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26 June 1929 - 9 May 2012
Alexander - ‘Sandy’ - Fenton
was a scholar and teacher who has had a profound influence on many areas of
Scottish and European studies and museums, not least through the extensive
corpus of his written and published work. He was born in Shotts, in
Lanarkshire, the son of Alexander Fenton, a souter from the north-east, from
Drumblade, and Annie Stronach. The family returned to Drumblade, near Huntly,
shortly after Sandy’s birth and moved a few years later to the Smiddy Croft
at Pitglassie, in the parish of Auchterless, near Turriff.
Sandy’s primary schooling was
at Drumblade, Auchterless, and secondary schooling in Turriff. He graduated
from Aberdeen with MA in English in 1951. An aptitude for languages was
recognised by his teachers such as Miss Mabel Smith, his French teacher at
Turriff, and Dr Clive Barber in Aberdeen, both inspired teachers who kindled
a lifetime’s interest in Sandy. He was taught German on a one-to-one basis
by Clive Barber, an exceptional and eremitic scholar with a passion for
languages.
Attending an early Vernacular Buildings conference at the University in
1976, Sandy took me to visit Dr Barber in his small flat in Aberdeen.
Barricaded behind deep piles of books, with the flat in darkness, and
working within a narrow shaft of light from a single anglepoise lamp behind
his chair, he was writing a grammar of Balinese, the philological challenge
being that this was a language with no evident orthography or any study of
its grammar. The only known raw material was a poorly printed translation of
St John’s Gospel, in the form of a small, frail pamphlet caught in the pool
of light, barely preserving the unique expertise and pragmatic Christianity
of a late-19th-century missionary in Bali.
Sandy was encouraged by Aberdeen to go on to Cambridge where he completed
the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos in 1953. Studying Old Norse
here laid the foundation of a thorough knowledge of the Scandinavian
languages. As he did when in Aberdeen, he used the summer vacations to his
financial advantage in doing the circuit of games and sports as a highly
successful middle-distance runner (winning a Cambridge half-blue), and
carried out some gentle archaeological survey work around Pitglassie and in
Auchterless parish. He did National Service between 1953 and 1955 and was
stationed in Germany, where he learnt to type and happily fraternised with
the locals - not generally part of the culture of the British Army On the
Rhine - building on his language skills with colloquial German. Sandy’s
capacity and appetite for European languages and the application of them to
cultural studies might be said to have then been honed and given a
particular direction while he was Senior Assistant Editor with the Scottish
National Dictionary. He edited the letters ‘K’, ‘N’ and ‘O’ while working on
the Dictionary under its Editor - and celebrated lexicographer - David
Murison. His great and lasting regard for such a mentor is strikingly
recorded:
My first two days are burned in my memory. As I sat beside him, he outlined
the whole manner and ways of working of a dictionary. Over the next two
years I learnt how to put into practice the concentrated wisdom of these two
days. After that came a feeling of competence. What he did, in effect, by
precept and example, was to teach me how to use, critically, an enormous
range of sources that, through words, pointed also to the history of things
that surround us. He provided an education in the roots of the heritage of
Scotland that outvalued any university degree.
In many a sense, this precept and example was carried forward by Sandy in
the education of his own assistants in the National Museum, by which a rapid
and essential briefing was followed by an extended process of practical,
intellectual and irresistible osmosis; the receptor assimilated not only a
full range of Scottish and European cultural knowledge but a quiet
confidence, boundless encouragement and the example of a generosity of
spirit and deep intent. A curious but potent legacy of the SND work with
David Murison flowed from bundles of galley proofs of the Dictionary which
were re-purposed into museum subject categories. These became part of
research assistant training in the National Museum; they were cut up and
pasted to archive slips, meanwhile offering some rapid reading and a gentle
and effective lesson on the applied role of language in cultural studies.
The mapping of language and dialect together with material culture was a
constant theme of Sandy’s work and output, not only within the ambit of the
Linguistic Atlas of Scotland but also of the European Linguistic Atlas
movement, which had broadened out from words to things in the compilation of
‘ethnological’ atlases beginning with the Atlas of Swedish Folk Culture
(1937-9). With an instinct for the importance of the wider fields of
European scholarly endeavour and a recognition of their potential for
Scotland, Sandy engaged vigorously with the atlas movement in the early
1960s, as soon as he moved from the Dictionary to the National Museum.
Having trained as a lexicographer (as he always maintained), Sandy rejoiced
in the pursuit of the essential meanings of words, with all connotations and
for any period, pointing out that meanings change, cognates develop quite
different meanings and a piece of equipment for a specific purpose may have
a dozen or more different names within the same language area.
The catalogues and archives of the National Museums bear witness that
material objects and their parts might have names in terms other than
Standard English and that Sandy and his assistants recorded these as an
invariable rule. This relationship between words and things had formed the
conceptual base of a linguistic atlas of Rhaeto-Romanic Switzerland and the
title of the journal Worter und Sachen, founded in 1909. Sandy moved
vigorously into these domains, particularly through his friendship with
European scholars such as Professor Axel Steensberg of the University of
Copenhagen with whom he founded the international journal Tools and Tillage
(1968-95). Thereafter, Sandy communicated constantly with a wide circle of
European teachers and scholars whose names magisterially and symbolically
formed, with his own, the Editorial Board of another groundbreaking
international journal, Ethnologia Europaea, founded in 1966 by the Swedish
ethnologist, Sigurd Erixon (1888-1968).
Sandy Fenton was appointed to a new post in the National Museum of
Antiquities of Scotland in 1959, as Assistant Keeper tasked with collection,
documentation, field-recording, documentary research and display towards the
creation of a national open-air museum for Scotland. This was a concept that
had been aired inconclusively for a generation or two but had received some
definition when government scrutinised Libraries, Museums and Art Galleries
in 1951 and recommended the ‘folk museum’ type for Scotland, drawing on
wider Scandinavian and European exemplars. The new Assistant Keeper's domain
was to ‘expand the Museum’s activities, particularly in recording and
illustrating passing ways of country life and agriculture’, as summarised by
the then Keeper, R B K Stevenson, in the Museum’s Annual Report (1960) and
as embodied in a new National Museum echelon, the Country Life Section.
Research, collection and display formed the modus operandi with themed
annual exhibitions in the former ‘Museum Gallery’ at 18 Shandwick Place,
beginning in 1960 and following a number of broadly based topics such as
‘Seed Time and Harvest’, ‘Fishing, Fowling and Hunting’ and ‘Peat Cutting
and Land Improvement’, and moving to regional foci such as ‘Caithness and
the Northern Isles’ and ‘Islands of the North and West’. These exhibitions
were seen by Dick Lemon, Secretary of the Royal Highland and Agricultural
Society of Scotland, and led to a request from the Society’s Directors for
similar agricultural history exhibits at the Royal Highland Show at
Ingliston. Beginning under canvas in 1965, these displays and topics were
unconventional in 20th-century museology but original and imaginative,
constructed on objects simply explained and placed in the context of related
objects or of a working background, be it landscape or dwelling-house
interior. Subjects were ploughs and ploughing, the lives of farm workers,
fishing and fowling, rope-making and rope-winders, smithying, joinery, cart-wrighting
and wheel-wrighting, basket-making and overland transport, milking and
dairying, peat-cutting and many other topics, with the displays ‘speaking’
to an informed Highland Show audience who were the rural communities of
Scotland with a deeply imbued knowledge of working the land by hand and with
horsepower. Older visitors would scrutinise every detail and match it for
accuracy against their own knowledge, and Sandy’s natural and easy way with
the public would release an avalanche of further information and additions
to the collections. It is worth putting on record that the annual bill to
the National Museum, in the early 1970s, for mounting these four-day
exhibitions, attracting an average of 5,000-6,000 visitors per day, was in
the region of £200, excluding wages and salaries. At this rate, any
cost-conscious management could see them as sustainable and a winning
formula.
The annual summer exhibitions were highly acclaimed and served to ‘grow’ the
collections. Under Sandy's advocacy and management, the exhibitions prompted
planning for a permanent building which was part-funded through the Scottish
Country Life Museums Trust, which he created in 1969. The Scottish
Agricultural Museum was completed in 1976 and opened to the public in 1977
with ‘Muck: an exhibition on manure for the fields and sanitation in the
home’, a topic brooking neither fear nor favour and rationalised with ‘the
theme for this year acknowledges the fundamental importance of a subject
rarely or never treated in museums’. An intense but fruitful process of
collection and display led ultimately, under Gavin Sprott’s direction, to
the development of a permanent agricultural and open-air museum for
Scotland, ‘The Museum of Scottish Country Life’, opened at Wester
Kittochside, East Kilbride, in 2001.
Sandy began his national museum career with some recently acquired ‘rural
bygones’, the former Museum of Antiquities' ‘MP’ classification of ‘Tools,
Implements and Miscellaneous’ and the legacy of Sir Arthur Mitchell’s
19th-century collecting of the ‘neo-archaic’. He established separate
collections for Scottish Country Life within a new and expanded taxonomic
framework to make sense of a seemingly amorphous mass of items and proceeded
to build a national collection and the material culture for an agricultural
history of Scotland. A broad approach to the country as a whole was
complemented by a focus on the material culture of different regions and
intensive fieldwork, particularly in the southwest, the north-east and the
Northern Isles. His 700-page volume, The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland
(1978), is a monument to this methodology. Sandy began the Scottish
Ethnological Archive as collateral research tool for the collections,
founded on his reading through and abstracting from the Old and New
Statistical Accounts and the County Agricultural Reports and seeking out and
copying old photographs. These were supplemented by culling information from
a range of local newspapers and recording information and memories from
contacts at the Highland Show. One or two books were regarded as ‘set texts’
for the Country Life Section, for example, Arthur Mitchell’s Rhind Lectures
of 1876 and 1878, ‘The Past in the Present’, William Alexander’s Notes and
Sketches illustrative of Northern Rural Life in the Eighteenth Century
(1877) and John Firth’s Reminiscences of an Orkney Parish (1920), texts
which offered comparatively detailed insights into pre-improvement Scotland
and whose authors were masters of description.
This was history not otherwise available and was compiled by Sandy, in the
first instance, from the fundamental evidence of objects and the
collections. It was distributed annually at the Royal Highland Show as
exhibition leaflets in the form of a simple folded sheet of foolscap. These
were topics nowhere else in print and exemplars of material culture or
‘ethnological’ studies. They were priced at two or three pence, only to
lessen the chance of them being discarded to become litter in the Ingliston
Showground, but over the early years of the ‘Agricultural Museum’ they
amounted to thousands of words of empirical research and accumulated wisdom
which still deserve a place on the shelves of Scottish history. This new
historiography was more durably placed in Scottish historical studies with
the publication of Sandy’s Scottish Country Life in 1976. Perhaps the
best-known of Sandy’s publications, it combines scholarship with readability
and has remained in print since then. The overarching theme was the
transition in Scottish farming over the last 250 years, from a traditional
and mainly subsistence economy to a highly mechanised one, with the detailed
description of the traditional or ‘pre-improvement’ way of life and work and
its survival being its particular strength. The book also marked the
beginning of a fruitful collaboration between scholar and publisher. John
Tuckwell of John Donald Publishers, later Tuckwell Press, was then
challenging a prevalent attitude that Scottish publishing could not be
sustained from the fruits of Scottish scholarship at the higher levels.
Sandy set out the parameters of his field within a credo born of innate and
confident wisdom:
A knowledge of Scottish country life amounting to accurate historical
insight derives in the end not only from studying the broad patterns and
trends that come through official statistics, not only from recording the
lives and actions of men like Lord Karnes or Sir John Sinclair, not only
from plotting on a map the diffusion of James Small’s plough or Andrew
Meikle’s threshing mill, but also from learning about the everyday
activities in byre and barn, home and workshop, about small-scale equipment
and its techniques of use, and about the unspectacular, indigenous changes
that took place in these over a period of time in response to local
conditions.
Sandy’s copious and energetic published output offers abundant lessons for
this process of learning and interpretation. His ‘accurate historical
insight’ is proffered to challenge what might be arbitrary and ultimately
inaccurate generalisations about material culture. Once engaged with the
National Museum collections, Sandy set out his stall in a paper ‘Early and
Traditional Cultivating Implements in Scotland’ in the Proceedings. He
described to me how an earlier paper, in a different learned journal, had
prompted him to return to first principles in this subject for a detailed
regional study of plough-types, the association between plough-types and
field-shapes, and the influence of other cultivating implements on
field-shapes to establish a fund of knowledge for interpretation and
synthesis, none of which, arguably, was then to hand. He began with Iron Age
evidence and the identification of characteristic stones as ‘bar shares’ for
wooden-beam and ploughs. With the inspiration of first-hand knowledge, he
drew a parallel with ‘iron sock bars patented by the plough-making firm of
Sellars of Huntly in the early 1900s for horse-drawn ploughs, now widely
used on tractor ploughs. These are ribbed or notched for a better grip on
the frame in which they lie, just as the stone bars are flaked or pecked. In
use the tips wear to one side and have then to be turned over so that the
sharpest part of the tip is always in closest contact with the land’
Sandy’s precept for the handling of such material culture was to set it in
its widest possible context and to engage with scholars worldwide. The
pursuit of cultivating implements was followed to an international
conference in Belfast whose papers were richly and efficiently edited by
Sandy, with Dr Alan Gailey of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, in the
volume The Spade in Northern and Atlantic Europe (1971). Similar volumes on
fundamental topics followed, such as Land Transport in Europe, co-edited
with Jan Podolak and Holger Rasmussen (1973). Recognition of his European
linguistic and scholarly reach brought election to membership of the Royal
Gustav Adolph Academy, Sweden (1978), the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences
and Letters (1978) and the Hungarian Ethnographical Society (1983).
Sandy’s study in the company of European and North American scholars of
cultures, technologies, beliefs and languages was based on methodologies
adapted from archaeology and anthropology but, more significantly perhaps,
drew on an intellectual tradition well-rooted in Scotland and customarily
disavowed by the 20th-century academic world; this was the study of ‘popular
antiquities’ and forms of antiquarianism located in the research activities
and collecting for museums. This in turn was influenced by emerging
‘folklife’ studies and particularly by the study of a traditional culture of
subsistence and self-reliance in Scandinavia. Material culture was
scrutinised between everyday practical and symbolic use and more widely
assimilated to include buildings and landscape, language and the written
word. Demonstrating the ‘competence’ of material culture studies, he also
founded the Scottish Vernacular Buildings Working Group in 1972. ‘Ethnology’
became a standard term for the study of folk life, representing not so much
a discipline as a methodology that had evolved as an academic subject in
Scandinavia and Europe. One of the Swedish Nordiska Museet’s duties was to
provide academic instruction in the University of Stockholm, and Chairs for
comparative folk life research or ‘ethnology’ were established here and at
the Universities of Lund and Uppsala. Sandy’s scholarly mission was to
harness the dynamic of European Ethnology to Scottish needs and Scottish
material culture. It was a matter of pleasure that Professor Gordon
Donaldson asked him to introduce Scottish Ethnology into the Edinburgh
University Scottish Historical Studies syllabus in 1975. The diversity of
subject-matter in Scottish rural life and its dimensionality require a
holistic approach and cross-disciplinarity to embrace the full range
(including objects) of standard sources in archaeology and museum
collections, written and oral evidence, dictionaries and dialect studies,
and an emphasis on systematic fieldwork, all of which were so readily put
under tribute by Sandy and later summarised appropriately in his ‘Essays in
Scottish Ethnology’ (1985-6).
A further ethnological domain that Sandy has so richly laid before us is
food and diet. He described how his visit to Slovakia in 1969 inspired a
recognition that food was an extremely important ‘handmaiden to ethnological
research’ and over the subsequent 20 years he co-authored and co-edited five
substantial volumes of conference proceedings of European ethnological food
research groups. His own food research formed his subject for the 1996-7
Rhind Lectures on ‘The Food of the Scots’ and, greatly expanded, has now
been published as part of the ‘Compendium of Scottish Ethnology’ (2007).
The Scottish Country Life Museums Trust was early evidence of Sandy’s canny
ability to raise funds, in this case as a conduit towards the Scottish
Agricultural Museum. A newsletter kept an interested public informed about
targets and developments and included nuggets of research. With an eye to an
agricultural museum ‘journal’, the newsletter was expanded in 1980 into a
multi-page format, Country Life News, with articles and reviews. This became
the launch-pad for a new journal, Review of Scottish Culture, the first
number of which was published in 1984. It was designed to fill a perceived
gap in the study of material culture, charting the inward and outward
movements of people and cultural influences, recording diverse aspects of a
national and regional culture and presenting aspects of Scottish culture in
terms of international comparison. The title was suggested by Professor
Hermann Palsson, offering the acronym ROSC, a particularly apt Gaelic term
for the action of seeing, in other words: vision, perception, understanding,
and to what is seen, that is, the written word in prose. ROSC Number 24 has
recently been published. Sandy succeeded Dr Robert Stevenson as Keeper and
Director of the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in 1978 and was
coopted to the Council of the Society as Museum Director ex officio and
became a Vice-President. He took on the mantle of securing a future for the
national collections since plans for a new ‘national museum’ and expanded
premises for the national collections had been shelved by government in
1975. Sandy was an energetic sponsor of the Alwyn Williams Committee,
appointed by the Secretary of State for Scotland in 1979 to report on the
future of the national museums and galleries. The Committee’s report, ‘A
Heritage for Scotland’, was issued in 1981 and the National Heritage
(Scotland) Act followed in 1985, transferring responsibility for the Royal
Scottish Museum and National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland to a new
Board of Trustees. Sandy became Research Director of a new national museum
combination and served a further term as Vice-President of the Society from
1985 to 1988. He was elected FRSE in 1985 and appointed CBE in 1986. He was
awarded a DLitt for his published work by Edinburgh University and Hon DLitt
by Aberdeen in 1989. From 1 October 1990 he took up appointment as the first
holder of the Chair of Scottish Ethnology and Director of the School of
Scottish Studies in Edinburgh University. Although Sandy had spent most of
his working life in the National Museums, this was still, perhaps, his
finest hour and the high point of a scholarly trajectory.
Sandy created the European Ethnological Research Centre in 1989 as an
independent body but still accommodated in, and supported by, the National
Museums. The EERC is mainly concerned with research per se and the
publication of research. As Sandy himself presented it: ‘its work aims at
throwing light on the history of everyday folk’. A vigorous publication
programme was initiated and channelled into five different streams, the
‘Flashbacks’ based on oral history (and drawing on a comparable Norwegian
project), ‘Sources in Local History’ drawing on surviving manuscript sources
such as diaries and account books, ‘Occasional Books and Papers’ looking to
international collaboration, and Review of Scottish Culture itself and the
‘Compendium’. Preparation of the ‘Compendium of Scottish Ethnology’ became
one of Sandy’s and the EERC’s major projects. It is planned as a 14-volume
series on Scottish Life and Society built on multi-authored volumes and was
launched in 2000.
It is a measure of Sandy’s energy after retirement from the
Museums that he never really retired and maintained his own lifelong study
of the small-scale economies of farms of small and moderate size. In a run
of diaries of a Buchan farm between 1923 and 1967, for example, he teased
out the detail of everyday life and the round of the seasons. This was
published in Wirds
an’ Wark ‘e Seasons Roon (1987),
documenting the work of ploughing, seed-time, harvest and grain-processing,
livestock husbandry, feeding and produce, and, as ever, with words linked to
people, processes and everyday life to demonstrate the importance of
language in the study of material culture and in deftly crafted vignettes of
conversation. A further book, A
Swedish Field Trip to the Outer Hebrides, 1934, came
from the press shortly before he died.
Highly articulate in English, Sandy was equally articulate in
his own Buchan tongue. Cralters,
or twenty Buchan tales (1995)
and Buchan
Words and Ways (2005)
are further legacies. The richness of his own family inheritance was no
doubt put in the wider perspective by his facility with languages and must
have contributed silently to other writing enterprises, such as his
translation from Danish of Steen Steensen Blicher’s Diary
of a Parish Clerk (1976)
and translation into Scots of the poetry of Sandor Weores of Hungary in If
all the World were a Blackbird (1985).
His friendships went far and wide. As with his European friends, his
engagement with friends at home often had a serious intent. He enjoyed for
years the fellowship of the 1970 Club, a sodality that emerged from the
Council of Europe’s consultations on the future of countryside and
environment and saw the establishment of the Countryside Commission for
Scotland. Sandy went on a series of pleasant and purposeful cruises with the
1970 Club and ‘read the landscape’ for his fellow members, shaping attitudes
towards and defining what is now so topical, that is, the cultural
landscape.
Sandy’s ability to raise funds to further the cause of
Scottish ethnology has been mentioned in terms of the Scottish Country Life
Museums Trust and the Scottish Agricultural Museum. The Scotland Inheritance
Fund was registered as a charitable body in 1985 and dedicated to the
cultural and historical heritage of Scotland. It formed an umbrella for a
number of trusts and funds from gifts and legacies and has been used for the
support of specific purposes, such as research and publication (in line with
the strategy of the EERC) and also for projects such as the restoration of
the Bucket Mill at Finzean, Kincardineshire, and to support the wider
purposes of the European Ethnological Research Centre. An endowment by Mrs
Ruth Ratcliff, and inspired by Sandy’s work, has created the high-profile
and generous Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize in Ethnology for important
contributions to the study of folklore or folklife. The first award was made
in March 1991.
Sandy was a scholar and teacher of a highly original stamp,
and as linguist, author, poet and athlete has left his mark on all who knew
him. In spite of the intellectual heights and reach of his endeavours, we
were all encouraged to share in them since the formula - and the best
working definition of ‘ethnology’ - was a compelling one and Sandy’s own
characterisation of what drove him: ‘an interest in folk and their ways of
doing and speaking’.
Hugh Cheape
1 This has recently been celebrated in Margaret A Mackay et
al, Bibliography, 1955-2009. Alexander Fenton. Professor Emeritus of
Scottish Ethnology. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, European
Ethnological Research Centre 2009. I have been helped in my recall of
Sandy’s career by Gavin Sprott, former colleague in the National Museums,
and have included in this text comments made by him.
2 Alexander Fenton, ‘To David Murison’, in ROSC. Review of
Scottish Culture Number 5 (1989), xi.
3 His detailed studies of inter alia flails, rope-making
equipment and kilns are exemplars of the genre, eg, Alexander Fenton,
‘Lexicography and Historical Interpretation’, in Barrow, G W S (ed) The
Scottish Tradition.Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press 1974,243-57.
4 Arthur Mitchell, The Past in the Present: What is
Civilisation? Edinburgh 1880, 107.
5 Alexander Fenton, Scottish Country Life. Edinburgh: John
Donald Publishers Ltd 1976, v.
6 ‘Early and Traditional Cultivating Implements in Scotland’,
in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 96 (1962-3),
264-317.
7 Ibid, 267.
8 Alexander Fenton, The Shape of the Past. Essays in Scottish
Ethnology. 2 vols. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd (1985-6).
9 The launch of Volume 1 of the ‘Compendium of Scottish
Ethnology’ at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 10 August 2013 has now
completed the series. See Alexander Fenton and Margaret A Mackay, eds, Scottish
Life and Society: An Introduction to Scottish Ethnology. Edinburgh: John
Donald and the European Ethnological Research Centre 2013, xvi + 592 pages. |
