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| Silbury
Archive 1975 |
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 Silbury Hill news, views and archive brought to you by Weird Wiltshire Introduction Latest News News Archive Excavations The Hole Beaker People What is it for? What Next? Postcards Wallpaper Links  |
First published on November 20, 1975 ASKED the name of that man-made mound near Avebury an otherwise brilliant competitor in last week's BBC Mastermind programme replied 'Woodhenge.' In his own day Bernard Shaw was not to be caught out like that. If when he came to write that play Village Wooing he couldn't remember the name of the wretched thing, he wasn't going to admit it. A resurgence of interest in Bernard Shaw last week, to mark the 25th anniversary of his death, sent me to check up on his Wiltshire connections. He is not an author we associate with the Wiltshire countryside (for a good reason which I hope to make clear) yet he was well aware of our existence. While his first well documented visit to Wiltshire was in 1909 or 1910 there is a charming reference to a day's walk in the county, which may have occurred earlier. In a letter to his biographer, Hesketh Pearson, Shaw, speaks of a day he spent walking in Wiltshire with two other playwrights J M Barrie and Granville Barker. Barrie 'talking like Niagara' told them of his boyhood, how he had bacon twice a year and beyond this treat had to content himself with porridge. That invasion of Wiltshire by three dramatists doing the county, in the popular way on foot, is a fascinating picture, but the date has gone and so is the route they took. Bacon? Could it have been over the hills above Calne? But Barrie has a character in one of his short plays called Mr Devizes. And did Shaw later recall Avebury and that manmade mound? It was in 1909 or 1910 that Bernard Shaw descended on Aldbourne. Charles McEvoy, a dramatist who had married the miller's daughter from Axford and settled in Aldbourne wrote and produced a play The Village Wedding which was staged in the old Malthouse Barn, with the master weathercock a-top. Village people took part in the play and the barn was claimed as the first village theatre in England. London celebrities came to see the play and Barnard Shaw who was among the audience, found it very refreshing, very jolly. Ida Gandy, from whose intimate history of Aldbourne, The Heart of a Village, I have taken this, writes that one actor later reported: "Yes, well, he was a distinguished gentleman but he looked at us as if to say 'I don't want to talk to you. You and I have nothing in common." Mrs Gandy comments: "This was probably true, Shaw had never met real country people before and he was completely baffled by their speech." Yet 23 years later Shaw, looking round for a venue for his play Village Wooing, deliberately sets it: In a village shop and post office on the Wiltshire Downs on fine summer morning. In the conversation between the postmistress and the hiker, complete with stick, rucksack and well cut breeches, the postmistress advises. "If you fancy empires' dustsand all that sort of thing you should meet our vicar and start him talking about our standing stones and the barrows on the downs and the Mound." Whatever the Vicar of Avebury and the village postmistress may have thought of all this in 1933, we may wonder why Wiltshire has not taken Village Wooing to its heart, why we never see any local revival of interest in it. The answer is that the Wiltshire setting is simply a vehicle for brilliant Shavian dialogue. While it is impossible to believe that Shaw had not visited Avebury (probably in well-cut breeches) he did not really know what made Wiltshire villages tick. Why then choose Wiltshire at all? Probably because Avebury was even then the one setting which London folk would recognise as a village with its standing stones and the 'Mount.' As for that mound. If Shaw could not have recalled Silbury Hill, I think that mastermind would have said 'pass.' His Wiltshire associations may have been rare but I doubt if he would have hazarded 'Woodhenge.' Back to 1975 index |
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