Crow discovery

Here's the movie of myself and Stuart finding the crow in the middle of the plinth. As I might have guessed, the footage begins to fritz up as we get closer. It looked fine during filming, but the playback was shot to hell.

By the pricking of my thumbs...

Ok, guys, I'm seriously beginning to not like this. Stuart and I went down to the site yesterday, as you know, to begin to plan what cameras were going to go where, and what info the recorded messages were going to speak, and so on. Remember the dead crow that we found down there week 1 of the project? Someone moved it into the middle of the plinth area with its wing outstretched. The placing was too neat to have been an animal, and too deliberate to have been just flung there. We took some footage of it (by accident, as it happens: we were video-documenting our walk around the site as we always do, when we came acros it), which I think Stuart is going to post up here some time next week. It's possible that this is just a 'Dartington thing', someone's idea of art... but it's just beginning to freak me out a little, what with everything else that's been going on down there on the technical side.

statue

Another image from the archives... this one solves the mystery of the plinth in the roundabout, and what was there. This is a statue of Fogerfalsht, which was apparently taken down in the mid sixties after protests from Neal Tor's parents over the possible cover-up by the school over their son's death.

Pic of Fogerfalsht

Here's a photo of Mrs. Kerry Fogerfalsht, reading a story to some of the children at the school. no date on the pic, but it must be around 1956.

Historical Research

Sorry I haven't been around to post on here or be with you guys the last week or so... family matters and visits to parents, kinda thing...

Anyway, I have not been idle in my absence. I managed to find a copy of Victor Bonham-Carter's book on the history of the Dartington estate, and also managed to get some access to the archives down at High Cross House. There's some interesting stuff there, as well as a lot of mundane correspondence stuff.

But there was something that caught my eye in among these various pieces. It was a bit of a hunt, and putting the pieces together took some doing. It started with a letter from a Mike Lyesmith, talking about one of the students who died in the pool at the school. It was described as an accident, but reading between the lines, there seemed to be a little more. So I began to delve, and buried in among other stuff was a bit of a scandal.

Back in the fifties, the headmaster was a guy called Henry Fogerfalsht. He was apparently something of a strict disciplinarian, and was at loggerheads with the Elmhirsts on several occasions over what they saw as his 'excessive' attempts to control the children down at the school. He was also, by all acounts, quite possessive of his wife Kerry, twelve years his junior.

Apparently, Kerry began to have an affair with a student from the arts college called Neal Tor. It continued for about seven months, until the headmaster discovered them one night. There was a big fight (mostly verbal, but some threats issued by both parties), and several other teachers had to interveene before things became too heated. Kerry was sent away from the estate to Fogerfalsht's parents.

Tor's body was found floating face-down in the swimming pool ten days later. There was no evidence of foul play, although rumours were frife. In the end, Fogerfalsht left the school at the end of the academic year, to be replaced by Samuel Leafe.

Based, on this, I think I might delve a little deeper through the archives and see if there's any other sordid little secrets that the estate is hiding. Maybe our tour should be based on these little tidbits?

Tech troubles

Sorry for lack of proper video updates, had some slightly bizarre quirks with the cameras. They just won't work. Well, not everywhere, but in enough places that I can't get consistent footage.

It's fine around the front of the building and the pool, but around the old tennis court and the roundabout area with the weird plinth thing it fritzes up. Footage goes a bit screwed in close proximity, and the camera just plain won't turn on when I'm actually on top of the area.

Will try and get some of the screwy footage up soon to show what I mean.

Video

There's Nothing Wrong

A few pics

Just a few pics of the site... more to come when we get back down there next week!

Pitch

The basic premise of this project is quite simple: we plan to create an interactive walking tour of the Aller Park school, detailing the history of the site. This would be combined with an exhibition of our documentation and discoveries that cannot, for reasons of time and resource, be included in the tour proper.

The tour will be operated through the use of video cameras wired up to a server computer within the exhibition centre. When the cameras show movement in front of their lens, the computer will trigger a sound response, playing a recording of relevant facts about the site people are standing at. In addition to this, it will log the routes that people take to walk around the site, thus providing us with data and a ‘map’ of the tour, to see where people have chosen to go and in what order.

Part of what has piqued our interest in the building’s history is the incongruous architecture. It is only as old, if not less so, than the other buildings surrounding it; and yet its design is of a very traditional school building, in comparison to the much more modern-looking Lescaze designs of Blacklers and Chimmels. Why was this decision made, and why is Aller Park - almost uniquely – a traditional-seeming building in an estate full of modernist and art deco design?

Much of our research will be undertaken with the help of the high Cross House archive, which was itself the old house of the original headmaster of the foxhole senior school at Dartington Estate. A complete archive of the estate’s history has logged there, including old games reports and missives from all the staff at the schools. We will then collate this information and find a way to pas this on through the interactive tour and exhibition centre.

Members List

Group members for the Narrative Threads group:

Robert Mulligan
James Gill
Stuart Gardner
Oliver Carson
Jon Paul Lane