THE LIFE OF A MAN

Raymond Greenoaken remembers MALCOLM DOUGLAS 10.8.54—22.3.09

In the previous issue of Stirrings I bade a "goodbye of sorts" to Malcolm Douglas. For two years he had been designing and formatting the magazine under the editorship of Gavin Davenport; now he was stepping down, partly because of an undiagnosed abdominal complaint that was sapping his energy and ability to work. It was, however, his intention to continue managing the Stirrings website, even though he was shuttling between his Walkley home and the Weston Park Hospital (his laptop was seldom from his side). Hence the qualification "of sorts". No-one understood better than Malcolm the arcana of website management, so I was grateful that he was still willing to look after that side of things.

Tragically, when his condition was finally diagnosed, it was shown to be terminal. Specialists suggested he might have up to a year left to him, which he resolved to fill with as much useful activity as possible. In fact I got a call from him in March pledging continued technical support in the magazine’s production cycle. At the same time he was hard at work on a revised edition of the songbook The Wanton Seed, at the behest of the EFDSS. (He had already revised two other seminal collections, The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs and Marrow Bones, for the same publisher, to universal critical applause.)

None of this, however, was to come to pass. A few days later he suffered a fatal deterioration in his condition, and died in his sleep on the 22nd of March. His funeral took place at Grenoside Crematorium eleven days later. As well as friends and family, many prominent figures from the national folkscene were in attendance, a testament to the respect and affection with which he was held in these circles.

Born in South London of Anglo-Scottish parentage, Malcolm fetched up in Sheffield in the early 1970s, reading English and French at Sheffield University. In due course he began to explore the local session scene, playing mandolin, mandola and latterly fiddle in a style that was uniquely his own. While at university he had become involved in cartooning, originally to help out the student union magazine. His expertise was quickly noticed, and he found himself in demand by national publishers, contributing to several of the “alternative” comics that had sprung up in the wake of Viz. Most had similarly monosyllabic titles: Oink! (populated exclusively by porcine versions of established comic characters), Zit, Gas...

For the last named he worked on a parody of the legendary Dan Dare—Dan Dross, Pillock of the Future—which gave him the chance to tread irreverently in the footseps of Dare's creator Frank Hampson, a personal hero of his. Pressure of work forced him to sub-contract the latter part of this series to me: it was my task to ink over his pencil layouts. These layouts were so exquisitely rendered that it seemed almost an act of violation to cover them with my crude daubs. But I did, and was well paid for it. By contrast, Malcolm recalled ruefully that, on another occasion, the publishers of Zit went into Liquidation in order to avoid paying him at all...

I first encountered Malcolm in the late 1980s when we were both recruited independently by Hugh Waller to help run the Red Deer folk club on Pitt Street, Sheffield. I was immediately struck by his unusual style on the mandola (he had yet to take up the fiddle seriously) and by his basso profundo singing voice. His pigtail seemed pretty funky, too. We also played together for a couple of years in the Kate Green Band, and for the best part of twenty years in the dance band Nine Daies Wonder with Vic Shepherd and John Bowden. Malcolm’s relationship with dance was complex: he loved the tunes, but claimed never to have taken the floor since country dance sessions at primary school. He was proud, in fact, of his conscientious objector status. Over the years he kept the Nine Daies p.a. system functioning almost single-handedly with innumerable ad hoc repairs: he never turned up for a gig without his screwdriver and soldering kit.

When Malcolm discovered computers, one of the folk scene’s great affaires de coeur was consummated. He swiftly mastered the disciplines of digital artwork and writing html code (he scorned the use of web editing software), which were to serve him well in the running of various folk-related websites, including those of Yorkshire Folk Arts, the South Riding Folk Network and Stirrings. At an early stage he discovered the online forum Mudcat Café, in which all manner of folkish topics are discussed, debated and deconstructed with an often rabbinical attention to detail. In quick time he became a Mudcat legend, far famed for the erudition of his postings and for their mordant wit. The sheer number of such postings also excited awe amongst his fellow Mudcatters: records show that in just under ten years he posted a total of over 9000 lucid, learned and meticulously researched pronouncements—an average of roughly three a day over an entire decade. Fellow posters voted him Mudcatter of the Year in 2001, and then abolished the award to ensure he didn’t win it every year thereafter.

Where did Malcolm come by all this book-larnin’? From books, certainly. His study cum workroom was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves groaning under the weight of leathery tomes on folklore and music, ethnology, history and related matters. (His “light” reading, composed principally of science fiction and fantasy literature, was distributed elsewhere throughout the house.) But he quickly found the internet to be a powerful research tool, offering him promiscuous access to academic and antiquarian websites worldwide. He had a nose for obscure but illuminating facts, and a commodious memory for retaining and organising them.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that his mastery of this branch of knowledge should come to the attention of the EFDSS. He’d actually been pestering them for some time to consider re-issuing some of the important songbooks that appeared under their imprint in the Sixties and Seventies. EFDSS bigwigs were properly reluctant to do this unless the scholarship in these collections could be brought up to date, and eventually arrived at the obvious solution.

Thus it was that in 2002 Malcolm was given the task of revising and re-evaluating the foundation stone of the modern revival repertoire, A. L. Lloyd’s and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs. A daunting assignment, given the book’s canonical status, but he took the sacred cow briskly by both horns and spent "a wonderful time" at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House examining the original manuscripts. This study led him to the (then) heretical conclusion that Lloyd and Vaughan Williams had played fast and loose with much of their material, serving it up in considerably modified form with no more than a nudge and a wink towards the extent of their mediation. Malcolm greatly expanded the critical apparatus of the book to incorporate these findings, and well as doing valuable original research on the source singers. By this time Penguin Books had relinquished their copyright on the collection, and EFDSS published Malcolm's revised version in 2004 as Classic English Folk Songs.

His credentials established by the enthusiastic reception of the resuscitated Penguin, Malcolm was then entrusted with the task of giving the same makeover to Frank Purlow’s four-volume selection from the Hammond & Gardiner manuscripts. The first of these books to receive his forensic attentions was Marrow Bones, published in 2008. His work on the second volume in the sequence, The Wanton Seed, was left unfinished at his death, but plans are afoot for another editor to take up the baton with a view to eventual publication. Whoever his successor might be will find him a hard act to follow.

The impression of bookishness given above is not misleading. Malcolm was, I think, an essentially solitary person—though he was convivial company in the snug of his local—and kept fairly antisocial, not to say crepuscular, hours, lucubrating through the watches of the night and usually retiring around breakfast time. This only changed to any degree in the last years of his life when he took up “proper” employment as a Royal Mail letter-sorter. (He pointed out that most of the mail addressed to Stirrings passed through his hands before it arrived at Stirrings Central.) Even then there was a note of inevitability when he was persuaded to switch to night shift.

He could be maddening. As with many intellectuals, he had firmly-formed opinions on almost everything, which he would dispense with a sort of ex cathedra authority that left little room for disagreement. Any demurral that arose would be greeted with grave courtesy and then, as often as not, completely ignored.

Not a saint, then, but a man of great integrity and compassion, who never bore a grudge towards anyone—with the possible exception of Margaret Thatcher—and whom many people within and without the folk scene, including myself, were pleased to call a friend. We’ll all miss Malcolm Douglas, and not just when we need to know who Baring-Gould collected Widdecombe Fair from. We may be in the middle of a recession, but he leaves us all richer than when he found us.