Jim.

In considering your post I don't find anything which is untrue or even undeserved.
In fact, I can quote similar instances and my own story with the efdss closely matches your own.

However, you are describing something which happened decades ago. While people who have had experiences such as you and I can quote (and there are hundreds of them) constantly parade that history then people like me who are still trying to get the Society on the right track will struggle. It's like being thought to be a criminal because your brother robbed a bank thirty years ago. That was then and I'm not that person anyway.

You talk about communication and you're not wrong, but things change. Here am I, talking up the Society to the best of my ability, vulnerable to the whims of a potentially global audience and even vulnerable to the disapproval of my colleagues on the National Council if I say the wrong things. I'm debating the Society in an open way, sometimes a bit defensively I'll own, but not in a dishonest or disingenuous way.

In the six years I've been on National Council I think I've made a difference. In the two years I have left before I become ineligible for re-election I hope to achieve even more. I see the Society taking steady if often painful steps towards being the organisation it should be, servicing many of the areas that are not being effectively addressed by others on what is a large and diverse scene. It's hard and sometimes you make it harder.

I am dispirited when people trot out old history like you have.

I am dispirited when people concentrate on what we get wrong instead of what we get right.

I am dispirited when the EFDSS is constantly measured against people who have more financial and moral support.

(I'm so dispirited I'm going to have to drink a lot of whisky over Christmas!)

Former Chief Officer Phil Wilson addressing the AGM six years ago gave them an option of closing the doors, winding up the Society, considering the job done as far as we could do it and marching off into the sunset. It's still an option I suppose, but if the Society stopped operating what would replace it?
Is anyone rushing forward to institute an English National Folk Archive such as the Irish have?
Is anyone trying to address education on a national level?
Is anyone dedicated to nationally publishing a wide range of English folk titles plus a magazine and research journal?

If they are then great - I can stop banging my head against this wall and concentrate on my tune research and audio archive.

I wish I could start from somewhere else but the letter I have in my file, from Kim Howells when he was Minister at the DCMS, saying that there was no funding for such as the Doc Rowe Collection and we should approach the EFDSS for assistance because that's the sort of thing they do convinced me that I have to start from where we are.


On your point about the library, yes, we have plans to expand. We have invested money in a capital project. We have a volunteer director driving the project (and bloody marvellous she is too!). We have architects plans which look really exciting. We have a strategy to raise the funding. Given the competition and the certainty that the Olympics will soak up the available funding I don't know what our likelyhood of success is. There are myriad difficulties in our path, but we're putting the effort in and have been for some time.

I don't blame you for giving up on the Society but I haven't and it would be helpful if people like you (ie. with your stature and experience) didn't periodically pull the rug out from underneath my feet with old news.

There's more I could say but I've been boring enough so I'll lighten up and go Christmas shopping.

J