George Ewart Evans (1 April 1909 – 11 January 1988)[1] was aWelsh-bornschoolteacher,writer andfolklorist who became a dedicated collector oforal history andoral tradition in theEast Anglian countryside from the 1940s to 1970s, and produced eleven books of collections of these materials.
Evans was born inAbercynon, a coal-mining village north ofCardiff, one of a family of eleven, to Welsh-speaking parents who ran a grocery business.[2] His middle name, Ewart, was chosen in honour ofWilliam Ewart Gladstone, a hero of his father, and Gladstone became one of his nicknames.[3] As a boy he assisted in the delivery rounds travelling by pony and trap through the neighbouring farms and villages until the business closed following the 1924–1925 coal strike. He went to grammar school, and studied classics atCardiff University. After an unsuccessful attempt to move toLondon, he obtained work during the 1930s as a schoolmaster atSawston Village College,Cambridgeshire, married, and started a family.
After serving in theRoyal Air Force withwireless equipment during theSecond World War, he moved briefly to London, and then in 1947 to the remoteSuffolk village ofBlaxhall, where his wife taught in the school. He then began to write, first stories, poetry and film scripts for theBBC. He contributed to the script ofThe Secret of the Forest, made byRayant Pictures on location in Suffolk in 1955.[4] Then he wrote a book about the people of the village of Blaxhall. This work (Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay) was, after many rejections, published byFaber and Faber in 1956, and the same house published the ten further books of similar character which Evans wrote over the next three decades.
The Evans family lived relatively simply, moving their home in the neighbourhood toNeedham Market andHelmingham to follow the teaching posts, and at his wife's retirement they settled down finally inBrooke, a small Norfolk village, where George continued to write. Evans made extensive collections of oral history on tape relating to East Anglia, its village life, rural culture and dialect in a painstaking and sympathetic way, gathering anecdotes of the trades, the poverty, the migrant workers and the pre-modern rural way of life which was then still lingering in that comparatively sequestered corner of England.
Evans' ideas about folklore were shaped by the writersJames Frazer,Margaret Murray,T. C. Lethbridge andRobert Graves.[5] He maintained a long correspondence with Graves, whose work Evans admired; later in his life Evans would criticise academics for their dismissal of Graves' bookThe White Goddess.[5] Evans collaborated with his friendDavid Thomson of the BBC on the bookThe Leaping Hare. Although his books have a strong flavour of memory and nostalgia, they record a time (extending back into the nineteenth century) that was hard and to which one would not seriously wish to return. He did not add a gloss of romance to his materials, but assumed and accepted the truthfulness of his informants.[6]
Of the Blaxhall countryman, Evans wrote:
His knowledge is not a personal knowledge but has been available to him through oral tradition which is the unselfconscious medium of transmission. It is in his bones, you could say, and nonetheless valuable for that.... It was here at this time, and with the dressing and elaborating on it later, that I transposed the Blaxhall community in my own mind into its true place in an ancient historical sequence, keeping the continuity that was for ever changing, and for ever remaining the same, until an irreparable break substituted the machines for animal power, and put an end to a period that had lasted well over two thousand years.(The Crooked Scythe, pp.197-198)
Terry Pratchett described Evans's work (specifically regarding his bookThe Leaping Hare cowritten withDavid Thomson) as speaking "to the men who worked on the land—not from the cab of a tractor, but with horses—and they saw the wildlife around them. I suspect that maybe they had put a little bit of a shine on the things they told him, but everything is all the better for a little bit of shine".[7]
Publisher and politicianMatthew Evans, Baron Evans of Temple Guiting, is the son of George Ewart Evans.[8] His daughter, Susan, married the artistDavid Gentleman.
Evans' life and works feature as a permanent exhibition at theMuseum of East Anglian Life inStowmarket,Suffolk.
