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How and with what success has the ACS carried out its task?
From the nucleus of ten or a dozen friends gathered round a luncheon table in the West End of London, the membership of the Society has grown to nearly two hundred, resident throughout the British Isles (including Ireland), and in other countries too - U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and of course in the Catalan Countries themselves. Although the Society is basically academic in character, not all its members are from the learned professions. The fact that the Society brings together different groups and professions in a common interest has greatly contributed to the friendly and informal atmosphere of the annual meetings. Also, and most importantly, the desire of the native Catalan members - naturally a highly significant element in the membership despite their declining numbers in the U.K. - to improve their own knowledge of their heritage and to promote the study of their own culture has been a stimulus to the academics in giving the research greater objectivity.
Once a year, usually in the autumn, the Anglo-Catalan Society holds a meeting, traditionally at a weekend. These meetings have taken place in different British universities - Belfast, Birmingham, Cambridge, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, Swansea - and frequently at Westfield College, London, where all the meetings between 1967 and 1974 were held. At the meetings papers have been read on history and literature, both medieval and modern, language studies and many other aspects of Catalan culture, and many of the papers have been published subsequently in academic journals. As a rule, three or four papers have been read at each meeting, and since the first meeting in 1955 the total number of papers presented is approaching 150. On several special occasions the number of papers given was raised to seven. The first time was in 1956 when the Jocs Florals de la Llengua Catalana were held in Cambridge - and the fact that the Jocs Florals were immediately followed by the Second Meeting of the Society gave an appropriately "university" feeling to the essentially cultural atmosphere of the festival. The second occasion was six years later in 1962, when the Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas was founded at Oxford; the eighth meeting of the Anglo-Catalan Society was held immediately afterwards. It is also worth mentioning in this context that the Anglo-Catalan Society took a leading role in running the Third International Colloquium on Catalan Language and Literature, held in Cambridge in April 1973. As part of that Colloquium, which was also the constituent meeting of the Associació Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes (AILLC), the statutes of the new Association were approved.
The year 1975 was a significant one for the Society; it marked its coming of age. The anniversary was celebrated with the first of its residential meetings, which lasted three days and took place at Mansfield College in the University of Oxford, the university which had hosted the first conference of the Anglo-Catalan Society many years earlier in 1955. That year's programme was the largest and most varied put on by the Society up to that time. In addition to the four papers there was a screening of some extremely interesting Catalan films, old and new, and a short but most entertaining piece of Catalan theatre.
Of course, the Annual Lunch, which every year is the focal point of the social side of the Society, was also a feature. In view of the success of this first residential meeting, the Committee, with the approval of the Annual General Meeting, decided to establish as a principle that in future residential meetings should be held every other year at different British universities in September, when camp accommodation is available, while in other years a shorter non-residential meeting should be held as usual in London in November. The 1980 the Cambridge meeting was also an exceptional one, with six papers, a showing of Catalan documentary films, and a concert of Catalan music of the 15th and 16th centuries performed by a group of English university musicians. The society was also pleased to welcome to part of its proceedings some 150 members of Xarxa Cultural from Barcelona, who took advantage of a brief visit to London to come and meet the Society.
Not long after the demise of the Franco régime the Anglo-Catalan Society took a momentous decision - to bear the cultural standard of Catalonia to the very place where for forty years it had been forbidden, the official centre of Castilian culture in London, the Institute of Spain. Since most British Catalan scholars are also Hispanists, the new climate of freedom of that time brought us into professional contact as never before with the diplomatic representatives of Spanish culture in London. We therefore took advantage of this situation to emphasize that we were also Catalanophiles and Catalan scholars, and that we saw no reason why we should not hold a meeting of the Anglo-Catalan Society in their Institute with their full official support. The proposal was well received, and from the outset the relationship between the Society and the Institute, established in 1978, has continued to be friendly and useful. The Society has always been welcomed at Eaton Square and has found there genuine interest and valuable support for its work; and the half dozen meetings held at the Institute since 1978 have received the fullest co-operation of the Directors who have each given generous hospitality and complete freedom to the Society to put on its programme. In view of the success of this venture, and bearing in mind the Society's links with all the Catalan Countries, it was agreed that the meeting in November 1981 should be held at the French Institute in London, and that the subject of the meeting should be "La Catalunya Nord: actualitats culturals i polítiques". The representatives of French culture accepted our proposal to hold a meeting, the 27th of the Society, at their premises in London. We were received here also with kindness and goodwill.
And promoting as we do Catalan culture as a whole whenever we can, we try to bring aspects of Catalan culture beyond Catalonia itself into our programmes, and so, as well as French Catalonia, we have held meetings specifically on Valencian and Balearic themes. In 1985, as part of our activities for that year, we worked closely with the Arts Council of Great Britain in putting together a public fine arts exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery, London, under the title "Homage to Barcelona" (later shown in Barcelona), and our members promoted and ran two public concerts of Catalan music in prestigious London concert halls.
In recent years, because the Catalan lectors at British universities - and indeed other members who are not usually in this country until October each year - find meeting in September inconvenient, we have taken to holding our annual meeting in November, when the London School of Economics became our main venue for a time. We then sought a way of returning to our preferred practice of alternating London meetings with meetings in parts of the U.K. away from the capital, and the successful weekend meeting in Liverpool in November 1992 established a pattern for the future. |
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