Record Number: 29795

---

Reading Experience:

Evidence:

'Meeting held at Oakdene, Northcourt Avenue 15. I. 35.
Sylvanus Reynolds in the Chair

1. Minutes of last read & approved.

5. It was with a great pleasure to the club to welcome back Charles and Katherine Evans, who with the latter’s brother Samuel Bracher, came to entertain us with their programme of “Bees in Music and Literature.”

6. Charles Evans opened with an introduction that gave us an outline of the bee’s life.[...]

7. We next listened to a record of Mendelssohn’s “Bee’s Wedding.”

8. Samuel Bracher gave a longish talk on Bees and the Poets. He classified the poems as Idyllic, Scientific or Philosophical, and Ornamental; by quoting a great variety of works including lines from Shakespeare, K. Tynan Hickson, Pope, Thompson, Evans, Alexander, Tennyson, & Watson, he showed an amazing knowledge of the Poets. [...]

9. Charles Evans then spoke on Maeterlinck and Edwardes.

10. Charles Stansfield read Martin Armstrong’s Honey Harvest.

11. Another gramophone record gave us Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee”

12. Katherine Evans read from Vitoria Sackville-West’s “Bees on the Land”. Some of the lines were of very great beauty, & much enjoyed.

13 H. M Wallis then read an extract from the Testament of Beauty, concerning Bees. But he & all of us found Robert Bridges, at that hour in a warmish room, too difficult, and he called the remainder of the reading off.

14. A general discussion was the permitted, and members let themselves go.'

Century:

1900-1945

Date:

15 Jan 1935

Country:

England

Time

evening

Place:

city: Reading
county: Berkshire
specific address: Oakdene, Northcourt Avenue

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary reactive unknown
single serial unknown

---

Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Samuel V. Bracher

Age:

Unknown

Gender:

Unknown

Date of Birth:

n/a

Socio-Economic Group:

Professional / academic / merchant / farmer

Occupation:

Journalist, Author

Religion:

Quaker

Country of Origin:

n/a

Country of Experience:

England

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

Members of the XII Book Club

Additional Comments:

n/a

---

Text Being Read:

Author:

William Shakespeare

Title:

[Lines of verse concerning bees]

Genre:

Poetry, Natural history

Form of Text:

Unknown

Publication Details

n/a

Provenance

unknown

---

Source Information:

Record ID:

29795

Source:

Manuscript

Author:

Victor Alexander

Title:

XII Book Club Minute Book, Vol. 3 (1931-1938)

Location:

private collection

Call No:

n/a

Page/Folio:

121–128

Additional Information:

n/a

Citation:

Victor Alexander, XII Book Club Minute Book, Vol. 3 (1931-1938), private collection, 121–128, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=29795, accessed: 21 December 2024

---

Additional Comments:

The reader is presumably the Samuel Veale (or Vale) Bracher (fl. 1898–1923), Quaker journalist and author of a number of books, involved with the Whiteway Colony in Stroud, mentioned in Sharon Butler, Bert Bundy and Peggy Bundy, Feminist Review, No. 30 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 25-35; and in R. C. S. Trahair, Utopias and Utopians: an historical dictionary (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), p. 46.

Material by kind permission of the XII Book Club. For further information and permission to quote this source, contact the Reading Experience Database (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/contacts.php).