All hail Enid! The folk history queen

One name keeps coming up again and again as we explore the history and folklore of East Anglia. No, it isn’t Cromwell, although he is certainly a hard man to avoid (as Charles I discovered much to his dismay). It is, of course, the wonderful Enid Porter, our spirit guide at Ruth is Stranger than Fiction and matriarch of the East Anglian social and cultural history scene. For anyone with an interest in folk history, local traditions, and the chronicles of daily life in all their simultaneous weirdness and banality, she is an important and influential woman. It’s about time, therefore, that I have a little blog post devoted to her. Without desiring to veer too far into cliche, the legacy of her work really does continue to this day, and she continues to be an inspiring figure to those such as myself who enjoy digging into the past of our particular part of the country.

Why do I love Porter so much? Let’s find out a bit more about her, and perhaps the reasons for my admiration will become clear. The first fact about Porter, perhaps a surprising one, is that she was born not in Cambridgeshire but in Essex, in 1908. However, her mother’s ancestry in the Cambridge area could be traced back for many generations, so despite this inauspicious start Enid frequently visited the city that would later become her home, and grew up hearing stories of folklore and history from her maternal relatives. She studied for a degree in Modern Languages at University College London and then followed her father into education, moving to Cambridge to take up a teaching position. While no doubt an excellent and worthwhile profession, Enid never quite felt it was the vocation for her. Imagine, then, her delight at seeing an advertisement for the vacancy of Assistant Curator at the Cambridge and County Folk Museum in 1947. Porter was appointed to the position and her role as chronicler of Cambridgeshire life began.

The Folk Museum (now renamed the Museum of Cambridge) had been founded just over a decade earlier, with the intention of recording and collecting artefacts not from the realms of fine or ‘high’ art but from the everyday life of ordinary people: textiles, tools, coins, applied art, costumes, and much more besides. This was in stark contrast to other, University affiliated museums in the city such as The Fitzwilliam Museum, which was firmly entrenched within the academic system of the University and could never entirely quite avoid the elitism that came along with this prestige. While the Fitzwilliam is housed within a vast purpose built structure with ornate galleries and a formidable Neo-Classical portico flanked by large stone lions (which are purportedly haunted, but more about that another day), the Folk Museum found its home within a disused drinking establishment, the White Horse Inn on Castle Street. The old inn, with its odd assortment of eight mismatched rooms and beamed ceilings, lent itself well to the purpose of the new museum: ‘the exhibition of objects of special local interest dating from medieval times onward.’ Just as I have many memories of going to the Fitzwilliam Museum as a small McPhee and sprawling with a sketchbook in front of the oversized and impressive portraits of British nobility or scampering about the sarcophagi in the Egyptian gallery, so I have perhaps even more vivid memories of visiting the Folk Museum and learning about why people put dead cats in the walls of their houses (to ward off evil spirits), or looking at delightfully horrifying medical implements from the 18th century and strangely sinister corn dollies from the farming villages that litter the county (my tastes tended towards the macabre even as a child).

It wasn’t long before Porter rose to the position of Curator - a somewhat grand title that in reality meant she earned £8 per week, lived in a small set of rooms connected to the old inn, and carried out the majority of the daily tasks required to keep the museum functioning, including ticket sales and cleaning. But she also worked to steadily grow the collection, attending auctions to acquire new exhibits, encouraging donations, and transforming the museum into a popular community hub. And while she was collecting objects she was also collecting stories. She recognised the vital fact that every object, however small and seemingly mundane, carried with it a wealth of contextual information which could only be understood by talking to those people who knew how these objects had been used, and why they took the forms that they did. So she spoke to people from all around the region and more crucially still she listened. Not content to hide herself away in the museum and its urban setting, waiting for information and objects to be brought to her, instead she roamed the county in search of knowledge. She went out to WI meetings, to village fetes and festivals, to church groups; she immersed herself in the oral history of the customs and rituals of daily life, superstitions and folktales, traditions and local lore. All of this was gathered together in her countless notebooks, recorded in her fluid cursive hand and squirrelled away back at the Folk Museum. These notebooks and the trove of descriptions, song lyrics, and stories that they contained formed the basis for the several books that Porter authored about Cambridgeshire life, as well as providing a fascinating repository through which researchers (and podcasters) can continue to trawl. These invaluable resources are, of course, now held in the collection of the Museum of Cambridge; you can also take a look at some of them online at enidporterproject.org.uk.

Enid Porter retired from her role as curator of the Folk Museum in 1976 and died in 1984. A blue plaque was installed at the Museum of Cambridge in 2015 to honour her contribution to the museum sector and her frankly incredible work in chronicling the everyday life of the region. Her philosophy on the gathering and sharing of knowledge was open, inclusive and always curious,  and I hope now that you will see why I extend to her my greatest respect and admiration. We love you Enid!