The Hay Festival of Literature, 2019

by Laura Burden

The town of Hay on Wye can be found on the Welsh side of the border between England and Wales. It is reasonably remote and very beautiful – topped by a crumbling castle, it overlooks the winding river Wye. Here are three things you probably didn’t know about Hay:

1. It proclaimed an independent nation in 1977 (by Richard Booth, the self-styled King of Hay on Wye). He even had passports printed and commissioned a national anthem. Some see this as the action of a madman but most think it was a massive publicity stunt to draw visitors to the town.

·     2. It is the world’s capital of second-hand bookshops.

·     3. It is twinned with Timbuktu (at a first glance it might seem odd that a rural Welsh market town is connected with a desert town in Mali, but the link, once again, is books – Timbuktu houses some ancient writings and has been a centre of learning since the sixteenth century.

Hay is also the site of a Festival of Literature that takes place every year in the May/June half term. I aim to visit it every year and have written about the Festival on this blog before, although I took a break last year as I was in the final trimester of pregnancy. Each time, I aim to attend a range of talks, some directly relating to my subject and others that expose me to different subjects and ways of thinking.

This year, I started with two talks about the environment and ecology. An ocean explorer (and “bathynaut” – it turns out that a bathynaut is someone who has been more than 200m deep in the ocean) called Jonathan Copley spoke about his career spent mapping the world’s oceans and of his discoveries in the deep. Copley started by taking us through the history of mapping the deep, from Ferdinand Magellan trying to “sound” the depths by lowering a long anchor rope, to the most modern techniques of mapping the oceans using satellites and by a deep diving vehicle scanning the seabed (just 0.05% of the ocean has been mapped using this very latest technology). It was very interesting to hear about Marie Thrapp (1920-2006) who was passionate about the ocean but, as a woman, was prevented from going to sea herself. Nevertheless, she used her “dry land role” to change and further human understanding of the oceans. She analysed the echo soundings taken by US naval vessels crossing the Atlantic and pointed out, to initially disbelieving superiors, that oceans contained rift valleys rather like ones that can be seen on land, such as in East Africa. This contributed to much wider acceptance of the idea of continental drift.

After this talk, I went to one by Alastair Fothergill and Keith Scholey on the Netflix Series Our Planet. They spoke about how delighted that, after years of working with their presenter David Attenborough with the BBC, they were delighted that Netflix had chosen to screen their work and convey their message to a different and wider audience. They spoke about how the plural pronoun in the title was chosen to give the audience a sense of responsibility for a shared planet, in a world in which the human population has more than doubled since we put the first man on the moon. Much of the talk was taken up by screening compelling sequences from the documentary and explaining the secrets and perils behind the filming. The overall message was that “one can’t expect people to care about the planet unless they know about the planet”.

The next talk was one of my favourites – Hallie Rubenhold on her new book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Rubenhold, a social historian, realised that, in the hundreds and hundreds of books written about the late Victorian serial killer, who was never caught, a full-length work had never been published about his victims. Rubenhold has traced the lives of these very ordinary women and claims that many of the established “facts” about them are far from true – for example, it is always said that the Ripper’s victims were prostitutes but, she argues, in the case of three out of the five, there is no hard evidence that this is the case. Just as interesting as the book itself, which I’ve since read, is the reaction Rubenhold has had to her work. She has been accused by the “community” of “Ripperologists” of bending the facts to promote a feminist agenda, but has also been criticised by some feminists for saying that some the victims were not sex workers and so denying their societal exploitation. She has been accused of “re-writing history to make it fit the #MeToo movement”, even though she began the book before #MeToo took off. Rubenhold also drew some interesting parallels between the Ripper’s victims and of victims of more recent killers in terms of comments judges and investigating officers have made about them in the media. Rubenhold is a compelling speaker and I am seeing if there is a possibility of inviting her to PGS.

The next day, Ms Smith and I went to a talk that we knew would be quite controversial, a panel discussion entitled An English Education? that was really about the stranglehold the speakers perceived the independent/fee-paying sector has over society. It’s fair to say that we were not on friendly territory as most of the discussion from both the audience and the panel centred around complaining about the privilege a private education affords. Many of the points made were valid but we both felt that not enough distinction was made between different independent schools – participants spoke as if every single fee-paying school is like Eton but it’s fair to say that a very small private school or one set up to provide for children with particular educational needs has little in common with the “giants” of the sector, such as former public schools, just as there is a gulf between a maintained sector school in a troubled or poverty-stricken area and one in a leafy suburb. We were also amused but not surprised when a question revealed that many of the panel had been educated privately or had taught in independent schools, and that two had sent their own children to selective grammar schools.

I then went to a talk called The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth and Their Year of Marvels, by a writer called Adam Nicholson. This focused on a period in 1797-1798 when these great poets lived in the Quantock Hills in Somerset and collaborated on material as they forged their way to greatness. It was fascinating to hear more about the background to well-known poems such as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tintern Abbey”.

Many people seem to find the TV presenter Lucy Worsley irritating but I enjoyed what she had to say much more in the flesh than I do on television. Her talk about Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow was very interesting and her slightly theatrical style of presentation worked well with a large crowd. Worsley looked at the Behaviour Books that Victoria was made to write in as a child, reflecting on her educational achievements and behaviour each day when she was a child and made links between these and the detailed daily diary entries she made as Queen, arguing that the highly unusual and controlled upbringing Victoria had made her very aware of how she would be viewed on paper: each diary entry is not a window to her inner thoughts but a self-conscious document, written for the benefit of history.

The Labour MP David Lammy then spoke on Tribalism in Politics. He spoke about the many divisions currently evident in our society and his fears that we are unable to “come back together” to move things forward. A supporter of the idea of a People’s Vote on Brexit (“It is very problematic to say that you undermine democracy with more democracy”) and a critic of some elements of the current leadership of his party (“The inability of the Labour leadership to get a grip” on anti-Semitism has created a crisis), he advocated a National Compulsory Civic Service for school leavers so that young people from different backgrounds and locations can get to know how other people in the same country live and think. The most memorable moment was when he recounted how a Jewish-owned law firm he had a training placement for paid for him to attend Harvard Law School and gave him opportunities for life – Lammy seemed genuinely moved to tears at this point.

Such a Pair – the Twin Lives of Humans and Trees, a talk given by Catherine Charlwood, was quiet but was a lovely analysis of how poets from the nineteenth century have presented the relationship between trees and humans. Charlwood, an academic at Oxford, had won the opportunity of speaking at Hay through an essay competition that asked for a discussion about nature and literature. She focused in particular on Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Mew.

On the final day of the Festival that I was able to attend, I began by hearing Jonathan Bate, Britain’s best-known Shakespeare scholar, speak about how the writers of Ancient Greece and Rome influenced Shakespeare. Bate spoke about the curriculum of grammar schools in the 1500s and of the writers Shakespeare would have been exposed to. Some of the material was already well-known to me but other ideas, such as how Cicero’s writings on civil war influenced Shakespeare, gave me a new perspective on a writer whose work I teach nearly every day.

The talk Reading in an Age of Digital Distraction by Silicon Valley tech turned Cambridge academic Tyler Shores was fascinating. Shores once worked for Google but now conducts research on how constant access to hand-held technology has altered reading and concentration patterns http://www.tylershores.com/ He spoke about how sensors have been used to show that those reading online articles tend to focus more on the top and begin to skim read sooner than when reading the print version and also discussed the recent trend of telling scrollers how many minutes it would take them to read an article, asking if this is yet another sign of our ability to concentrate weakening. Shore is passionate about technology in its place, but I left the talk with the feeling that my hunches about phones and iPads and their impact on reading habits are now gradually being supported with more and more evidence.

The Future of Englishes by David Crystal was based on this academic’s work on encyclopaedias and dictionaries over the past few decades. Crystal explored how our language is evolving in different parts of the world and on how new ideas and concepts work their way into new dictionaries.

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings was a deeply interesting exploration of the war. Hastings focused in particular on the cruelties inflicted by the Communists during that time, arguing that much of Western writing on the war has guiltily focused on atrocities committed by French and American troops and not enough on the actions of their opponents.

I ended my time at the festival by attending a workshop on Writing Radio Drama, taken by playwright Sebastian Baczkiewicz. He spoke about his experience of writing drama for radio (most recently the drama Home Front that ran on BBC Radio 4 for the duration of the centenary of the First World War. We completed a few warm up exercises (Sixth Formers opting for Creative Writing for Ignite! be warned – I may do some of them with you!) and then started our own piece. Since this workshop, I have made steady progress on a radio play of my own that I hope to submit to the BBC Writers’ Room when the submission window opens late this year or early next.

I have been to the Hay Festival many times, having partly grown up in Radnorshire, and have enjoyed time there on my own, with my family and with Ms Smith. However, despite the poor weather (lots of busy tents and empty deckchairs!), this year was even more special as my twins came along. At 11 months they were a bit young for the talks but they enjoyed a festival picnic and, in the 50th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar being published, enjoyed some board books by Eric Carle.