Wow, that's a bit of a tirade Cap'n!

It looks like you're blaming the efdss for absolutely everything. (note: we didn't go into Iraq waving our six longswords!)

As I remember, the efdss main festival involvement was Sidmouth and Whitby. There were probably other weekend festivals but I've only been with the efdss since 2000 so I wouldn't know. When the efdss handed over Sidmouth to professional management in 1986 it was a good financial decision by a volunteer council and saved both the festival and the society. You can check the history in Derek Schofield's excellent book 'The First Week in August'.


As a regular attender until recently, I can say that when Steve Heap and John Heydon took over Sidmouth I have seen as much solo traditional singing as when the efdss ran it, maybe more. I used to go to post efdss Whitby especially FOR the traditional singers. So you can't say things went to pot because the efdss left - that's just rubbish,

Abolish competitions? What are you referring to? Did the efdss run traditional singing competitions? Did they stop them and send an order out to the folk world that this was 'not allowed'. If they had, would the folk world of the time complied? Probably not. It's irrelevant anyway.

I agree that the disappearance of the branches was not a good move in my eyes but the NC at the time probably had their reasons and I'm certainly not going to worry about them in the 3rd millenium.

But here we go again...... talking ancient history - boring, boring, boring.   I joined the efdss in 2000 and I'm only interested in looking forward - that's why I joined. Since I joined I've concentrated on getting the online infrastructure in place. Robbie is newly arrived and is using his vast and very very high level business experience to get the business infrastructure right. Others are working slowly and steadily on Education and Publishing and Capital projects. We're busy Captain, and just because we're not presently doing all the numerous little things that everybody thinks we ought to be doing because that's what they're interested in doesn't mean we're not interested or that we don't want to do them in the future - it just means we're busy.

And while we're on 'ready made market for selling EFDSS publications' - while I've been writing this email I've had two emails from the EFDSS shop robot to tell me we've just taken another two book orders - one of them for traditional song book published by the efdss. That's the way we sell a lot of stuff these days. Having said that you could have visited our stall at some of the recent festivals, joined, bought a book, had a chat, or even stood and told us how to run the society. We might even have offered you a coffee. We don't need to RUN a festival to be there and others are making such a good job of it anyway.

J