The website of Emanations contributor and International Authors Board member Michael Butterworth has been updated to reflect his 2026 activities, including Mr. Butterworth's work in the recently published Emanations 12:
In its twelfth annual edition Emanations contained ‘The Little Arundalean’, Part 1 of a three-part memoir of my time at St Christopher School. Due to an interest in boarding education, Emanations editor Carter Kaplan virtually commissioned me to write this, although it had always been planned to form the opening of Driven by Anger, the new book length memoir above mentioned. Parts 1 and 2 are scheduled to appear in Emanations #13 and #14.
‘The Little Arundalean’ and its sequels are an exercise of memory in which I try to capture the boarding school St Christopher, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, as it was in 1957 when I first attended sixty-six years ago, and an attempt to describe how its then radical progressive co-educational teaching methods saved me from an unhappy fate in the ‘Army-style’ orthodox school system of the time.
I boarded there for six years from the age of ten. ‘St Chris’ was an unusual school even for its time. Founded in 1915 by Theosophists but Quaker-run when I attended, the school was not as liberal as Summerhill – lessons were compulsory – but it had a democratic foundation, was inclusive of the voice of its pupils, and over the years became the incubator of many who went on to be prominent creatives – Michael Winner, Jenny Diski, Paul Hamlyn, Elizabeth Jenkins, Prince Rupert Zu Loewenstein, to name a few.
From an artistic perspective there may be an interesting conjecture to make. After leaving school and becoming a contributor to New Worlds, Charles Platt then became the magazine’s designer (and finally its editor) and brought with him a certain gestalt. During the later large-format phase of New Worlds he hired onto the team a fellow St Christophean, the late author-designer Nigel Francis (Simon Francis as he became), to help cope with the increased workload. St Chris had a very particular atmosphere, and it could be said that with three practitioners, including me, having been drawn from it, the UK New Wave of Science Fiction owed something to its culture. To an old St Christophean like me, the magazine’s 1967-70 heyday stylistically as a whole is partly infused with the school’s unmistakable voice, at least the voice of St Chris as it was during our time there.
Click HERE (or the photo of Mr Butterworth) to visit the site.
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