Showing posts with label malmesbury. Show all posts
Showing posts with label malmesbury. Show all posts

Friday, September 12, 2025

Art ... illustrations by Colin Forward from around 1960 ... this is a first draft ... I'm hoping Blaise Vyner will have more details in due course.

Some Flying Saucer Enthusiasts around 1960 … unexpected relics have recently come to light.

 



My friend, Dr. Blaise Vyner, surprised me in June 2025 with some interesting images, drawn by my father … and thereby hangs a short tale.

My father, COLIN FORWARD of Malmesbury, and Blaise Vyner’s father, JOHN VYNER of Little Somerford, became friends during the late 1950s … possibly when both had joined the local group of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in North Wiltshire … or perhaps whilst travelling to and from their workplaces on country bus routes.

For a long time, there had been a public fascination with the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life-forms visiting our planet, particularly in the imaginary craft called flying saucers. 

Fictional alien invasions were nothing new but, in twentieth century popular culture, the possibilities began to seem more and more like probabilities as time passed and as films and fictions proliferated.

Whatever.

John Vyner was fascinated by flying saucers to the point of obsession, archiving newspapers articles about rumoured sightings and encounters … and my father soon absorbed much of John’s enthusiasm.

 


Aged ten or eleven, I visited John Vyner’s farm cottage with my father and saw a large composite map on his wall with markings that charted possible sightings of “unidentified flying objects” across the counties of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.

John persuaded Colin to join him in a search for fresh evidence. 

They took a holiday in which they walked night-after-night, going north-east across a stretch of promising territory in the two counties, presumably in the hope of encountering visitors from other worlds.

I didn’t share their enthusiasm and I quickly forgot about the whole episode … until my school friend Blaise Vyner contacted me about sixty-five years later with news of this surprising discovery.

John and Colin were long dead by then, but Blaise’s mother had lived on into her nineties. 

And with Mrs. Vyner having passed on, Blaise’s younger brother, Merlin Vyner took on the task of going through the relics and souvenirs of her life.

Blaise then sent me photographs of several old and stained drawings discovered by Merlin, each drawing glued to a rough piece of card. 

Although they were never signed, it was immediately clear that they were by Colin’s hand.

Colin Forward, a Welsh man, had trained at Cardiff as an art teacher in the late 1940s.  He was a highly proficient technical illustrator and was a well-practised portraitist.  These drawings reflected some of that professional competence.

 


The drawings discovered by Merlin fell into two groups. 

The first group, were drawn upon the theme of the early Victorian “bogey-man” character, Springheel Jack, once the subject of several “urban myths” .  

Not instantly recognized by me but soon identified with the help of some internet searches describing these images and their “narrative” content. 

Searching for “a tall man in Victorian costume breathing fire” quickly led me to the subject matter of this first drawing. 

It illustrates Mary Stevens account in 1837 of being assaulted at night on a street in South London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-heeled_Jack

https://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/9059/

The second, third and fourth drawings in this group puzzled me … but not for long … my guess is that they fictionalized a chance encounter with the supposedly immortal Springheel Jack, perhaps in some country pub along the way to Northampton. 

John Vyner may have believed that Springheel Jack was a lost spaceman who could not find his way home and now walks the Earth disguised in human clothing … a bit like “The Man Who Fell To Earth”.

Can you see his alien ears in the drawings ?  Is his expression one of alarm at being recognized ?  Remember ... there was still a reward available for his capture.







Having studied these ( un-titled, un-signed ) Spring Heel Jack drawings, it seemed to me that John Vyner must have written something fictional, or had at least imagined it, and then Colin Forward had made these drawings, probably intending them for publication. 

But where might they be published ?   And when ? 

Perhaps John’s work had been published without Colin’s drawings.  

That seemed more likely but how could I find out ?

More internet searches followed.

The Wikipedia article on Spring-heeled Jack had provided a helpful bibliography, but it didn’t point to an obvious source for an article by John Vyner, and Blaise said that he was never aware that his father had ever published something. 

Not a thing.  Never, ever, ever.

And of course, in the back of my mind, I was still hoping to find a drawing by my father had been published ... somewhere.

I carried on searching for a while and eventually The Internet Archive, a kind of global digital library, miraculously turned up something unexpected whilst I searched for J Vyner and for Spring-heel Jack.




Lynn E. Catoe’s UFOs BIBLIOGRAPHY was and is a treasure trove.

https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL1862572A/Lynn_E._Catoe


































So, now we knew that John Vyner’s article about Springheel Jack had first been published in THE FLYING SAUCER REVIEW in the UK in May of 1961, and that article was re-printed in the US in another pulp magazine named FATE in October 1961.

I wasn’t able to track down the copy of the Flying Saucer Review at that time, but eventually discovered that a surviving issue of FATE magazine was for sale … from Bloomsbury Books … a dealership based in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

I flourished my credit card, virtually, on the 10th July, and was promptly supplied with the goods, at a very decent price, especially when considering Lloyd the vendor’s own efforts and expenses. 

The carefully packaged little book arrived in Tenby on Friday 18th July.




 

 

Not the greatest thing you ever might read, but informative and entertaining ... and it seemed worth every cent to me …






There were two more drawings amongst Merlin Vyner’s discoveries, although neither was directly connected to that published article.



Each drawing showed a close encounter between a small training aircraft of the Royal Air Force, and an even smaller-looking flying saucer. 

Each close encounter was shown from the same standing-point in Malmesbury, looking up and across from the lower corner of the old cattle market towards St. Denis Lane and towards the High Street beyond.


 

( Yes !  There are topographical inconsistencies ...  and No !  I haven’t the faintest idea why and how ! )

In those days the skies around Malmesbury were busy with multitudes of different aircraft from the Royal Air Force stations at Kemble, at Hullavington, and at Lyneham … and also from the USAF bomber base at Fairford.  Trainers flew over daily.  The planes that flew from Hullavington were only there for brief periods, both De Havilland Chipmunks, and the early Percival Provost.  But they were there just long enough to become a familiar sight for excitable schoolboys to embed in their long-term memory.

It is possible that John Vyner had written another article about such an encounter, and equally possible that Colin Forward simply dreamed up this scene … the fact that the drawings had remained in Mrs. Vyner’s possession suggests they had been commissioned by her late husband.


 

After a busy summer, Blaise and I were able to meet in a Yorkshire pub on a sunny Sunday evening, 7th September 2025, and we exchanged the little magazine and the drawings. 

Hurrah !  Hurrah !

I've ordered some archival paper for interleaving the drawings, but I could use some professional advice about long-term preservation.

My gratitude to Blaise Vyner, and to Merlin Vyner, and to the late Mrs. Vyner, is enormous and will last forever and a day.


POST SCRIPT ... 

NB. I have belatedly discovered there is, after all, a PDF of the Flying Saucer Review that can be found online ...

http://noufors.com/Documents/Books,%20Manuals%20and%20Published%20Papers/Specialty%20UFO%20Publications/Flying%20Saucer%20Review/FSR,1961,May-Jun,V%207,N%203.pdf

 and another

https://archive.org/details/the-flying-saucer-review-ultimate-collection/45.FSR/page/n3/mode/2up










Monday, March 11, 2024

Thomas Hobbes ... a short summary of his life that should have been written when I was a schoolboy in Malmesbury ... we learned nothing of his ideas in our so called GRAMMAR school

 The 100 best nonfiction books: No 94 – Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)

This article is more than 6 years old

Thomas Hobbes’s essay on the social contract is both a founding text of western thought and a masterpiece of wit and imagination

According to the 17th-century historian and gossip John Aubrey, Thomas Hobbes “was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.” As a great thinker, Hobbes epitomises English common sense and the amateur spirit, and is all the more appealing for deriving his philosophy from his experience as a scholar and man of letters, a contemporary and occasional associate of Galileo, Descartes and the young Charles Stuart, prince of Wales, before the Restoration.

Hobbes himself was born an Elizabethan, and liked to say that his premature birth in 1588 was caused by his mother’s anxiety at the threat of the Spanish Armada:

… it was my mother dear
Did bring forth twins at once, both me, and fear.

Throughout his long life, Hobbes was never far either from the jeopardy of the times (notably the thirty years’ war and the English civil war) or the jeopardy sponsored by the brooding realism and pragmatic clarity of his philosophy. What, asked Hobbes, was the form of politics that would provide the security that he and his contemporaries longed for, but were always denied?


frontispeice of leviathan by thomas hobbes
The famous frontispiece to Leviathan. Photograph: Alamy

Subtitled The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and CivilLeviathan first appeared in 1651, during the Cromwell years, with perhaps the most famous title page in the English canon, an engraving of an omnipotent giant, composed of myriad tiny human figures, looming above a pastoral landscape with sword and crosier erect.

Thus “the Leviathan” (sovereign power) entered the English lexicon, and Hobbes’s vision of man as not naturally a social being, animated by a respect for community, but a purely selfish creature, motivated by personal advantage, became condensed into his celebrated summary of mankind’s existence as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.

It was Hobbes’s argument that, to ameliorate these conditions, man should adopt certain “Laws of Nature” by which human society would be forbidden to do “that which is destructive” of life, whereby virtue would be the means of “peaceful, sociable and comfortable living.”

The first law of nature is: “every man ought to endeavour peace”. This, he argues, will be a hard goal: the general inclination of all mankind is “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death”. The second law of nature is: “a man [must] be willing when others are so too … to lay down his right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.” The third law of nature is: “men performe their Covenants made.”

This, in essence, adds up to Hobbes’s social contract, enforced by an external power. Accordingly, members of civil society should enter into a contract to confer their power and strength “upon one Man, or upon an Assembly of men … This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Common-wealth.” For Hobbes, the contracting of such power is the only guarantee of peace and prosperity: “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is every man against every man.”

Having witnessed the English revolution at first hand, it is war above all that Hobbes most fears. Social warfare empowers mankind’s darkest side: “Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.”

Hobbes is never less than ironical in his attitude to humanity’s appetite for “government”. He had seen too much debate, before and after the execution of Charles I, about the relationship between, citizen, church and state to be anything but pragmatic: “they that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy; so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.”

For Hobbes, the “political community” is paramount, and individuals must surrender themselves for their own further and better protection: “he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author; and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself; no nor himself of injury; because to do injury to one’s self, is impossible.”

As numerous commentators have observed, Leviathan is the founding document of the “social contract theory” that would eventually flourish in the western intellectual tradition. It is also a majestic monument of 17th-century English prose, at once sinewy and vivid:

Riches, knowledge and honour are but several sorts of power.

Hobbes also illuminates his argument with many delicious asides:

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

This comparison of the papacy with the kingdom of fairies (“that is, to the old wives’ fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits”) is a reminder of the philosopher’s pre-eminent wit and imagination. Combined with the economy, candour and irony of Leviathan as a whole, it marks Hobbes out as one of the truly great writers in the English literary canon. But he is also a giant of western philosophy whose influence can be found in the work of Rousseau and Kant.

Not that his contemporaries understood this. “Hobbism” became a term of opprobrium, Leviathan was publicly burnt as a seditious document, and Hobbes himself spent many of his later years in fear for his life. He died in 1679, suffering from Parkinson’s disease. According to Vanbrugh, on his deathbed he said he was “91 years finding out a hole to go out of this world, and at length found it.” His apocryphal last words were: “I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”


A signature sentence


In such condition [of Warre], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.


Three to compare

John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (1690)
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
Paul Auster: Leviathan (1992)