The popularity of the classical guitar in Britain surged between 1950 and 1970. The virtuosity of elite professionals led by the pioneering Andrés Segovia and the new stars Julian Bream and John Williams earned the classical instrument considerable purchase within the wider culture. Above all, it inspired thousands of largely middle-class, male, relatively young and urban amateur players, attracted not simply by the instrument’s intrinsic appeal but also by the opportunity offered to display a fashionable modernity and sophisticated connoisseurship. However, although securing for the classical guitar a much-enhanced musical role, these enthusiasts also created an often inward-looking specialist culture.

A magnetometry survey of the Roman fort at Lake Farm, near Wimborne Minster in Dorset, first discovered in 1959, has upgraded the status of this site to a full legionary fortress: a major base of the legio II Augusta during the subjugation of the Durotriges and other tribes of south-west Britain. The interior layout of the fortress was identified for the first time, together with the original road and river connections, extensive areas of extramural activity and evidence for an earlier phase of the site as a marching camp.

Making particular use of material drawn from the Census of England and Wales, this article confirms that music teaching was above all an urban activity, increasingly dominated by women, albeit with some local variation, and that the highest provision of teaching was invariably in middle-class areas. Seaside resorts and suburbia were especially prominent market locations by the early twentieth century, with the south-east particularly favoured. The often-derided part-time teacher is shown to have been a key figure in working-class communities. While teachers showed little interest in formal professionalization, it is argued that they were probably better paid than has been assumed and were able at least to maintain a social position within the lower-middle and skilled working classes that most were born into. Although women's careers were frequently short, for a growing minority, music teaching was a serious career option. It is suggested that teachers met contemporary needs rather more effectively than some have claimed.

The backgrounds of opera singers have received little systematic study and this article attempts to help redress this situation through analysis of a collective biography of 344 British and Irish-born performers active in the century from 1850. It argues that certain areas, notably London and Wales, made a particularly significant contribution to the operatic profession and notes that certain other patterns of regional under- and over-production are discernible. While singers from a broadly defined middle class were numerically dominant within this sample, this study stresses the unexpectedly strong contribution from those born into the lower-middle and working classes. Such performers were able to build on skills honed in the amateur musical sphere partly as a result of an expanding state-funded higher education system, but also due to an extraordinary variety of forms of patronage. The ‘popular’ social tone of singers, however, is shown to have done little to challenge perceptions of opera as an elitist cultural form.

Background: The clinical literature cautions against use of meditation by people with psychosis. There is, however, evidence for acceptance-based therapy reducing relapse, and some evidence for clinical benefits of mindfulness groups for people with distressing psychosis, though no data on whether participants became more mindful. Aims: To assess feasibility of randomized evaluation of group mindfulness therapy for psychosis, to replicate clinical gains observed in one small uncontrolled study, and to assess for changes in mindfulness. Method: Twenty-two participants with current distressing psychotic experiences were allocated at random between group-based mindfulness training and a waiting list for this therapy. Mindfulness training comprised twice-weekly sessions for 5 weeks, plus home practice (meditation CDs were supplied), followed by 5 weeks of home practice. Results: There were no significant differences between intervention and waiting-list participants. Secondary analyses combining both groups and comparing scores before and after mindfulness training revealed significant improvement in clinical functioning (p = .013) and mindfulness of distressing thoughts and images (p = .037). Conclusions: Findings on feasibility are encouraging and secondary analyses replicated earlier clinical benefits and showed improved mindfulness of thoughts and images, but not voices.

In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

The community singing movement was a distinctive feature of English popular musical life in the mid-1920s. Although initiated by individuals who saw it as essentially educational, it was rapidly appropriated by sections of the press, and especially the Daily Express, as an instrument in the circulation wars of the period. It was typified by a restricted range of music comprising ‘national’ songs, hymns (with the performance of ‘Abide with Me’ at the FA Cup Final singing particularly important), and songs of the First World War. This mixture and the concomitant neglect of modern popular song reflects the rather nostalgic thrust behind activities, with calls for community singing to recreate a ‘Merrie England’ that would heal the deep social divisions of the 1920s. Whether the singers were fully aware of these various musical and socio-political agendas is unclear, but community singing undoubtedly enjoyed a period of considerable popularity, with the music appreciated for allowing displays of individual and collective emotion.

During the coffee break at a recent conference, I described myself to a new acquaintance as ‘a social historian of music’. He replied that he was glad to meet me as he now knew all four of us. The ‘club’, of course, has never been quite that exclusive, but the joke highlighted the essentially submerged and inchoate nature of work in this field. What follows is a decidedly personal article, designed not as a polished, final argument but as a review of some recent developments within the social history of popular music and as a stimulus to further work and argument. Aimed most particularly at those, whether they define themselves as musicologists or historians, taking relatively early steps into this field, it reflects the biases and preoccupations of a social historian with decidedly Anglo-centric interests and for whom history tends to ‘begin’ about 1750; I have a sense, however, that some of my comments may be relevant to the study both in and of other countries and of other historical periods. ‘Popular’ music is broadly defined here to accommodate both ‘aesthetic’ and ‘social’ usages of the term, but given my particular interests, and perhaps because of the methodological imperatives of social history, the latter application undoubtedly receives the closest attention.

A cooperative program has been established to produce a reference frame of at least 400 suitable extragalactic sources. This is an extension of collaborative efforts (Johnston et al., Russell et al., Ma et al., and Reynolds et al.) reported at this meeting. In Phase One, a catalog of radio source positions will be constructed using original VLBI observations already obtained by NASA, NGS, NRL, JPL and USNO. Observations will be re-reduced in a consistent system to avoid some of the more serious problems associated with the formation of compilation catalogs. In Phase Two, the USNO will maintain the system, including the monitoring of source structure and/or variation. During both phases cooperation among the various agencies will continue. A list of sources will be made available to optical observers so that the frame will have benchmarks in both the optical and radio regimes.