The Upottery Festival Archive
Upottery is a village in east Devon, located in the Blackdown Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which straddles the border between Devon and Somerset. In 1978, 1980 and 1982 it was the unlikely venue for three arts festivals which featured live performances by three world famous musicians: Jacqueline du Pré, Stephane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin, as well as other notable figures in the arts, including the pianist Roger Vignoles and the actor Timothy West. The festivals were organised by the actress Penelope Moore (née Lee), who has lived in Upottery for most of her life and who drew on her many theatrical and musical contacts to bring these luminaries to her home village.
In 1982 Penelope used her connections with China to invite an orchestra, and Yehudi Menuhin brought two child prodigies from his music school, including a violinist called Jin Li, who was 11, and a female pianist aged 16, from Taiwan. Some of this was broadcast nationally on BBC Radio Three. In 1981 there was an additional Christmas concert in Upottery’s magnificent church, and this was splendidly reprised in December 2022, using a recording of the original BBC recording.
In 2021 the South West Heritage Trust was approached by Richard Wells, a resident of Upottery and a past researcher in Devon’s archives, with the suggestion that we might collaborate with him and Penelope Moore in the compilation of a documentary and audio-visual archive to preserve the memory of the festivals for posterity. Since then, Brian Carpenter, the Devon archive service’s Community Outreach Officer, and Jane de Gruchy, the Trust’s digital archivist, have been working with Richard, Penelope and Jo Loosemore of BBC Radio Devon to bring the idea to fruition.
Albums of photographs of the festivals have been digitised, along with printed programmes of the events, and Jo Loosemore has conducted a series of interviews with people who participated in the festivals. These, together with a range of other recordings and visual material will, when the accessioning and cataloguing process is complete, comprise a comprehensive record of some unique events in the cultural history of contemporary rural England.