An Audience With An Elephant E B

by Byron Rogers

"An Audience with an Elephant" is a compendium of the oddest and most eccentric travels - a travel book to set alongside Norman Lewis and Eric Newby for the sheer unpredictability of its encounters and its surreal comedy. But Bryon Rogers didn't venture to the ends of the earth to find singular custom and heroic idiosyncrasy: he had no need to. These are journeys to the heart of the strange and distant land of Britain. On his travels he meets the Turkish POW in British hands - an ancient tortoise captured at Gallipoli and now resident in Great Yarmouth - and the teenaged elephant who has opened more fetes and supermarkets than any TV celebrity. Here, too, are such bizarre figures as the octogenerian triathlete, the man who (before such things were banned) held every world eating record, and the last hangman in his untroubled retirement. Whether exploring the middle of England in the forgotten county of Northamptonshire or accompanying the last tramp through the wilder reaches of Wales, Byron Rogers chronicles a secret history of Britain that is touching, hilarious, magical and the extraordinary lives or ordinary people.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Byron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist and biographer. In August, 2007 the University of Edinburgh awarded him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best biography published in the previous year, for The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of RS Thomas. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said of the book: "Byron Rogers's lively and affectionate biography is unexpectedly, even riotously, funny."

Born and raised in Carmarthen, he now lives in Northamptonshire. He has written for Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian, and was once speech writer for the Prince of Wales. It has been written of his essays that he is "a historian of the quirky and forgotten, of people and places other journalists don't even know exist or ignore if they do".

Reviews

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was really much more than I expected. It’s the kind of book I usually read to fill in-between more “strenuous” reads. The blurb explains that Byron Rogers, a Welsh born journalist, travels Britain to talk with non-celebrities (well there was the period of time he worked as a speech writer for the then Prince Charles, hardly a non-celebrity) and discovers the quirky and quintessential Britishness in their stories. That is true but it turns out to be a poignant but not the least sappy story as well. I’m not sure of the title—that story was perhaps the least meaningful. I would say he was just getting warmed up though. If I were British I might be more clued into the story as well as some of the details in others, but anyone can relate to these people. Among my favorite stories is the Last Tramp in Wales. Tramp here means more than someone out of work and definitely not a beggar. There was a time when people who just lost touch with the general times walked around rural England and Wales, sometimes doing farm work as needed to keep body and soul together. The modern equivalent may be people in cities living on the streets, but the rural trampers seemed to fit into the countryside and were probably more likely to be accepted and given assistance. Rogers follows Mr. Gibbs, the man considered the last of his kind and learns about his life.

It’s hard to describe Rogers’ findings. As an example he sits in on a singles group who occasionally meet up in a modern uncomfortable way, not necessarily for the dating or meat market. Some just can’t find social contacts in their modern lives and just want a safe place to sit with other people at dinner or take bus tours of the countryside, although Rogers thinks the organizers are taking advantage. Then there is the story of the area not far from London where gunpowder had been manufactured for centuries. It has resisted development and has turned into a jungle of sorts. How about the many and assorted societies in Britain dedicated to the promotion of literary figures, preferably the dead ones? There is an all-over umbrella society that has yearly meetings to facilitate the fights over favorites such as the Thomas Lovell Beddoes society—sorry if I’ve picked on your favorite. I don’t mean to ridicule and neither does the author. There are plenty of societies dedicated to the big guns like Byron or the Brontes. Ironically there is no society for Shakespeare in the group.

Where the author really hits his stride is in talking about the loss of continuity in the quintessential villages of Britain. The book gets a touch melancholy when mentioning all the losses of connection among people and the need for young people to move to cities for work. The wealthy from cities buy weekend or vacation homes that are old treasures, well kept and now fairly soulless. Ordinary folk can no longer live the rural life style.

I recommend this book. It’s a gem.

[Jamie Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of short essays by Welsh journalist Byron Rogers, previously published in various British newspapers and magazines up through the 1990's. In the foreword he bemoans the modern obsession with celebrity and has made a point of gathering stories of ordinary people (although he apparently couldn't resist including a piece on his five-year stint as a speech writer for a melancholy Prince Charles). The essays are quaint and amusing when they're not melancholy, and are interesting for an Anglophile.

My favorites were:
- An interview with the last tramp (as in vagrant) in Wales
- The story of the man who in retirement took up competing in marathons and triathlons
- The forgotten story of the 1944 explosion of a bomb storage facility in Staffordshire; until Hiroshima, the biggest explosion in the world
- The story of a report written by an Oxfordshire market town's Communist Party in 1955
- The account of the author's ride on a ghost train; one of the so-called Parliamentary trains in Britain that go nowhere useful and provide no practical service but continue to operate because it is cheaper to do so than to go through the legal process to close the lines. Seriously.
- The piece on the Dead Writer's Society, an alliance of wildly varying literary societies

[Athos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Talk about random good finds! I found this while meandering in a library. It sounded interesting, and I was feeling adventurous, so I signed it out and I am so very glad I did! It's a collection of articles by a Welsh writer with a great sense of humour and a talent for spinning tales out of seemingly ordinary things.

[Janet]

Me The Authorised Biography reviewed in the Telegraph 25 July 2009.

[Elizabeth Gibbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think someone who knows about Britain would enjoy this book. I know very little about the background in Britain so I didn't understand a lot of the stories.