Leslie Alan Shepard (1917-2004)
2006; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2056-6166
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoOn a bright May morning in 1997, I made the first of several visits to renew my acquaintance with an old friend, Leslie Shepard, with whom I had conversed and corresponded since the late 1960s, at his home in Stillorgan, Dublin. However, house Number One was not to be seen until my wife parted an overgrown leylandii hedge to reveal it hiding among the shadows. Even on a modern housing estate, Leslie managed to create an aura of mystery appropriate to the editor of The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories (1977) and How to Protect Yourself against Black Magic and Witchcraft (1978). In his adopted home in the Irish Republic he confessed himself to be both a recluse and an outsider. (1) Leslie Shepard's other label for himself--'a bit of a back-room boy'--is perhaps more appropriate, for, in a quiet, unassuming way, he wrote himself into every folklorist's bibliography with his ground-breaking scholarship, which focused around vernacular and popular print culture and ephemera. His monograph on The Broadside Ballad, (2) his detailed case study of the printer John Pitts, (3) and his wide-ranging The History of Street Literature, (4) were volumes that on the one hand developed systematically the sleuthing of earlier folk song scholars and antiquarians, such as Frank Kidson, and on the other complemented the discourse of his Marxist contemporaries, such as A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl. I was not surprised to find every wall of every room of his house and garage covered with shelves of books, some double-banked. Leslie was not just a prodigious collector, he was also extraordinarily well-read, and his scholarship and expertise were respected in several fields of study. It would be easy to assume that he came from a privileged home background and had a distinguished education, but this would be well wide of the mark. His family in West Ham were very poor--though 'genteel poor', he emphasized--and his schooling at Harold Road, Upton Park, was basic. In fact, for several years he languished at the bottom of the class, until he discovered books, namely Charles Kingsley's collection of Greek myths and the legend of Finn MacCool, which led him to a lifelong interest in folklore. On leaving school at fourteen he had aspired to become a library assistant, but, disappointed, he studied shorthand, typing, and book-keeping at a commercial school and took a job as an office boy. Ominously, his place of work was an asbestos factory, and by the time he was twenty he had developed asbestosis, which later led to his hospitalization in 1953. His chances of survival were considered low and he was sent by his trade union to a sanatorium in Switzerland, from which he was not expected to return. Through achieving an understanding of the power of the mind, Leslie confounded the doctors. He not only cheated death and made an excellent recovery, but went on to outlive most of his contemporaries. It was not the medical care or the Swiss air from which this remarkable recovery stemmed, but rather his discovery and practice of yoga, leading to a life-changing interest in Hindu metaphysics. During the war he had been a conscientious objector assigned to civil defence and, wanting to get away from the factory, he took a post as a newsreel film-maker for the Ministry of Information with Paul Rotha, the leading figure of the documentary film movement. His career in films burgeoned as he worked on various educational and industrial films for the Central Office of Information (1945-58), the National Coal Board (1948-50), and Public Service Television (1960-62). Through his work with the monthly news film, 'Mining Review', he met A. L. Lloyd and helped him publicize among the workforce his quest for mining songs, which was to lead to the collection Come All Ye Bold Miners. (5) His love of films and film-making never left him and in his final years he devoted himself to the rescue of over two hundred classic Continental films from the golden age of silent cinema, which he transferred to the Eumatic video format and lovingly restored, translating the captions into English. …
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