The Follies
A complete account of the Society’s expenditure would be tedious. A short list of the more notable expenditures-in-error, however, is preserved in the archive under the heading “Follies”. The Society maintains this heading separately from its other expenditure categories; the Curator notes that the maintenance is itself a form of institutional honesty. Figures are given in the money of the period; the modern reader’s conversion is, on the Society’s view, an exercise in private mental arithmetic.
1. The Type Acquisition (1897) — £1,840
The Society commissioned a complete set of typographical sorts in a custom face designed expressly for the Society — “Pedant Antiqua”, by Edward Johnston, later of London Underground fame, then a young man in his twenties. The face was beautiful. It was used for the printing of seventeen documents over the period 1898–1903, after which it became apparent that no commercial printer was equipped to set it without considerable difficulty, and that the Society’s own printing capacity was inadequate to the task. The sorts were disposed of for scrap in 1923, returning £14 to the Society. The Curator’s note of that year reads, in part: “The Society’s experiment with custom typography is, on the present evidence, complete.”
2. The Comprehensive Atlas of English Place-Name Pronunciation (1908–1923) — £3,400
A multi-volume work setting out the proper Anglicisation of every place-name in the British Isles, entrusted to a Standing Committee under Prof. Eustace Mountstuart-Lawley, who held the chair of Phonetics at Birmingham. The Committee met twice annually for fifteen years. It produced four maps and a preface. The project was discharged in 1923, the Committee having, on its own assessment, “established the principles upon which a successor body might, in due course, undertake the work in earnest”. No successor body has been constituted. The four maps and the preface are, the Curator notes, “a model of the kind of preparatory work the Society has, on a number of occasions, produced as a substitute for the work itself.”
3. The Memorial Window (1922) — £840
The stained-glass window in the anteroom, by Christopher Whall, depicting Sir Mortimer Bracegirdle being arrested at Buckingham Palace in 1908. The folly classification is mildly disputed: the modern Curator holds the window a worthwhile object and ought not to be so classified. The classification stands, however, on the grounds that (a) the window was funded as a memorial to Fellows killed in the First World War, and (b) Sir Mortimer had died in 1908, six years before the war, of unrelated causes, and was therefore not, on a strict reading, a Fellow whose memory the window had been commissioned to honour. A 1923 proposal that the window be either reclassified or replaced was lost. The window stands.
4. The Library Acquisitions (1934–1938) — £1,600
The Society resolved, in the depths of the Depression, to take advantage of the depressed market in scholarly books. The Standing Committee on Library Acquisitions acquired approximately 2,800 volumes at favourable prices, of which the modern Curator estimates that perhaps 400 are of substantive scholarly interest. The remainder constitutes the bulk of the library’s third catalogue category — “Volumes Whose Status is Uncertain” — which has since grown to approximately 7,400 volumes. The Curator’s quiet view: “The 1934 acquisitions have, by their numerical weight, defined the Society’s library for ninety years. They have not, by their substantive contribution, defined it at all. The matter is, in this respect, instructive.”
5. The 1947 Court Action — £420
Following an article in The Manchester Guardian describing the Society as “a body of well-meaning eccentrics whose pronouncements have, in the modern era, ceased to carry weight”, the Society sought legal advice on the prospects of an action for libel. After eleven months of correspondence, Mr Christopher Lestrade KC concluded, in a final opinion of 23 pages and a fee of £420, that the article was, in the legal sense, “unobjectionable”, in that “to describe an institution as well-meaning is no more libellous than to describe it as well-found.”
The Society did not proceed. The Society did, however, write to the Guardian, at length and over a period of seven years, on a number of subsequent matters of usage. The Guardian did not acknowledge any of the seventeen letters dispatched. Mr Lestrade’s opinion remains the most expensive single document the Society has ever commissioned, on a per-word basis, which the Curator notes is “itself an interesting fact, given the Society’s avocation.”
6. The Cork Panelling (1962) — £2,260 total
Following the Audibility Resolution of October 1962, the Society engaged a sound engineer of regional reputation to “improve the acoustic properties of the Society’s principal meeting room, with particular reference to the audibility of the apostrophe”. Cork panelling was installed at a cost of £1,840. It remained in place for five years, during which the Society’s meetings continued in approximately their previous mode, with no perceptible improvement in the audibility of the apostrophe. The panelling was removed in 1967 at a further £420. The Curator’s note: “The difficulty in producing the audible apostrophe is, on the present evidence, neither acoustic nor architectural, but doctrinal.” The Society has not, since 1967, attempted further architectural intervention in the matter.
7. The 1979 Computer (IBM Memory Typewriter, Model 6) — £3,800
Acquired on the recommendation of the Standing Committee on Modern Communications, which had been considering the purchase since 1971. The machine produced, in the period 1979–1985: one letter to The Times (April 1981); one letter to the BBC’s Pronunciation Unit (June 1982); and a draft set of meeting minutes, abandoned mid-draft on the operator’s discovery that the machine’s memory had not, despite contrary appearances, retained the previous evening’s work.
The machine was retired in 1985; donated to a local primary school; reclaimed in 1991 on the school’s discovery that it had not been used in the intervening period; and installed in its present glass case in the anteroom in 1995. It has not been switched on since 1985, except for a single test by the Curator in 2009, on which occasion it was found to be in working order. Mrs Henrietta Foulkes, the Society’s Secretary in 1985, supplies the card beneath the case: “The device performed its functions; the difficulty was chiefly in our requiring those functions of it.”
A note on the ledger
The Follies ledger has admitted no entry since 1979. The Society does not conclude from this that no folly has since been committed; the Society concludes that the classification of a folly requires distance, and that the most recent candidates are, at the time of writing, still regarded as policy.
The Society's certificate of Fellowship, at £9, is not recorded in the Follies ledger. The Society invites the reader to ensure it stays that way.