I can't wait to tell you about the wonderfully quirky diary which I have had the pleasure of unearthing of late! But first, as ever, I'd like to share with you the circumstances of its discovery...
My interest having been piqued by the wonderful Canoe Log and Diary of a Tramp, I had cause to throw together a quick display of travel diaries for one of our monthly Saturday openings at the archives. As ever, it was only on the day of the display itself that I had chance to actually look inside the mostly non-descript notebooks which had emerged from the boxes, obtained through my hastily thrown together list of references, basically from a quick search of the term "travel diary".
So it was only when I started trying to read the entries in the diary that I noticed there was something quite unusual about it. There were no obvious sketches or illustrations and the writing looked quite standard for the time. It was headed with the date (April 1901), always a good start. But it had a rather curious title at the head of the page, reading "North-Welsh Wheelriding."
It turns out that the whole diary was written in a curious type of language. My language-savvy offspring, Alex, picked up that it was using a style of writing which later became known as 'Anglish'. This is a kind of linguistic purism where 'native' or Anglo-Saxon derived words are chosen in preference to those borrowed from French, Latin, Greek, etc., with which our language has become endowed since the time of the Norman conquest. The results are a rather quirky and surprisingly appealing poetic form of expression. Who would not love to "faren a-wheelriding" rather than simply "go for a bike ride"?
When it also became apparent that the diary was describing a bike ride across Wales, then I knew it was one we would have to come back to. A few months later and the opportunity came for Alex to take on the task of transcribing the diary, and the results unearthed a fascinating insight into the mind and world of its author.
We soon identified our diarist as Henry Edward George Rope and found that he has the distinction of having a Wikipedia page of his own, described as a "writer, poet, editor and priest widely known in the Roman Catholic Church in his long lifetime". He was later known affectionately simply as "Father Harry".
I also discovered that the reason the name Rope was familiar to me was that Henry Rope was a prolific depositor at the archives. There were over forty separate accessions received from him between 1953 and 1973. He deposited the diary in 1964, along with some other miscellaneous correspondence and papers. I also discovered, in the deposit file, correspondence between him and the County Archivist of the time commenting on the diary, which he had written over sixty years earlier, when he was a young lad of just twenty. He describes it as 'written in a quaint "Anglosaxon" vocabulary', stating that 'I feared it would be merely comic, but perhaps there are notes, vignettes here and there to which time has given a certain value'.
I like to think that Father Harry would be pleased to know that the diary is now seeing the light of day, being enjoyed and appreciated by at least a few of us. I can now offer a full transcript of the diary, spread over four separate blog posts, for you to enjoy at your own pace.
There are many themes which can be drawn out, from our young cyclist's forthright views on industrialisation, urbanisation, to the mechanisation of transport, politics, 'jingoism', colonisation and more. Many of his observations have taken on greater meaning in the light of the present day, where we find ourselves over a hundred years later. In fact, the threat of all-consuming 'progress', to which he took such exception, is set to continue to what could very well be the end of all that we know and love in this world and many of his words are as poignant as they would have been then, if not even more so.
I hope it will also be enjoyed by those who have a love of cycling or other forms of slow travelling across our green and pleasant land. Not to mention those who appreciate the rich language contained within its pages. It is my real pleasure to bring into the light of day the wonderful and curious diary of Henry Rope, also known as simply "travel diary 1901" (ref 1436/1).
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