Episode 82 – Echoes from the Abbey

A Podcast to the Curious - The M.R. James Podcast

This week Will and Mike don their warmest Christmas jumpers for dinner with Dr James and the troubled incumbents of Medborough Abbey, in the company of Sheila Hodgson.

• What could be more seasonal than a cracker, eh? Oh the fun that tumbles out when it goes snap! Paper hat, plastic keyring, lighthearted message of impending doom, that sort of thing. Indeed, Monty James felt a cracker could prompt a ghost story, “if the right people pull it, and if the motto which they find inside has the right message on it. They will probably leave the party early, pleading indisposition; but very likely a previous engagement of long standing would be the more truthful excuse.” (Stories I have Tried to Write, 1929)
• Sheila Hodgson ran with this suggested plot device, setting her tale at the fictional Medborough Abbey. The story appeared as a radio play, Ghosts and Scholars magazine and ultimately in Fellow Travellers, a collection of her Jamesian tales published by Ash Tree Press in 1998. The same idea also inspired Andrew Caldecott to write ‘A Christmas Reunion’, the story we covered for our Christmas episode in 2017.
• Sheila was a script writer best known for her radio and TV dramas between the 1950 and 1980s, including thrillers, detective stories and then supernatural fiction. Her first ghostly tales were adaptations of Algernon Blackwood’s ‘Dr John Silence: psychic detective’ stories for radio in the mid 1970s. She subsequently wrote seven radio plays inspired by James, and the stories collected in Fellow Travellers.
• Alas there is no real Medborough Abbey in the UK, but the name may have been inspired by Medmenham Abbey in Berkshire, which was a 12th century Cistercian monastery until it was dissolved in 1547 and became a private residence. It is more notorious for being one of the haunts of Sir Francis Dashwood’s ‘Hellfire Club’ (but that is a whole other story).
• FACT: Will once dressed as Death and pursued me, Mike, around a ruined abbey, as part of a short film made by a friend. Still gives me nightmares.