rules—with Merlyn; and a wonderful joust between two knights who lumber along towards each other at a mild drayhorse canter and meet with stupefaction in a dull crash of ironmongery. These are both Disney scenes. 

Mr. White has a pleasant learning which gives the whole a comically critical and instructive air. I never recommend humour, because it makes enemies, and many awful people will read this book aloud; but I suggest a prolonged and surreptitious glance at it.

And Disney did buy the rights to the book in the following year, though his film of it did not appear until 1963.

Trivia fans will be interested to know that Pritchett is the grandfather of the cartoonist Matt, who is famous for nailing it.

Richard Dawkins and T.H. White are distant cousins

This, just in from out Trivia Desk, wins Trivial Fact of the Day.

The Wikipedia entry for this blog's hero T.H. White tells you that that one of his great great grandfathers was a clergyman and author from Cape Colony, part of what later became South Africa, called Abraham Faure.

Go to the Wikipedia entry for Abraham Faure and you find that he is also a great great great grandfather of the scientist Richard Dawkins.

John Arlott's second son remembers T.H. White

 

The first time they met, my father and Tim were so captivated by each other’s company that they went out for a drink and did not return until late the following morning.

My favourite book on John Arlott is the memoir of him by his son Timothy, which also gives a much sunnier picture of another of this blog’s heroes, T.H. White, than you will find elsewhere. (T.H. stood for Terence Hanbury, but White was always ‘Tim’ to his friends after the retail chemists Timothy Whites, which was for many years Boots’ main rival on the high street.)

I’ve never understood why the biography of White by Sylvia Townsend Warner is quite so highly regarded – Timothy Arlott’s elder brother Jim, who died in a road accident at the age of 21, is the ‘Zed’ of that book – while Helen Macdonald concentrates in H is for Hawk on what you might call the more hysterical aspects of his personality.

Timothy Arlott, however, gives us a White more like the Merlyn of The Sword in the Stone:

‘Tim’ White looked a bit like Ernest Hemingway – tall, white-bearded and strongly built, also a lover of the outdoors, animals and alcohol, and a writer by trade – but that is where the similarity ends.

In summer he sometimes wore just a large scarlet towelling bathrobe over shorts. One night two rather serious young men came to his door and introduced themselves as Jehovah’s Witnesses. Flinging the door open wide, Tim boomed, ‘I am Jehovah.’ …

Biographies of Tim White have made him out to be a melancholic homosexual. I can only say we saw nothing of either. With my mother and us children during those summer holidays he was a riot. He was an enthusiast about movie cameras and making his own films about twenty years before it became popular with the general public – and Tim’s films were full of humour. 

He would organise imitations of the new ‘whiter than white’ Persil TV commercials and startle Alderney housewives leaving the grocers by descending on them with a movie camera, my brother Jim as the compere asking which washing powder they had chosen and pulling fresh ‘whiter than white’ samples out of his pockets like a conjurer If they had not chosen Persil. Even in his early teens Jim could do superb deadpan imitations of smarmy suave comperes.

For St George's Day: From The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White

It was England that came out slowly as the late moon rose: his royal realm of Gramary. Stretched at his feet, she spread herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the imagined Hebrides. 

She was his homely land. The moon made her trees more important for their shadows than for themselves, picked out the silent rivers in quicksilver, smoothed the toy pasture fields, laid a soft haze on everything. 

But he felt that he would have known the country, even without the light. He knew that there must be the Severn, there the Downs and there the Peak: all invisible to him, but inherent in his home. 

In this field a white horse must be grazing, in that some washing must be hanging on a hedge. It had a necessity to be itself.

He suddenly felt the intense sad loveliness of being as being, apart from right or wrong: that, indeed, the mere fact of being was the ultimate right. He began to love the land under him with a fierce longing, not because it was good or bad, but because it was.

The Joy of Six 1269

"Labour’s recent creative industries plan, published in March, avoids any talk about new horizons or radical change, either in the country or the wider world. Rather, it presents arts and culture as an existing 'part of 'our national story' and 'our sense of national pride.' References to technology are always balanced with something more traditional." Wessie Du Toit reminds us that Labour has lost Tony Blair's faith in creativity and the future.

Anno Girolami looks at the Flixborough disaster and its place in the battle for workplace safety: "Fifty years ago, at tea time on a Saturday in June, the Nypro chemical plant near the North Lincolnshire village suffered an explosion that killed 28 of the 72 people on site and seriously injured a further 36. Had it been a weekday, many more people would probably have died."

Stuart Whomsley on being a working-class professional: "When a person enters clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms."

Children's playgrounds are part of the solution to many problems, argues James Hempsall.

Philippe Broussard searches for a mysterious photographer who snapped occupied Paris and mocked the Nazis.

"No writer before T.H. White, I think, had been so flamboyantly anachronistic in fantasy. The Sword in the Stone (1938) is rooted in anachronism, steeped in it, inhabits it as its element. The clash of periods is embodied in Merlyn, the ancient wizard, who not only lives backwards ... but seems to have lived for hundreds of years, since he remembers all the major incidents and changes of fashion between White’s lifetime and the fifteenth century." Rob Maslen accounts for the magic of The Sword in the Stone.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: My new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails

Beavers and badgers. Badgers and beavers. It's all getting very confusing. How far this pair are correct in blaming Hegel for the societal organisation of the beavers and the impenetrability of T.H. Green I shall leave the philosophers to debate. In any event, Lord Bonkers is on record as preferring his brother, T.H. White.

The King of the Badgers is a character in the Revd J.P. Martin's Uncle books, but the king who appears in the Bonkersverse - debating weighty matters underground - owes most to the badger in White's The Book of Merlyn. Let's hope Labour will reward his statesmanship by ending the badger cull.

Saturday

Feeling in need of a chinwag, I make my way to the royal chamber of the King of the Badgers, deep beneath the triumphal arch I had erected to mark the victory of Wallace Lawler in the Birmingham Ladywood by-election. 

I find him in low spirits. His strategy of fighting the cull of his people through the courts while reining in the hotheads among the younger badgers has come to nothing. He is now inclined to let the young idea, as it were, shoot. 

Soon we are talking of the beavers, and the King suggests their guild-like organisation comes from reading Hegel, whom we agree is fundamentally unsound and responsible for making T.H. Green’s writing Such Hard Work. 

The King then tells me of a legend among the badgers that the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle is so pronounced because it was originally built by beavers, who were later driven from their home by usurping aristocrats. I shall make good use of this story next time I find myself talking to my new friends with the webbed back feet and scaly tails: it has The Ring Of Truth.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The only estate in England with a breeding population of corkindrills
• My hereditary peer peers
• In case they get peckish during Lent
• The maintenance of the Rutland Union Canal
• Conservative members are now attacking their real enemy... each other

The Joy of Six 1254

"Easy though it is to mock the quality of the Tory leadership hopefuls, enabling and encouraging the worst impulses of the far-right carries dangers for our country and our democracy, as we have seen just this week. We need a serious government, but we also need a serious opposition. Right now the Tories cannot and will not fulfil the latter role." Alistair Carmichael says the Tory leadership contest is revealing that the party’s lurch to far-right is terrifyingly real.

Lauren Crosby Medlicott on what life's like inside a UK women's prison and the need to find other ways of dealing with female offenders.

"To be happy and healthy, children need a decent amount of everyday, sociable play and physical activity. To grow into independent, capable, resilient young adults, they need a chance to experience real life, explore and take risks. To develop a sense of belonging and responsibility for others, they need to be seen and heard in their communities." Alice Ferguson presents a manifesto for restoring children’s freedom and outdoor play.

Corinne Segal takes us to four cities - New York, Baltimore, Auckland, Istanbul - that are bringing buried rivers back into the light of day.

"Detoxification" is a popular concept in wellness but, says Adrienne Matei, it's just another lie.

Rohan Amanda Maitzen understands what it is that makes T.H. White's The Once and Future King great: "The novel’s most ridiculous, delicious flights of fancy (the thwarted romance of the Questing Beast, for instance) are narrated in the same down-to-earth way as the most extreme moments of betrayal or grief or psychic torment ... and so we experience them both as part of the same world of people who may transform into animals, trap unicorns, and perform miracles, but are somehow, bizarrely, wonderfully, just like us."

The Joy of Six 1249

Alistair Carmichael argues that 'popular Conservatives' are killing their party: "It takes a special sort of intelligence to see an election in which you have lost hundreds of seats to liberal and centre-left parties, including 61 in Tory heartlands to the Liberal Democrats, and interpret that as a mandate to run screaming to the Reform-lite fringe."

"If we sit by and shrug at what happened to Andrew Malkinson we accept that the CCRC is part of the disease and not part of the cure." Maximilian Hardy lays bare the failings of the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

"New Civil Engineer recently revealed that National Highways does not know when the majority of attenuation ponds collecting runoff from around the M25 were last cleaned, meaning they could be full of hazardous waste that could join watercourses." Tom Pashby on the catastrophic damage caused by water running off roads.

Arash Abizadeh is doing something about the lucrative scam of academic journal publishing: "Not only do these publishers not pay us for our work; they then sell access to these journals to the very same universities and institutions that fund the research and editorial labour in the first place."

Luke McLaughlin describes how Great Britain won the Cricket gold medal at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

"She’s an orphan, her family is bankrupt, the estate is in ruins, and she’s spent her whole life alone, raised amidst the faded grandeur of her family’s past by a cruel Governess. Then one day, while exploring the wild grounds, Maria stumbles upon an amazing discovery: a lost colony of Lilliputians! Kidnapped and brought to England as carnival performers in the 18th century, these tiny humans long ago escaped and built a new homeland on her family’s ancestral lands." Nathan Goldwag celebrates Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White.

The Joy of Six 1167

"When you look at the facts in the cold light of day; Labour’s plan will raise much needed money at a time when state schools are quite literally crumbling. It will not lead to a mass exodus or overwhelm the state sector, and when even Michael Gove thought taxing private schools was a good idea, it’s hard to argue against it." Emma Monk backs moves to curb the tax breaks received by private schools.

Alistair Carmichael talks to Holyrood Magazine about, among other things, Dolly Parton and the Dalai Lama.

Angelina Osborne on why Black British history matters.

"In just one year, bans have increased by a third, with a total of 3,362 bans in the 2022-23 school year. The sharp rise in book bans is largely targeted at books with LGBTQ+ content, characters or authors; books about race or racism; and books about physical abuse or with themes of grief or death." Katie Dancey-Downs explains the need for Banned Books Week in the US.

Terence Towles Canote writes about one of his favourite British films: "David Puttnam had good reason for wanting Bill Forsyth to see Whisky Galore! The producer had been researching the Scottish oil industry, in particular the oil boom in Shetland in the early Seventies. What struck David Puttnam is that the Shetlanders actually welcomed the oil companies, in hopes that the large amount of money generated by oil would in turn help them. David Puttnam then talked Bill Forsyth into developing the idea for what would become Local Hero."

A short introductory lecture on T.H. White, one of my favourite authors, from Gabriel Schenk.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: I set off with the Well-Informed Orphan

It always snows at Christmas in Rutland, or at least on the Bonkers Hall Estate, which makes me think that it must be part of 'the old England' described by T.H. White.

And BBC Radio 4 used to broadcast a humorous play, Crisp and Even Brightly, which starred Timothy West and claimed to portray the real events behind the carol Good King Wenceslas. It may have given me the idea for this diary entry.

Follow the link and you'll find the whole thing on YouTube.

Sunday

There I was at my Home for Well-Behaved Orphans on Boxing Day with a sack of presents (chocolate for the inmates, gin for Matron), when I happened to glance out of the window and spied a fellow whom I did not recognise gathering winter fuel. 

A passing orphan, who proved not only Well Behaved but also Well Informed, told me that the aforementioned scavenger lived in the Rutland Alps near the forest fence (erected, no doubt, by my ancestors to stop the environment getting out) and next to a fountain (which must be Very Handy). 

What with it being Christmas and all, I sent to the Hall for cold drumsticks, a bottle of my second-best claret and some pine logs. When they arrived I set off with the Well-Informed Orphan to deliver them.

The snow was deep and crisp and even, and the WIO found the going rather heavy. Luckily, I was wearing my patent Steam-Heated Boots for Winter Focus Delivery, so I advised him to tread in my footsteps. He reported that heat was in the very sod I had printed – at least, I think that’s what he said. 

We found the fuel-gatherer by the fountain and, I am pleased to report, the cold chicken and wine were well received. Unfortunately, the pine logs had all been used to fuel my boots.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• Keep the flag of freedom burning

More on Southern TV's adaptation of T.H. White's The Master

Last summer I found some cuttings from TV Times about the dramatisation of T.H. White's children's book The Master that Southern Television broadcast in 1966.

Now I've found a page about the series on Nostalgia Central.

This describes The Master as "Southern TV’s most prestigious children’s drama of the 1960s - perhaps ever" and reports that:

Southern had so much confidence in the series that they invested a huge £6,000 pounds per episode and introduced it with a full-colour feature in the TV Times. It paid off, and proved a pivotal moment in children’s television, mixing elements of standard adventure with James Bond type villains and science fiction.

And Nostalgia Central salutes the ambition of the drama:

it assumed a certain IQ on behalf of its audience, not least whether they could understand the philosophical conundrum which eventually faced the junior adventurers Nicky and Judy: should The Master be murdered for the greater good?

That is a very T.H. White question - the sort Merlyn might have tested Arthur with in The Sword in the Stone or The Book of Merlyn. This makes it all the sadder that The Master is missing believed wiped. 

I looked up the contemporary reviews in the British Newspaper Archive, which proved equally complimentary.

The reviewers of Mystery Hall, another Southern children's series and one I think I remember watching, aged seven, when it was broadcast the year after The Master, were less impressed. But they did mentions secret passages, which are about my strongest memory of whichever series it was.

OK, so secret passages are to be expected from children's adventure stories set in mysterious seaside buildings, but it increases my confidence that I have identified this memory correctly.

Bernard Cribbins and T.H. White

There was an unexpected detail in the fine tribute to Bernard Cribbins that Russell T. Davies wrote:

He knew everyone! He'd talk about the Beatles and David Niven, and how he once sat on the stairs at a party impersonating bird calls with T H White. Then he'd add, "I said to Ashley Banjo last week…"

It's hard to imagine the reclusive White as a fixture at showbiz parties. This encounter must have taken place after the musical Camelot was made from his sequence of novels The Once and Future King and he was taken up by Julie Andrews.

Southern Television's dramatisation of T.H. White's The Master

Southern Television, which held the ITV broadcasting licence for the South and South-East of England until the end of 1981, had a reputation in the 1960s for its children's programmes.

Most of these were wiped long ago, including the drama series Mystery Hall, which I think I remember watching in 1967.

But the lost Southern series I really mourn is The Master from 1966, because it was based on a book by T.H. White.

As the blurb on my Puffin edition says:

This is, in some ways, a surprising book to come from the author of The Sword in the Stone and Mistress Masham's Repose, for it is, at first reading, a straightforward thriller.

In fact it's almost a James Bond thriller, in that it involves an evil mastermind bent on world domination. His lair is inside Rockall, a rock in the North Atlantic that Britain claimed two years before The Master was published in 1957. And because it is a children's book he is foiled, not by 007, but by a pair of twins and their dog.

The blurb goes on to suggest that the book

also has the quality of writing and the subtle undertones which made the late T.H. White a superlative story-teller.

The undertones are certainly there, including discussion of the morality of warfare. And the first sentence, enticing and perfectly pitched at its intended audience to be see what a fine writer White is:

It was a blistering day in July, and the swell of the sea was like melted lemonade bottles.

The other evening I discovered a Twitter account dedicated to missing television programmes and run by Sam Czopanser. (I suspect this is a pseudonym as it was the name of a character in a largely lost 1970 science fiction series called The Adventures of Don Quick.) Anyone with an interest in missing TV should follow him.

And in a recent thread Sam included TV Times cuttings on The Master.

There was the full-page feature you can see above, including an overacting John Laurie two years, the two young heroes and the only adult goodie George Baker.

Then there was the cast list from TV Times - the first episode was broadcast on 11 January 1966.

Have a look too at the programme before The Master. Five O'Clock Club featured Alexis Corner, a pioneer of British blues, and an 18-year-old David Essex.

And there was a feature on the making of The Master and on its young stars in particular, which for some reason refuses to appear as large as I would like, so zoom in if you wish.

Adrienne Poster, under the name Adrienne Posta, appeared in films of the 1960s and early 1970s, with Up the Junction being the most notable, and also did a lot of televions and recorded pop singles.

The reference to Paul Guess having already appeared in Oliver! reminded me of Alan Bennett's diary entry, later published in his Writing Home, after auditioning boys for his own play 40 Years On:

Many belong to a species of stage boy, only related to childhood by their small size. All the other attributes of boyhood - youth, gaiety, innocence - have long since gone. Squat creatures, seemingly weaned on Woodbines, they are the boys who have been in Oliver! Lionel Bart has cut a swathe through the nation's youth like the 1914-18 war. They are the new Lost Generation.

Guess can't have suffered too badly, as he was in the cast for the play's first night.

Six of the Best 970

Chris Dillow explains why the Tories have lost interest in economics: "Evidence for this is of course abundant. We see it in reports that Sunak is worried about government debt despite the fact that the Bank of England is buying it and gilt yields are negative; in the failure to address the fact that job creation has plummeted; in Johnson’s “fuck business” remark; and in the reckless pursuit of Brexit."

"Our experience of mental ill health is not equal - factors like race, economic class, gender identity and disability all affect our likelihood of struggling with mental illness. These factors also affect the way we experience and receive treatment, support, access to services and understanding from our employers." Mental health is not 'a great leveller', say Sofie Jenkinson and Margaret Welsh.

James Alexander Cameron asks what can be done to save England's neglected parish churches.

Dan Jackson on how he fell in love with Northern League football.

"T.H. White was a man to whom animals were very important, perhaps because his human relationships were so tormented. But his sense of connection with nonhuman lives goes far beyond mere compensation; it is a passionate vision of a moral universe, a world of terrible pain and cruelty from which trust and love spring like autumn crocus, vulnerable and unconquerable." Ursula Le Guin writes about her love for T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone.

"Many chess fans will be wondering: what about the chess? Was the board set right? Are they messing up, as they do in so many other movies and commercials? The answer is: absolutely not - the chess is done right." Peter Doggers has good news about the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit.

Dickens, T.H. White and Susan Hill

In the October 2019 issue of Clinical Psychology Forum I answered a few questions about my taste in books for its Books R Us feature.

The book you most often recommend

When I tell people they should read Dickens, which is often, it is Great Expectations I recommend. It is of manageable length, extremely good and contains all the Dickensian themes you could wish for.

The book you should have read but didn't get round to

It’s a long list - as, more shamingly, is the list of books I have started but not persevered with - but at the top is War and Peace.

The book you wish you had written

Ultimately, of course, it’s just Cinderella for boys, but I admire T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone inordinately. It is funny and sad, wise and silly, steeped in history and turns anachronism into an art form.

The book you wish hadn't been written

Wishing books hadn’t been written is not so far from wanting to burn them, so let’s talk about books I wish I hadn’t read. Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler crime novels are a recent example. I tried one and found I was supposed to care more about the careers of the detective’s extended middle-class family than I was about the fate of the abducted child. What really shocked me was the disregard of the rules of the genre. I tried another to see if it was better. It wasn’t.

The funniest book you know

The older I get, the more I appreciate wit employed in writing with a serious purpose. Paradoxically, setting out to be funny for the sake of it feels cold blooded. So let me choose a young man’s book: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh.

Six of the Best 957

"It’s a crisis for education, but it’s also an opportunity to put everything on the table and consider ideas that would have been impossible before COVID. Outdoor school, long relegated to the Waldorf fringe, is getting a serious look. The pandemic is forcing conversations about equity in education, and both parents and teachers are asking how we can reimagine the school day to prioritise student well-being and mental health." Anna Nordberg asks if the Covid-19 pandemic could change education for the better.

James Rebanks on how to save British farming and the countryside.

David Graeber died a few days ago. Read him on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs.

James Robert Wood praises T.H. White's studies of the 18th century - and there's a mention for Shropshire's Mad Jack Mytton.

"I’m old-fashioned enough to think that for something to count as a cult, it should be dark, subterranean and bound up with sacred mysteries. On that definition, Penda’s Fen (1974) may be the only authentic cult TV I’ve come across." Robert Hanks celebrates David Rudkin's television play.

"He was a lovely man, a consummate professional and treated us as equals when clearly we were not. I consider myself very lucky to have played that day and witnessed a magnificent all round appearance both on and off the field." Stan Heaton pays tribute to the England cricketer David Capel.

Remembering Mystery Hall from 1967

One of the oddities of belonging to my generation is that you have memories of television programmes that no longer exist.

There is the episode of All Gas and Gaiters where the authorities discover a parish hidden in the fold of a map and work out that it has never received an episcopal visit.

So they go there - and discover that its inhabitants are still living in the Middle Ages.

That sounds like The Bishop Pays a Visit, first broadcast in January 1969 and since wiped.

I also have memories of a children's serial that featured a secret pasasge, which the young hero was warned against entering in case he became stuck.

And there was an adult character you thought was on the boy's side who turned out not to be. An effective plot twist that - I am surprised it is not used more often.

After much searching, I have decided that this is probably the Southern Television serial Mystery Hall, which was broadcast in 1967 and is now believed lost.

Which means the young hero was played by Mark Colleano, son of the American actor Bonar Colleano and the British actress Susan Shaw.

It was set in a hotel on the South coast, but my memory (which may well be fallible) is that the secret passage began behind a dresser in the kitchen and that the kitchen was like that of a Yorkshire farmhouse.

Still, it may well have been Mystery Hall I watched - I have illustrated this post with a couple of relics of it that I found online.

Southern made some interesting children's television in those days, but much of it is lost. This includes an adaptation of T.H. White's The Master.

Six of the Best 915

"This week, we’ve seen far more of Boris Johnson than we ever thought was possible. With No 10 now home to a live, daily broadcast, Johnson’s Achilles heel (one of many), has truly been exposed - his need to be adored. The result is pandemonium for the rest of us." Charlotte Moore on Boris Johnson's approach to coronavirus - at least before this evening.

Johnny McDermott finds lessons for the Liberal Democrats in T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone.

"The simple truth is that the torrent of online rumour-mongering is simply filled by a vacuum left where official communications should be." James Ball says we should not blame social media companies for the government's failure.

Peter Black asks if the BBC's Question Time has run its course.

"In the confines of an idyllic English meadow a grisly hell breaks loose. A group of deserting Civil War soldiers team up in order to seek out a pub but are soon ensnared by O'Neil, a terrifying necromancer and alchemist, who orders them to hunt for buried gold." Jason Barlow recommends viewing A Field in England while practising coronavirus distancing.

"Glenn McGrath was launched down the ground in his first over, Shane Warne yawningly swept into the grandstand. Hollioake looked like a man born to do exactly this, not just once but many times." Barney Ronay celebrates the brief career of Ben Hollioake.

T.H. White vs the Oxford School of children's fantasy literature

Being a contrary child, I often took against writers I was meant to enjoy.

Arthur Ransome, for instance, was dispatched with a pincer movement involving Malcolm Saville and Richard Jefferies.

And once I discovered T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone I had no more time for C.S. Lewis.

I have just come across an article that suggests there may have been more behind this latter judgement than sheer cussedness.

In it, Rebecca Onion interviews Maria Sachiko Cecire about her book Re-Enchanted: The rise of children’s fantasy literature in the twentieth century.

In it she identifies an 'Oxford School' of children's fantasy literature led by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - led not just through their own writing but also through their influence on the development of the university's English Literature curriculum.

Sachiko Cecire says:

This curriculum at Oxford was really heavy on medieval literature, just at the moment when most other universities were going in the direction of modernism and the kinds of writing that we now associate with literary fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

At Oxford they were doubling down on medieval literature and also looking at it not just as examples for linguistic analysis - which was how it had been primarily studied in the 19th century under philology - but really looking at it as literature. Really seriously asking students to meditate on both the English medieval past and also this idea of magic and enchantment.

And she points out that Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman all studied this curriculum between 1956 and 1968.

Cambridge doesn't have the same legacy of children’s fantasy writers, but it did have T.H. White:

T.H. White was at Cambridge at a really interesting time, when there was still a medieval requirement, but right as they were ending it. If you compare his The Once and Future King to, say, The Lord of the Rings, they’re so different in the way they talk about the Middle Ages, with a different level of reverence. 

There’s anachronism in White’s writing, and pretty profound critiques of the warlike nature of the Middle Ages and of a lot of the nostalgia for that period. Whereas Tolkien and his students tend to be a lot more reverent of that material.

This may explain why White's writing is so much warmer than that of the Oxford School.

The Sword in the the Stone is funny and sad, wise and silly, steeped in history and turns anachronism into an art form.