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George Ewart Evans (1 April 1909 – 11 January 1988)〔(Maureen James, "The Man Who Asked ‘The Fellows Who Cut The Hay’", ''Smallholder'' magazine, May 2007. Accessed 10 February 2013 )〕 was a Welsh-born schoolteacher, writer and folklorist who became a dedicated collector of oral history and oral tradition in the East Anglian countryside from the 1940s to 1970s, and produced eleven books of collections of these materials. ==Life and career== Evans was born in Abercynon, a coal-mining village north of Cardiff, one of a family of eleven, to Welsh-speaking parents who ran a grocery business. Reflecting the Liberal politics of his father, his middle name was inspired by William Ewart Gladstone, and Gladstone became one of his nicknames. As a boy he assisted in the delivery rounds travelling by pony and trap through the neighbouring farms and villages until the business closed following the 1924-5 coal strike. He went to grammar school, and studied classics at Cardiff University. After an unsuccessful attempt to move to London, he obtained work during the 1930s as a schoolmaster at Sawston Village College, Cambridgeshire, married, and started a family. After serving in the Royal Air Force with wireless equipment during the Second World War, he moved briefly to London, and then in 1947 to the remote Suffolk village of Blaxhall, where his wife taught in the school. He then began to write, first stories, poetry and film scripts for the BBC, and then writing a book about the people of the village of Blaxhall. This work (''Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay'') was, after many rejections, published by Faber and Faber in 1956, and the same house published the ten further books of similar character which Evans wrote over the next three decades. The Evans family lived relatively simply, moving their home in the neighbourhood to Needham Market and Helmingham to follow the teaching posts, and at his wife's retirement they settled down finally in Brooke, a small Norfolk village, where George continued to write. Evans made extensive collections of oral history on tape relating to East Anglia, its village life, rural culture and dialect in a painstaking and sympathetic way, gathering anecdotes of the trades, the poverty, the migrant workers, and the pre-modern rural way of life which was then still lingering in that comparatively sequestered corner of England. He maintained a long correspondence with the writer Robert Graves, and collaborated with his friend David Thomson of the BBC on the book ''The Leaping Hare''. Although his books have a strong flavour of memory and nostalgia, they record a time (extending back into the nineteenth century) that was hard and to which one would not seriously wish to return. He did not add a gloss of romance to his materials, but assumed and accepted the truthfulness of his informants.〔This account is derived from the introduction by David Gentleman to the Evans anthology ''The Crooked Scythe'', pp. xi-xxi.〕 Of the Blaxhall countryman, Evans wrote
Publisher and politician Matthew Evans, Baron Evans of Temple Guiting, is the son of George Ewart Evans.〔("Land of my father", ''The Guardian'', 22 June 2002. Accessed 10 February 2013 )〕 His daughter, Susan, married the artist David Gentleman. Evans' life and works feature as a permanent exhibition at the Museum of East Anglian Life in Stowmarket, Suffolk. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「George Ewart Evans」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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