In 1973 Britain’s Central Office of Information commissioned a film, directed at children, to warn them of the dangers of playing near ponds and rivers. Presiding over it was a sinister Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, voiced by the actor Donald Pleasance. In this presentation we shall look at how a similar approach was adopted by parents in the 19th century, and how they used ‘imaginary monsters’ to scare children away from dangerous waters. Our starting point is a recent Royal Mail stamp depicting just such a monster, named Grindylow. By way of the world of Harry Potter and the writings of 20th- and 19th-century folklorists we shall track Grindylow and her sisters Jenny Greenteeth and Nellie Longarms to their lairs in the ponds and flooded marl pits of north-west England in the early 1800s.
Your speaker is John Clark, who was for many years Curator of the medieval collections of the Museum of London (now London Museum). Since his retirement in 2009 he has continued to research and publish on a range of subjects, including medieval horses and their equipment, London legends, and folklore and fairylore. His book on the medieval story of the Green Children of Woolpit, The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England, bringing together the results of some 25 years of research, was published in 2024 by University of Exeter Press in their series New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Belief.
Your curator and host for this online event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. He has edited two anthologies of classic ghost stories for the British Library's Tales of the Weird series – Eerie East Anglia (2024) and his latest, All the Fear of the Fair: Uncanny Tales of Circus and Sideshow (pub. Oct 2025). For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can't make the live event on the night – the next day we will send you a recording valid for two weeks.
[Image: montage of a still from Lonely Water (Central Office for Information, 1973) and a depiction of Grindylow by Adam Simpson for the Royal Mail's 2025 'Myths and Legends' stamp series (© Stamp Design Royal Mail Group Ltd, 2025).]
