The 1990s were creative years in Hook Norton, with not just the production of a processional drama and the filming of a detective mystery story, but the founding of an annual series of open-air folk, rock and blues concerts. Each of these ventures involved so many individual contributions that they became communal efforts, and we are proud to present surviving evidence of their achievement.
Unfortunately, the first venture – a live dramatic performance of A Passion for the Countryside in 1993 – was not adequately filmed or recorded; the only video we have of it is fuzzy and difficult to follow. But we can provide Pat Groome’s evocative reminiscences of the occasion, and those who saw one of the performances (or were part of it) long remembered it as an extraordinary event, made resplendent by the glorious weather.
By contrast, the second venture – the Film Society’s amusing film Bare Bones, made in 1996 – was well recorded, and we can make available some of the ample documentation.
The third venture also started in 1997, as an open-air music festival christened Folk in a Field and in 2001 its organisers produced a CD highlighting its regular performers up to that date. For those first five years it was part of the annual Rural Fayre, which was brought to a close by the Foot and Mouth epidemic. The festival changed sites and in time became “Music at the Crossroads”, which still survives, despite the interruptions of Covid, and is now held at the Brewery. By 2021 the successive music festivals had raised nearly £100,000 for charity.
Finally, we cannot resist a literary entertainment created in Hook Norton at the beginning of this inventive decade. In 1991 the Village Newsletter published, in four separate parts, an extraordinary account of the village’s supposed recent rebellion against all external governments – be they in Bodicote or Oxford or Westminster – that claimed authority over Hook Norton, a rebellion that was ultimately settled by armed conflict and required the personal intervention of the prime minister of the day. There were those who said it didn’t contain a word of truth; others just laughed.
The author called himself “Freethinker” but was, in fact, almost certainly John Ballantine, a sports writer on the Sunday Times (or was it The Telegraph?) who lived in the village in the 1970s and ‘80s. After he had moved to Stratford some years later, Ballantine also wrote (and published privately) a short book describing the conversations between William Shakespeare and the vicar of Hook Norton, whom Will supposedly met up with from time to time, usually in a Hooky pub! Entitled Conversations with Shakespeare: From the Recently Discovered Diaries of Canon Anthony Dumbleton, 1590-1617 (Stratford, 2000), it was entirely fictional. No one named Dumbleton was ever vicar of Hook Norton! In truth, Ballantine did not know enough (nor did anyone else) about Elizabethan and Jacobean Hook Norton for the “conversations” to be revealing or insightful. That was not true of the Hook Norton of his own day, and The Hooky Insurrection of 1991 remains an entertaining and suggestive read. It is available here in a lightly edited form. Enjoy – but don’t believe a word of it!
Donald Ratcliffe (with thanks to Pat Groome),
September 2022
