Today, a dash of Fenland history, a gentle vicar and some ghost stories, as we follow in the footsteps of M R James – in a way. Join us, dear listener, for a ramble in East Anglia and some ghostly trivia in the company of E G Swain…

It’s easy enough to chart those authors who continued the M R James tradition in the early half of last century. Some became over-specific in their horrors; others grasped at James’ style but couldn’t quite achieve his ease. And a number broke one or more of his ‘rules’.

His friend and contemporary Edmund  Gill Swain, often broke a cardinal rule and yet achieved stories which shine with that careful, detailed touch which makes James so readable. So today we stand on the edge of The Fens a while, and reflect on Swain’s Mr Batchel and his landscape.

M R James on Ghost Stories

There are no real rules, of course, but M R James set out a number of points as to what he himself considered to be the requisites of a ghost story. These can be found in the introduction to the collection Ghosts & Marvels (1924), and in the preface to More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911):

“Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage…”

“For the ghost story a slight haze of distance is desirable. ‘Thirty years ago,’ ‘Not long before the war’, are very proper openings. If a really remote date be chosen, there is more than one way of bringing the reader in contact with it. The finding of documents about it can be made plausible; or you may begin with your apparition and go back over the years to tell the cause of it… On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique…”

Ghosts and Marvels

“Another requisite, in my opinion, is that the ghost should be malevolent or odious: amiable and helpful apparitions are all very well in fairy tales or in local legends, but I have no use for them in a fictitious ghost story.”

More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

E G Swain (1861-1938) adhered closely to the first two points above, but pretty much ignored that last one. Swain was Chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 1905. His chaplaincy came after he had been a curate for some years in South London.

He and M R James had an amiable relationship, and shared a number of interests beyond college and religion. It’s known that he regularly attended M R James’ ghost story readings at Christmas, and his only collection of ghost stories, The Stoneground Tales, is dedicated:

TO MONTAGUE RHODES JAMES, FOR TWENTY PLEASANT YEARS MR BATCHEL’S FRIEND, AND THE INDULGENT PARENT OF SUCH TASTES AS THESE PAGES INDICATE

We gave a brief mention to this volume over a year ago ( gods and garden rollers), but felt it was time to do more justice to an unjustly forgotten writer and his geographical influences. Like James, he drew on antiquarian knowledge and folk-lore to bring a strong feeling of history, the church and the land to his tales.

The Stoneground Ghost Tales took form quite directly from Swain’s period as the vicar of the real Stanground, near Peterborough, on the edge of The Fens. He was in that position at the church of St John the Baptist from 1905 to 1916, and his collection was published in 1912. M R James had already featured parts of East Anglia in a few of his stories. Swain confined himself entirely to the area outside Peterborough, and to that part nearest to his living.

Unlike James, there are no un-named or varied narrators in Swain’s stories – only Mr Batchel, vicar and amateur antiquarian. And the wry, delightful bachelor Mr Batchel at Stoneground is, indeed, a certain version of E G Swain at Stanground.

As one of those ‘small’ heroes who seeks justice in whatever way they can, he is admirable. He brings God to the Fenland in that peculiar old-fashioned way which makes allowances for both the supernatural and the foibles of humanity. He doesn’t employ the degree of rational deduction of G K Chesterton’s more famous Father Brown, but he does share a certain mild determination with that figure. And having introduced the protagonist, we should say a little more about the backdrop to the stories.

The Drained Land

The geography of the area is of direct relevance. Although Stanground is situated south of the River Nene, on relatively high ground, most of the Fenland lies within a few metres of sea level.

The area originally consisted of fresh- or salt-water wetlands. These were artificially drained and have to be protected continually from floods by drainage banks and pumps. Stanground itself was not immune to flooding, as happened in the August of the same year as Swain’s collection was published. Swain wrote, concerning these events:

“It may well be that Vermuyden and the Dutchmen who drained the fens did good, and that it was interred with their bones. It is quite certain that they did evil and that it lives after them. The rivers, which theses men robbed of their water, have at length silted up, and the drainage of one tract of country is proving to have been achieved by the undraining of another.

“Places like Stoneground, which lie on the banks of these defrauded rivers, are now become helpless victims of Dutch engineering. The water which has lost its natural outlet, invades their lands… and a summer flood not infrequently destroys the whole produce of (the) ground.

“Such a flood, during an early year in the twentieth century, had been unusually disastrous to Stoneground…”

The Eastern Window

In The Richpins, Swain gives a fine picture of the area at its best, with regard to an area called ‘Frenchman’s Meadow’:

“It was upon the edge of what is known locally as ‘high land’; and though its elevation was not great, one could stand in the meadow and look seawards over many miles of flat country, once a waste of brackish water, now a great chess-board of fertile fields bounded by straight dykes of glistening water.”

Only a few miles from Stanground (now a suburban neighbourhood of Peterborough) lies Wicken Fen, one of the only ‘wild’ fens in East Anglia, although it has long been under human management. The first recorded sedge harvest at Wicken was in 1414, and ever since then, sedge has been regularly cut for roofing. The area is also notable for the history of Spinney Abbey, more properly Spinney Priory.

Beatrice, the grand-daughter of the Steward of the Count of Brittany, founded the Priory of St Mary and the Holy Cross in the spinney by Wicken in the early 1300s. The priory was first endowed with three canons of the Augustinian order. In 1403 the Prior, William de Lode, was murdered by three of his own canons who stabbed him in the priory church. Only the priory cellar and few fragments of the original buildings remain.

It may be the murder of de Lode  which started legends of monkish ghosts being seen in the area. Some would say that the area is a supernatural hotspot. The bank nearby called Spinney Bank, for example, is a location notorious for sightings of the mythical ‘Old Shuck’, the demonic black dog of East Anglia. For our Northern equivalents to the Shuck, see game of groans and clanking chains

The Church of St John

St John’s church itself in Stanground was constructed some time in the 1200s and is the oldest building in the parish. The Lampass Cross, a 12th-century scheduled monument, stands in the churchyard, and is thought to date from the 11th or 12th century. It was originally in the vicarage gardens, and would have been in the latter position during Swain’s time.

These gardens are a constant presence in the stories – Bone to His Bone, one of the best tale, concerns a genuine predecessor, Vicar William Whitehead, who donated his own close of ground to these gardens. The real-life church is key as well, and even its glasswork has a role.

“The focal point of the interior is the impressive stained glass window at the east end of the chancel. This features Christ in majesty at the top, holding globes with hand raised in blessing. To either side he is flanked by his disciples, eleven of them depicted, along with Mary Magdalene. Below, we have scenes from the life of Christ. From left to right the infant Jesus lying in a manger, Jesus baptised by John The Baptist, the crucifixion, the last supper and the ascension.”

Rob’s Churches

Here is Mr Batchel’s typically deprecating take on this, which plays a crucial part in The Eastern Window:

“It is a large painted window, of a somewhat unfortunate period of execution. The drawing and colouring leave everything to be desired… The five large lights in the lower part are assigned to five scenes in the life of Our Lord, and the second of these, counting from the north, contains a bold erect figure of St John the Baptists, to whom the church is dedicated. It is this figure alone, of all those contained in the window, that is concerned in what we have to relate.”

The interconnection between fact and fiction is a constant in Swain’s ghost stories. He doesn’t go in for exploitation of the more macabre Fenland legends such as the Black Shuck, although he does include two tonsured figures in cassocks in his story The Place of Safety. He tends to choose rather smaller human stories, and eschews the viler apparitions of M R James. In The Richpins, for example, he draws on another genuine piece of history – Norman Cross.

Napoleonic Remains

Norman Cross was the site of the world’s first purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp or “depot” built during the Napoleonic Wars by the Navy. It was intended to provide humane confinement for prisoners of war, especially those who had limited means. The average prison population was about 5,500 men most of the men held in the prison were low-ranking soldiers and sailors, including midshipmen and junior officers, with a small number of privateers.

“Within five miles of Stoneground a large barracks had been erect for the custody of French prisoners during the war with Bonaparter. Many thousands were confined there during the years 1808-14. The prisoners were allowed to sell what articles they could make in the barracks; and many of them, upon their release, settled in the neighbourhood, where their descendants remain.”

The Richpins

Particularly pertinent to the tale is the fact that in Swain’s time, there were older folk still alive whose grandparents had witnessed the Napoleonic wars. The last British veteran of the Battle of Waterloo had died only 20 years before the publication of Stoneground Ghost Tales – Morris Shea (1795–1892), of the 73rd Foot Regiment.

The Richpins is a small reminder of that past, with a faint shiver included. As we said of Swain last year:

“His tales are not ones of loathsome horror, or doom to come. They include hauntings, but avoid being trite or overly romanticised. They… are of loss, longing and wistful souls, and all the better for it.”

Swain only ever wrote the nine tales. David G Rowlands did take up Mr Batchel’s cause and write another dozen or so stories of the vicar in the eighties and nineties. It’s a difficult task to capture quite the right tone of James and Swain, but some of them are certainly worth a read. Perhaps the best of these were included in Michael Cox’s Bone to His Bone collection for Equation in 1989. This is sadly long out of print, but old copies can still be found at a good price.

Anyway, there you have the Stoneground Ghost Tales – an essential read for enthusiasts of M R James, and of the gentler or more curious sort of ghost story. If you can’t find a second-hand copy, you can read all Swain’s stories at Project Gutenberg:

the stoneground ghost tales