Writing on Malcolm Saville 1998-2018

My wife and I joined the Malcolm Saville Society in 1996 with the sudden realisation that we were not the only people shopping for his books and visiting places like Rye, Shropshire and Dartmoor. In those days you didn't buy books from the internet, you dived in shop after shop. Sadly many of those shops no longer exist as the internet offers instant gratification. One of the benefits of coming to annual gatherings was that Saville books were for sale at manageable prices. There was always a scrum at the official sales desk. I have memories of Shropshire gatherings in Shrewsbury and the Long Mind Hotel, in Rye, Exeter, Plymouth and Ely. We didn't get to them all because we had a few Easter foreign holidays, but in our first decade we were pretty regular. My wife's long illness began to be a problem after 2010 so since then we have not been able to attend.

I have to confess I was not a Saville reader as a child but bought a rebound library copy of Saucers over the Moor in my teens. That is therefore the story I have more of a bond with than the others. My wife read the early Lone Pine titles ending with The Neglected Mountain so Shropshire and Rye were on our married to do list. Her sister lives in Kent  and her in-laws lived in Pett Level so Rye visits were regular. We had week long cottage holidays in Minsterley, Stiperstones and shorter stays in Shrewsbury   over the years.

The purpose of this article is to record twenty years of my writing for Acksherley! and Souvenir Programmes. I chose the first one in 1998 as a book written in my birth year, so I and the book were both fifty years old. That was Redshanks Warning, the first Jillies book from 1948. In fact the second story, Two Fair Plaits appeared for Christmas the same year, so this appeared in the same piece. We knew Blakeney very well because close friends lived nearby and we often walked the coast. I wrote in more detail on each book later. The style of writing changed as editors changed. That editor liked informality and humour, the next two were more formal. It was a matter of us getting to know each other. My current style evolved gradually as I tried to write serious studies of books or locations to run alongside the reports and lighter pieces. My contributions rose from two to four a year depending on the need for copy to fill the issue.

The subject matter of articles had no fixed pattern. As the copy deadline became closer, something would crop up. Souvenirs were easy since it was an article about a location. I would look for an angle which would be new and different - like Shropshire at War, or Shropshire Railways. Some followed my travels, like Shap, in Westmorland which we passed through every year on the way to Scotland and eventually stopped for a couple of nights. My emphasis tended to be on series other than Lone Pine to encourage people to read more widely. Lone Pine stories often were covered in Souvenirs. It suited me to wait for inspiration and write 3000 words but after the first decade I began to be more disciplined and produced some Yorkshire studies (Whitby, Goathland, Wharram and Muker) and London studies which involved searching out locations (Brownlow Square, Chelsea) and events such as the Festival of Britain. Most recently I have written published Introductions to each of the seven titles in the Marston Baines 'Thriller' series, for Girls Gone By Publishers, the final one Marston - Master Spy due out around Easter 1922.

Many of the early articles are available online on:

https://eprints.worc.ac.uk/800/1/Saville_Papers_2010.pdf

https://eprints.worc.ac.uk/1499
See also malcolmsavillearchive.blogspot.com