Saturday 2 December, 7:00 PM Thank you very much to Bob Allen for a magical evening of readings. In the wonderful candlelit atmosphere of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House, we were transported back to Victorian times with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations, and heard of Christmas visits in Killerts Diary. The mince pies were tasty and the mulled wine made the Meeting House even smell of Christmas! A lovely start to the festive season for Friends and visitors.
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After the success of last year’s reading of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, Bob Allen is rejoining us at the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House for another candlelit evening of readings, on Saturday, 2 December 2023, at 7pm.
Bob is an English teacher, teaching a range of arts subjects including history and arts history, has worked with the Open University since it began, and is still working as an OU Arts Foundation lecturer. Previously he was the Head of English at Deben High School in Felixstowe, was then Vice Principal at Tendring Technology College in Frinton-on-Sea, and is currently doing consultancy work with Ipswich High School. Recently he was in conversation with IUMH Friend and committee member, Rachel Sloane:
R: What brought you to Suffolk?
B: I was originally from Sheffield but came to Suffolk in 1969 when I finished at Cambridge
University and had trained as a teacher. I was looking at adverts for my first job and at the
school I was doing teaching practise in, was Jack Roberts who had previously worked at
Northgate Grammar School for Boys in Ipswich, in the English Department. They were
advertising a post and he told me it would be a wonderful job and I should apply. To be
honest, I wasn’t terribly sure where Ipswich was! I have been in the Ipswich area ever since.
R: How did you get involved in so many different local organisations?
B: I met Peter Underwood, a geography teacher at Northgate, who was, at that time, the
Chairman of Ipswich Society and he introduced me to the world of conservation in Ipswich
and I became fully involved in that. I eventually took over from him as Chairman of the
Executive Committee. At that time, we were very supportive of the creation of the
Buildings Preservation Trust and the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust and I still have a foot in each of those. That links into my interest in art history, architecture, and the built
environment.
R: How did your passion for Charles Dickens come about?
B: Well, it’s part of my general interest in literature. I’m teaching A Christmas Carol for the
OU at the moment, as it is one of the set texts on the foundation course, and of course I’ve
known about the story for years. I think it is one of the finest things Dickens did. It speaks
very directly and powerfully to me.
The sort of things you find in the text I still find hugely moving. In all kinds of ways, it has
become part of our folklore and part of the mythology of Christmas. A Christmas Carol
exists in all kinds of different versions … cartoons, films… but the idea of somebody locked
into his own negative world and the notion that you can somehow open that up and enable him to reflect upon his past and see moments when things might have been different … and the insights that you get from that, are hugely powerful, I think. When it was first published it was hugely popular and many people wrote to Dickens and testified on the way it had made an enormous difference to their lives.
I like to think that a little bit of A Christmas Carol is a very good way of stretching your
moral compass for the next year. It enables us to think about fellow human beings as
valuable people. The way Scrooge dismissed people who he sees as being of ‘no value… the poor and needy’ has, in all sorts of ways, crept into political discourse today, in ways I find offensive and appalling. The story is very powerful in confronting that. It’s about how you relate to other people and what you have done to make the world a better place , or other people happier than they might have been.
R: I wonder what Charles Dickens would think that, all these years later, the story is still
popular?
B: It’s lasted in a most extraordinary way, but that’s because the characters are splendid and
have a real grip on you and, right from the word go, the sequence of events is so powerful.
Friends of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 