Robin Mills met Alastair Braidwood near Dorchester
I’m really Dorchester born and bred, but my father was a Scot. He followed my grandparents down from Scotland, who moved here for my grandfather’s health. My father met my mother, who was born in Broadmayne, here in Dorset, and it’s where I’ve grown up, feel like I belong, and love to be.
Whatever I’m involved in, I tend to jump in with both feet. Music is such a big part of my life that as a family we wonder where it’s come from. My parents haven’t really passed it on to me, or my sister who is very musical, so perhaps it skipped a few generations. My mother sings in a choir, and my father has a good appreciation of music, so it clearly hasn’t come out of nowhere. There was, and still is, a very good music department at Thomas Hardye School when I was there which gave me great encouragement to develop as a musician. I then went to Royal Holloway College in Egham, Surrey, for three years and got my degree, but couldn’t wait to get back to Dorset afterwards.
When I came back from university, I started working for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, initially doing marketing and PR, but quite quickly moved into the library, sorting out all the sheet music for the concerts. I did enjoy that, but a couple of years ago I left to start a freelance career. I’d always intended to have a proper job with a wage, but I was getting offers of gigs, either to act or play music, so I thought I’d give it a go. Thus far I haven’t starved, although I can’t say I’m raking it in.
I started acting, aged nine, in Dorchester’s 4th Community Play Fire from Heaven. Then, as a teenager I was in the 5th play A Time to Keep, written by David Edgar and Stephanie Dale in 2007, a large production involving over 100 people, set in Dorchester in 1804 when there was a great threat of invasion by Napoleon. That was huge fun, and my involvement (with both feet) included acting, singing, and playing music, even some of the tech. Since then, there have been two more Dorchester Community Plays, and various productions with the New Hardy Players, for which I’ve acted and written music, and been musical director, including the very enjoyable and successful adaptation by Howard and Alison Payton of Far from the Madding Crowd in 2019. I’m taking on an increasingly directorial role with the New Hardy Players, our most recent production being A Few Crusted Characters, which was also great fun to do, and went down well. During A Time to Keep, all those years ago, I met well-known local folk musician and director Tim Laycock, and he and I now perform together as a duo. We have some gigs coming up in October, when we will be performing traditional songs and readings about the autumn, describing what the rural year used to look like a century or two ago in Dorset.
Much of my bread and butter today comes now from playing the organ at various church services. There’s always a dearth of organists at village churches. As an instrumentalist I’m a jack of all trades and master of none, but I play the hurdy-gurdy for folky things, bash a guitar in a ceilidh band, and play the church organ in all its forms a great deal—and I sing. In the spring and summer, my folk song walks are popular.
I’m classically trained as a musician, with an interest in jazz, and some classic rock, but traditional folk music is my main interest. The more unusual styles of early folk music, plus choral and church music being my main genres these days. It comes from an interest in tradition and history, and how music links us to the past, but having said that traditions in folk music are constantly changing, so there’s a need to keep up with them. That helps keep the traditions relevant to today’s world, as can fusions of other genres like jazz, pop, or music from other cultures lead to new directions with traditional folk.
About 10 or 12 years ago, attending a very wet folk festival with absolutely nothing to do except sit in a damp gazebo, I started to learn to knit. We knitted bunting which we hung up round the gazebo, and I’ve just never stopped. I’ve learned many different styles and techniques, and now I teach other people to knit. I hope to start my own knitwear brand this autumn, specialising in fisherman’s guernseys, and other classic, practical pieces of knitwear, made entirely by hand. I’m doing it all myself, although if orders come flooding in I may have to think again. I’ll be selling through a website, social media, going to craft fairs, and through word of mouth, which can be a powerful thing. The difficulty is getting people to understand the cost of the hand-made item, which pays someone a reasonable wage to make something from scratch. It is unavoidably expensive, but the product is so much better in terms of quality, sustainability, ease of repair, and the use of only natural materials. The damage wrought by fast fashion, produced by cheap labour overseas, is well known. The percentage of people’s income spent on clothes used to be much higher and was spent on fewer clothes; it’s better to possess one item and look after it, and repair it when necessary, than to have 10 items and throw 9 of them away. Until the industrial revolution so many people were involved in the production of cloth; it would take 8 spinners to supply one weaver with yarn, which gives one an idea of how many pairs of hands the process of making a garment took. Wool, once the source of wealth and employment for so many people all the way back to medieval days, has today become almost worthless to sheep farmers due to competition from cheap materials and high costs of production, but there does seem to be a resurgence in demand for the many uses it can be put to. The British Wool Board have done excellent work in promoting this wonderful fibre with so many benefits.
The ceilidh band I lead is called Tatterdemalion. This year is special as it’s 10 years since we started playing traditional tunes at weddings, parties and fund-raising occasions for people of all ages to dance to, and we’re celebrating with a family ceilidh at the Corn Exchange, Dorchester on 13th September. All the tunes we play come from two manuscripts of folk music dating to the 1820s and 1830s, which would have been recognisable to Thomas Hardy, although we have slightly updated them with a bit more beat and some different harmonies to make them more danceable. We were brought together by Tim Laycock, who provided the first tunes, and his wife Angela, with her amazing knowledge of so many dances, her enthusiasm and persuasive manner, is our main caller. Since we started playing together, providing music for the New Hardy Players’ productions, we have all become great friends. In fact, I met my wife Juliet years ago as we were both playing in the band, but it took me a while to realise I liked her rather a lot, and so we married last year. We have so many things in common, like folk music, living history, and dressing in a classic style. We try to live in as environmentally friendly a way as possible in our lovely little spot in Dorchester. Juliet works at Athelhampton House as resident historian, although that job title covers many roles. She organises living history events there, including the Tudor Week at the end of October.
