From: HobgoblinH-AT-aol.com Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 12:34:00 EDT Subject: PUPT: Wlater Wilkinson and P&J Dear All-- I am appending an excerpt from an e-mail that might be news to a very few of you. Obviously not to Ray da Silva, of course: <<Walter Wilkinson was a Punch and Judy man. More than that, he was a Punch and Judy man who wrote about his work. I don't know what it was that attracted me to his books, or how I first came across them, but, like many Punch and Judy men (were there ever, at any time, 'many'?), presenting his shows involved transporting his equipment from venue to venue. In Wilkinson's case, these journeys were heroic, and it is perhaps because they are 'walking' books, covering areas in England that I know, love and have walked in myself, that attracted me in the first place. That, and the fact that a friend of mine who, at the time, lived in Warton - a small village in northern Lancashire, quite near to the Lake District - could point out the very house that Wilkinson had stayed in overnight on one of his 'tours', over 50 years before. (Warton also has links with George Washington, but that's another story . . . ) Walter Wilkinson wrote his books in the early 1930's and appears to have been a Londoner (there is very little biographical information in any of the books). He was, it seems, something of an odd-ball (given that his chosen trade was that of a travelling puppeteer). He had - if I remember rightly - children, a broken marriage a strange attitude towards his mother, hatred of his father and was - at a time when such niceties were definitely not understood - a vegetarian. His first book was The Peep Show, documenting his travels in Somerset and Devon. This was followed by Vagabonds and Puppets - of which I have an autograph copy - which covered his wanderings in the Southern Counties. Puppets in Yorkshire was probably the first of his books I bought, as it covers his trip to what is God's own County and the one I came from. Then there were A Sussex Peep Show, Puppets into Scotland (which I don't think I've seen), Puppets Through Lancashire, which the friend mentioned above brought to my attention and one which would probably be of particular interest to you - Puppets Through America. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen this either and, if I remember (it must have been 20 years ago when I started reading these books) second-hand book dealers I spoke to about Wilkinson said that most copies of this particular volume had, unsurprisingly, already found their way to America. Though these books were a 'discovery' of mine, I found that Wilkinson was an author familiar to many second-hand book dealers and that, in his time, he was not an obscure author writing on an arcane subject, as the accolades for his books, apart from reviewers writing in 'higher-class' periodicals and newspapers, such as The Tatler, Country Life, Punch, the Times Literary Supplement, the Manchester Guardian the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph, came from such literary luminaries as D H Lawrence, J B Priestley and Arnold Bennett. His books, as travel documents, were compared to those of George Borrow, Hilaire Belloc and Robert Louis Stephenson, which even I, as an enthusiast, find a little OTT. Should I need to whet your appetite further, I can do no better than to quote from the review of a Mr Richard King, who wrote in The Tatler : "These 'puppet' books make up a little library of books so delightful to read that they are unique among volumes of travel. To read any of them is to be enchanted by descriptions of people and places, charmed by meeting country folk who are really of the countryside, and to be as interested in the writer's experiences as if you were sharing them yourself." The Daily Telegraph wrote of the American volume: "Walter Wilkinson's puppets are internationally famous, and when they decided to take their creator on an American tour they knew that they would find plenty of friends to welcome them. Their adventures make a delectable addition to the 'Puppets' series - those charming, gossipy, rambling travel books which have endeared their author to thousands of people who have never seen his shows . . . " His books - all of them written over 70 years ago - do not deal so much with the mechanics of puppetry, though there is some mention of it and, like you, he made all his own puppets>> All this books can still be bought at very reasonable prices through used book sellers. I now hand the microphone over to anyone who already knows all about this matter. It made a major blip on my radar. Cheers, Alice Hobgoblin Hill Puppets --- Personal replies to: HobgoblinH-AT-aol.com --- List replies to: puptcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- Admin commands to: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- Archives at: http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons
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