M R James

 Whilst looking for something to watch on Prime the other night I came across a couple of documentaries on M. R. James and they were brilliant and I highly recommend them.   

The first documentary was called The Haunting of M.R James.

M.R. James was born in 1862 in Kent.  His father was a clergyman who moved to Suffolk, Great Livermere Church in fact, when James was 3 years old.   

Great Livermere Church is a wonderful old medieval church standing in a gently undulating part of Suffolk and I remember the area for two reasons, firstly travelling through there on a regular basis to visit my aunt in Bury and secondly for the sheep sales held out in the open on the Livermere fields.  There I would go as a young child with my brother, he driving the livestock float delivering sheep to the sale, me riding as sidekick.  I would stand on the windswept fields in awe of the sheep pens and farmers gathered and to me as a young child it would look like a million sheep and hundreds of men.  In reality I would guess it would be a thousand sheep and probably 50 men and boys.  There would also be lorries and cars parked upon the fields of course.  We would make our delivery and stay for the sale and wait to see if we could get any business for deliveries of sheep onwards from the sale. 

M.R. James is well known as a writer of ghost stories although his main occupation was that of a scholar of medieval literature, a  medievalist and translator of ancient medieval texts.  He was provost at Cambridge University and also at Eton College.  His father had wanted him to go into the church but young James had other ideas and was said to have been translating ancient texts when he was a very young boy of under 10.  His father was thought to also be a clever man with languages and no doubt taught his son. 

The ghost stories were written as entertainment for his student friends at Cambridge where evenings before television would be spent storytelling over a drink or two. 

The ghost stories that M.R. James is most well known for today were definitely not very important to him in his working lifetime,  they were entertainment.  Of course he had a great interest in ghostly things and dreams but it is not known from where the stories really came: were they entirely imagination or some ghostly experiences he had in the rooms of Great Livermere Rectory and in the lonely fields and lanes around where he lived?

The Second Documentary

One of the best known stoies is Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad and the second documentary I watched on the same evening was Wits in Felixstowe which was the setting for that particular story and is filmed entirely on location in the Felixstowe area with snippets of Ipswich and the Cobbold family, with whom he was friends,  and some very interesting background to M.R. James. As a child my father would take us to Felixstowe so I enjoyed the filming and recognised some of the spots we would go to.  The documentary had the folk song of Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad sung by soprano Patricia Hammond hauntingly in the background. For this alone it is worth watching, she has such a beautiful voice.  The BBC has made two adaptations of the ghost story.  

Both documentaries are free on Amazon Prime and the ghost story Whistle and I'll Come to You is available at £1.98.  

I don't watch or read ghost stories but I did find the two documentaries about M.R. James fascinating.