Hay Festival News Articles

Historians are still stumped by the identity of a World War Two-era spy – codenamed “Dolly” — who shipped so much British secret information to Stalin that he (or she) overloaded the radio, and had to rely on ordinary post. Historian Jonathan Haslam told a Hay Festival crowd that the information, primarily signals intercepts of the kind made at Bletchley Park, was so high grade that it was key to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk and thus to the course of the war.

“We still don’t know much about this network, but Dolly was possibly a secretary. If you were the secretary equivalent to the joint chiefs, my goodness, but you could send out some information,” said Haslam, a professor at Cambridge University.

The spy and others like her (or him) such as the famous Cambridge Five were the fruit of Stalin’s policy of recruiting left-wing westerners and using them to penetrate the upper reaches of Britain and America. Stalin failed, however, to devote enough attention to code-breaking, meaning is secret services were reliant on stealing information from westerners who had the skills required to read German cables.

In the absence of code-breakers, Stalin employed burglars who could steal physical documents and pass them to Moscow, thus allowing officials to see high grade communications of some kind.

Top quotes:

“There is a historiography of Stalin that is entirely misleading, which is that he was sitting at a piano and pressing the keys so people did things, but one of the reasons why he shot so many people was that it was so hard getting anyone do what he wanted.”

“They assumed that Britain had agents everywhere so if you are running a country like Russian with long borders then this is not a good time to democratise the country, you need everyone to act as a counter-espionage agent.”

“Stalin was a paradox. He believed in human intelligence, in agents, but he was also incredibly suspicious of people. That’s why he killed so many.”

“Stalin wanted to see original documents, which as a historian I can understand. It’s very sensible, and he would get them by burglary… but if you use burglars you are not going to get the highest kind of people in society.”

On the Cambridge 5: “These people held their positions through interconnected friendships so when Stalin pontificated on agents, he said the best agents were friends who believed in the USSR. If you got the because they slept someone or by money, they would in the end betray you.”

On an ancient mound in the centre of  the beautiful market town of Hay-on-Wye stands the impressive, if a little dilapidated, Hay Castle. What better way to get into the festival spirit than with a tour around a landmark that has almost as many stories to tell as the festival itself?

Mary Morgan, Head of Hay Castle Trust, welcomed a large group of intrepid explorers into the castle with promises of a history lesson on one of Hay’s oldest buildings, which is proving to be a great attraction for this year’s festival goers.

Built by the Normans in the twelfth century, the castle has - just about - stood the test of time. It was taken over by the last Prince of Wales, Llewelyn II, in 1233 and then rebuilt by Henry III. By the seventeenth century, castles were thought to have had their day, so down came the walls and up went a mansion called Castle House in its place.

Morgan led the group of adventurers towards the arched gateway, the oldest part of the building and one of the oldest gateways in Wales. ‘There are people who think these gates should be in glass cases,’ she said, ‘but the rest of us think it’s much more fun to use them to walk through and to open the steps into the town.’ The main goal since the castle was purchased by the Hay Castle Trust in 2011 has been to create a cultural centre for the whole community to enjoy.

Top quotes:

Mary Morgan: ‘The Hay Castle Trust is committed to access for all. People will be able to enjoy the gardens when they are restored and we want to have concerts, plays, weddings and school events here.’

‘All castles ought to be in public hands, for everyone to walk through and enjoy.’

1. Quentin Blake - Beyond the Page

2. Jeremy Strong - The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog Goes for Gold!

3. Cressida Cowell - How to Seize a Dragon’s Jewel 

4. Lauren Child - Ruby Redfort

5. Korky Paul - Winnie’s Dinosaur Day

Image credit: Finn Beales

Indie rock quintet Noah and The Whale lived up to their reputation as one of the most down to earth bands in the music business with their show rider for The Hay Festival. They asked for locally sourced homemade flapjacks, which were provided by the Festival’s own master baker Marian Lally and lovingly photographed for The Telegraph’s Hay Festival live blog.

Playing to a packed crowd they treated a sell-out audience to a thumping set of the rousing anthems that made their breakthrough third album, Last Night On Earth, a platinum seller in the UK.

At Hay on the first night of their tour to launch their fourth album Heart of Nowhere, which was released to critical acclaim in the UK on 6 May, the five-piece also treated the crowd to a multitude of new songs, each of which was greeted with rapturous applause. As befits any good rock gig, frontman Charlie Fink urged the crowd to make some noise and get to their feet, which the crowd greeted with infectious enthusiasm. A large group of the band’s younger fans danced their way all the way through the set in Hay’s very own answer to a mosh pit, which stretched all the way down one end of The Barclays Pavilion.

As they closed to ecstatic applause it was clear that Noah and the Whale’s bittersweet, catchy tunes were indeed the perfect finale to the first day of The Hay Festival. 

Environmental activists Polly Higgins and Molly Scott Cato appealed today for environmental issues to be addressed as a matter of urgency, with two very different approaches, one with an international and the other with a local focus.

Leading international lawyer and author Polly Higgins, speaking at the Hay Festival, called for ecocide, meaning extensive damage and destruction to the ecosystem, to be included in the Rome Statute, which is up for review in 2015.

The Rome Statute is the governing international document outlining crimes against peace.

‘It will need tough leadership and fast action,’ she said, ‘but it can be done’. Calling on politicians to take a strong approach, Higgins said, ‘We are looking for a Head of State to stand up and call for this amendment to be tabled in 2015. All it requires is strong-balled, moral, courageous leadership.’

Green economist Molly Scott Cato focused on the local scale, introducing the notion of lamby-ism (‘looking after my back yard’) and expanded on the benefit of bio-regions, or self-sufficient local economies.

‘At the moment we can make decisions but don’t have to take responsibility,’ she said. ‘We’re not genuinely accountable.’ In response, Higgins suggested that members of the regions should be responsible for their resources; their sourcing and their disposal.’

Top quotes:

Polly Higgins: ‘This is something that could fundamentally shift the outcome of civilization.’

‘It’s not about the small steps now…this is about standing up and saying, “Enough!”’ 

Molly Scott Cato: ‘It really helps to identify with your local place if it’s defined in terms of natural features. You find people do think of their local places in ways that don’t have political meanings.’

The recent collapse of a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the tragic deaths of more than 1,100 workers has turned the spotlight back on the ethical issues surrounding fast fashion and the dubious working conditions of factory workers in the developing world.  

Speaking today at the Hay festival, Sandy Black, Lecturer at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion, called for companies to work in partnership with their suppliers to induce greater responsibility towards those at the bottom of the chain. She said, ‘If the workers’ wages were doubled, that would add only a matter of pence to the cost of some items, and that could easily be absorbed.’

She attributed the surge in fast fashion to the removal of garment and fabric trading quotas in 2005, which opened the floodgates and created a race to the bottom, where companies looked globally for the cheapest places to manufacture.  

Black favoured a culture where consumers demanded greater transparency and asked questions of leading clothing companies, saying, ‘Everybody can do their own little bit.’ She added, ‘People have to learn the real value of clothing, they have to realise that clothing isn’t all in the shop; it’s made by people who are earning a pittance.’

Black stressed that legislation was vital to increasing transparency and openness in the fashion world and argued that returning the manufacture of clothes to more local areas could also be beneficial, citing as an example Zara, who produce most of their clothes in Portugal.

Top quotes: ‘People have to learn the real value of clothing.’

‘Responsibility has to be on the companies to do things better.’

The horsemeat scandal, drought, floods, supermarket demands - who on earth would be a farmer today? In a combative debate on the opening day of the Hay Festival, a  well-informed audience challenged Young Farmers Chair Milly Wastie, The Land editor Simon Fairlie and Northumberland farmer Conor Colgan on the issues of ‘cheap’ food, buying British, food waste, and wildlife decline.

Rural Commentator Rob Yorke, who chaired the event, asked the panellists what farmers could learn from consumers in the light of recent food scandals. ‘That people still want cheap food,’ was Colgan’s view. ‘I expected more of a furore over fraudulent labelling’, though he noted that consumption of cheap burgers had since plummeted. Milly Wastie, representing young farmers under-26, made a plea for promoting agriculture as a career. ‘We need 60,000 new entrants over the next 10 years,’ she said. She is working with Defra on a scheme to match young people keen to enter the industry with farms where there no family member to take up the reins.

Simon Fairlie, who milks three Jersey cows - ‘I would like to expand to four’ - hoped for an exodus of people from the city to go back to the land and work in harmony with nature. ‘Instead of narrower margins for food producer, we need better wages and to value our food more highly’. After the War, we spent 30 per cent of our income on food; today it is around 10 per cent. 

Top quotes:

Simon Fairlie: ‘We need a voice for small farmers, for landworkers rather than landowners.’ 

‘Horsemeat tastes rather nice. It’s an option for the one million horses that currently do nothing except get transported round the country in horseboxes.’ 

Rob Yorke: ‘What is sustainable to many, may not be sustainable to someone on a low income.’

Conor Coglan: ‘Today, meat is now seen as a right, not as a treat’.

                          ‘Ready meals are convenient but they are not cheap.’

Milly Wastie: ‘We need to invest in technology. We can sell direct to the consumer from the farmgate over the Internet.’

Hay festival has launched with events for 3,000 children meeting writers Cressida Cowell, Jeremy Strong, Lauren Child, Katherine Rundell, The Ethrington Brothers and Korky Paul. 

HRH The Prince of Wales and HRH The Duchess of Cornwall visited Hay on the opening day of our festival. 

Calling in to Hay on market day, they visited regeneration projects. The Cheese Market aims to restore the old Town Hall building. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall toured Hay Castle with National Trust Wales director Justin Albert. Their Royal Highnesses heard about Hay Castle Trust’s plans to restore the castle to the centre of the town’s life.

HRH The Prince of Wales and HRH The Duchess of Cornwall came to Hay Festival to a wild cheer from children lining the walkways. They attended a reception given by the Schools Libraries Association after which the Prince of Wales toured the festival site and met the environmentalists leading the Hay-on-Earth programme, Landmarc Support Services leaders who are working with the Countryside Fund and spoke with local farmers, John and Helen Price, Penny Chantler and William Powell with local Hay vet Barney Sampson to talk about the current challenges of our rural economy.

HRH The Duchess of Cornwall met with literacy project leaders - John Ralston Saul, President of PEN International briefed HRH on PEN’s work in Africa; HRH met with Phil Forder who runs Hay in the Parc - the literary festival in Parc Prison, Bridgend and with two former offenders who’d worked on the project; HRH met with representatives of the Welsh Universities participating in the nationwide Scribblers Tour she launched at Hay in 2011; and she met with Andy Fryers and Heather Salisbury, leaders of the Comenius Project - a Wales/Norway environmental and literary project. Luca Norton (11)  of Hay Primary School told her a tale.

Their Royal Highnesses then visited the Hay Festival Bookshop where they met children’s writers who had been speaking at the festival today.  The Duchess of Cornwall unveiled the Summer Reading Challenge for 2013. The Summer Reading Challenge is organised by The Reading Agency with whom the festival will be working on library-based initiatives nationwide.

Penny Neville, a librarian in Worcestershire: ‘Every single public library authority can subscribe to The Summer Reading Challenge and it’s a fantastic way to get children reading through the summer holidays. They receive a collectable wallet, stickers and a postcard every week. Many libraries have a big award ceremony where they win a prize.’

Cressida Cowell, children’s author: ‘It’s wonderful that the Hay Festival, the Royal Family and my fellow authors are helping to profile this most powerful of reading programmes for children. The Summer Reading Challenge’s simple magic can help turn children into library users for life and its sheer fun inspires them to keep reading all summer long.’

Day One of Hay Festival 2013 launched with our Schools Programme where almost 3,000 children were entertained by a programme of free events featuring Cressida Cowell, Korky Paul, The Etherington Brothers, Lauren Child, Katherine Rundell and Jeremy Strong. For the full Hay Fever programme, visit hayfestival.org/hayfever.

Sir Quentin Blake reminded an eager crowd at The Hay Library Lecture of the importance of illustration when introducing young people to reading.

He was introduced by Miranda McKearney, founding director of The Reading Agency, who explained that The Hay Library Lecture  celebrates the Festival’s commitment to the public library service.

After a round of applause for the librarians in the room and Blake’s own salute to his childhood library in Sidcup, it was clear that the possible closure of many libraries in Herefordshire is at the forefront of many people’s minds at this year’s Festival.

However, on a day when almost 3,000 primary school children were in attendance, education and reading - or more specifically learning to love reading and wanting to pick up a book as early possible - were the main messages of the day. 

He compared it to Roald Dahl’s creation, Matilda, brought to life on the page by Blake, as she is a manifestation of the magic that comes from reading. She also represents a young girl who is very comfortable  surrounded by books, a message that appears to have seeped through to its young readers, many of whom were in attendance.

Speaking about the potential of illustration to reassure, alleviate and in particular to motivate, Blake reflected on an encounter with a school teacher who had written to tell him her school had purchased 90 copies of A Christmas Carol, which he had illustrated, and now they were all reading Dickens.

Overall Blake’s message was one of reading for fun and learning through exploration. When asked, ‘Is reading for pleasure the best way for children to get into books?’ His answer was, quite simply, ‘Yes.’

Top quotes:

Quentin Blake: ‘I believe in the possibility of two languages, verbal and visual, and for me – a long time ago - the library was a very rich source of both.’  

Miranda McKearney: ‘I know everyone always introduces famous people as best-loved and iconic but that is really true with Sir Quentin Blake, he is famous in households around the world, including mine.’