Introducing... Dr David Clarke

In our Introducing… posts, we’ll tell you a little more about the team behind the National Folklore Survey for England.

You can learn more about project lead, Dr David Clarke, Associate Professor, Sheffield Cultural Industries Institute, in this instalment.

It all began with Celtic carvings for Dr David Clarke.

You studied for your PhD part time while working as a journalist. What do folklore and journalism have in common? Do the disciplines complement each other?

In 1989 or 90 when I was in the third year of my undergraduate course in archaeology and medieval history at the University of Sheffield, I called in at what was the Centre for English Cultural Traditional or CECTAL to visit Prof John Widdowson. My undergraduate dissertation was a fieldwork survey of so-called ‘Celtic’ carved stone heads, in the Peak District. John suggested it could be developed as a PhD. There were few jobs in archaeology at the time but after visiting the Lindow Man exhibition at Manchester Museum I wrote a review for the Sheffield Star that was, much to my surprise, published. I decided the pen was mightier than the trowel, signed up for a journalism training course, and my career as a writer began there. Working as a cub reporter also allowed me to pay for PhD study, part-time. I realised that what I was doing – effectively storytelling in print – complemented my folkloric research, e.g. collecting and recording stories and beliefs. Ceri Houlbrook and Owen Davies neatly defined folklore as ‘the customs that we practice, the stories that we tell and the beliefs that we hold’. What I call old fashioned ‘shoe-leather journalism’, visiting places, talking to people – particularly ordinary people, not just celebrities, politicians and the like – has so much in common with folklore fieldwork. The methods by which stories are collected, selected and published are different but we are dealing with similar materials.

You have written extensively about ‘The Crying Boy’, something that was perpetuated by local media. Can you tell us a little more about this?

I first heard about the Crying Boy phenomenon at the Rotherham branch office of the Sheffield Star. The journalist who triggered off this urban legend, John Murphy, was one of my predecessors, who worked in the same office during the Miner’s Strike, 1984-85. During the ‘silly season’, the phrase we used to describe the slow news period during the summer holidays, he attended a house fire in a small village near Rotherham. The owner had suffered burns to his arms after a chip pan ignited (a common source of domestic fires at that time). The heat was so intense that it had stripped plaster from the wall. But the only item that had survived, unscathed, was a cheap mass-produced print of a ‘Crying Boy’. Many thousands of these prints were sold at Boots and Woolworths during the 1970s and 80s and they were very popular in working class homes. One of the fire fighters told Murphy that this was the latest in a whole series of fires they had attended where copies of the print had been found unscathed, despite the intense heat. He came up the headline ‘Curse of the Crying Boy’ and the story was immediately followed up by the local stringer for The Sun. During the 80s this was the best-selling tabloid in the UK and the editor, Kelvin McKenzie, was locked in a circulation war with the Daily Mirror. McKenzie was responsible for some classic page one splashes such as ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’ that were journalistic re-tellings of folkloric legends. The hyperbolic stories about the Crying Boy that followed led to a nationwide panic as some people who owned copes of the prints became worried that it might set their houses on fire or bring them bad luck. Hundreds were posted to the newspaper’s offices in London as McKenzie told them, ‘send them to us, we will deal with them’. That alone is a measure of the impact that belief legends can have when they are spread by the news media.

The prints were all burnt, appropriately, on Halloween, on a bonfire organised by The Sun’s fine art correspondent. There is much more to the legend, that is really an example of the folklore of art, or artlore. But in this case the focus of the story was not an original artwork like ‘The Mona Lisa’ but copies of originals (in several different versions), with no clearly identified artist. I have explored it in more detail for a paper to be published in a special Contemporary Legend-themed issue of the online journal Revenant. I also have a page on my website dedicated to the Crying Boy legend that has had thousands of visitors since 2011. The power of the story lies, I believe, in the mystery surrounding the identity of the anonymous artist and also its links with more traditional beliefs about bad luck and the evil eye.

You are also well known for your research in UFOs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as they now tend to be called. Yet this area of research is often marginalised by traditional folklore studies. Why might this be? What drew you to the study of UFOs?

Quite simply because UFOs are a relatively recent phenomenon in folkloric terms. Although people have always seen strange things in the sky, the phrase ‘flying saucer’ was coined in 1947 and the acronym UFO – Unidentified Flying Object – followed during the early 1950s when the first truly international wave of sightings spread out from the USA. Although some folklorists, such as Linda Degh, who were interested in contemporary legends immediately classified UFO narratives as folklore, it has taken a long time for the discipline to recognise the subject. The fact that, as our National Folklore Survey found, some 10% of respondents say they have seen one and even larger numbers believe that some are either extraterrestrial or supernatural in origin, underlines their importance as folklore. As Dr J Allen Hynek, an astronomer who acted as advisor for the US Air Force Project Blue Book, once said: we don’t have any UFOs, only reports of UFOs. Those reports are folkloric narratives.

Sightings of things in the sky has evolved to include, within the UFO-lore, landings and contacts with aliens, abductions and interbreeding with ETs, visits by the Men In Black (MIB), journeys to the otherworld, cover-ups, and conspiracies. It is an incredibly rich area of study and it was writing about UFO stories that drew me into the study of UFOlogy when I working as a newspaper journalist. I have always been interested in the space race and the history of the Cold War, and UFOs were a product of that era. My research into the Ministry of Defence records at The National Archives led them to ask me to lead their open government project that oversaw the release of their UFO archive from 2008. This was an amazing project as I got to review and prepare several hundred files for public release and it cemented my position as the go-to expert on the subject for the national and international media.

Why were you keen to run a National Folklore Survey for England project in 2025?

I was a student at CECTAL when the Survey of English Cultural Tradition and Language was still ongoing. The folklore centre at the University of Sheffield was closed in 2009 but in retirement John Widdowson, my PhD supervisor, was keen to revive it. In 2016 he published a paper in Folklore journal saying it was time for a new national survey and I immediately thought this was an idea worth pursuing. By then I was teaching journalism at Sheffield Hallam University but most of my research was in folklore and contemporary legend. In 2018 I helped to co-found the Centre for Contemporary Legend research group at SHU with my colleagues, Diane Rodgers and Andrew Robinson. We organised two successful conferences and Diane completed her PhD on the folklore of 1970s TV. The idea for a fresh survey was discussed during the Covid lockdown, on Zoom calls with folklore colleagues and they urged me to take the lead. As a journalist I had written many stories about other belief surveys and, by coincidence, I happened to meet Professor Chris Bader at a conference in Scotland around this time. Chris had led several multi-million dollar belief surveys in the USA, where he is based, and had written a book, Paranormal America, that summarised the results. So all these meetings, discussions and collaborations came together in my application to the AHRC for what became the National Folklore Survey for England in 2024.

How does this project differ to its predecessors?

When the idea for a new folklore survey was discussed in 2020-21, it was obvious that if we wanted to attract funding for a new survey it must be truly representative, drawing upon the resources of a polling organisation such as YouGov or IPSOS. Both the CECTAL survey of language and folklore and an earlier folklore survey conducted by UCL in the 1950s were entirely qualitative. They collected folklore by sending out questionnaires and relied upon individuals filling out collecting slips by hand. These were handed out to people who attended talks on folklore, so there was a inherent bias in the data collected. After 40 years it resulted in a huge collection of rich data (there are an estimated 12,000 collecting slips from the original Sheffield-based survey). Sadly despite its riches the CECTAL survey is not much use in terms of measuring belief and experience, or interrogating the data for links with religiosity, age, or other factors at a national level, in the way that a modern representative survey can do. I have often heard academics from other disciplines criticising folklore studies as lacking hard data. ‘It’s all anecdotes’, they say, and ‘you don’t have any clear methodology’. These are just two comments chosen at random. By employing a carefully designed survey like the NFS we have avoided earlier mistakes and have produced new knowledge, in the form of hard data. We can use this as a base to analyse a range of contemporary folkloric beliefs and traditions and as a starting off point for future research. But no survey is ever comprehensive and, as Chris Bader has pointed out, the results should be seen as the start of a longer conversation.

The National Folklore Survey for England project must be taking up much of your time, but folklorists always have other research ideas up their sleeves! Can you tell us about something you’re working on now, or next?

The NFS team are currently busy working on a follow-up application, collaborating with a major regional museum, to curate a year-long exhibition of folkloric culture drawing upon the results of the National Folklore Survey. I am excited to be involved in that, but my own personal project is my next book, Space Age Folklore, that has been five years in the making. I hope that it will be completed soon, in time for publication in 2027 when, if all goes well, humans will return to the moon. That year will also mark the 70th anniversary of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik that triggered off the Space Race. As the title implies, my book covers the folklore of the space age and goes on to examine many well-known stories and conspiracy theories that emerged from this turning point in human history. Inevitably there is a quite a bit of UFO content but I will also examine many other little-known aspects of the space age that are folkloric in nature. I wanted to write this book to tackle the common misperception that folklore is something that people once believed in the past. Everyone has folklore – even astronauts and cosmonauts. If humans ever leave the Earth and set up permanent bases on the moon and Mars, we will take our folklore with us.

Dr David Clarke is one of the UK's leading authorities on contemporary legend and folklore. He is co-founder of the Contemporary Legend research group in SCII and Project Lead for the AHRC-funded National Folklore Survey. He combines his interests in folklore with his teaching and research in journalism and storytelling. He is an experienced broadcaster and has acted as a consultant for The National Archives and the BBC. You can follow David on Substack here.