About Vole Magazine

Vole Magazine

Vole Magazine, published as Vole, was a British environmentalist magazine published in London between 1977 and 1980. It was founded by the journalist Richard Boston, with funding from Terry Jones of Monty Python, and was intended to have a lighter-hearted tone than the other countryside and ecology magazines of the time. Its offices were in Park Square East, London. Contributors included Richard Adams, John Arlott, Tony Benn, Paul Foot, Richard Ingrams, Miles Kington, Richard Mabey and Ralph Steadman, and Bryan Reading's cartoon strip The Belchers ran throughout its life.

Vole is credited with helping to raise awareness of serious Green politics at a time when much of the British public understood environmental living through the BBC sitcom The Good Life. Its working title, The Questing Vole, came from the nature column of William Boot, the hapless hero of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop, and was shortened at launch. A magazine that took its name from a comic novel, its money from a Python and its tone from a deliberate refusal of solemnity succeeded, across four years, in gathering one of the most remarkable contributor lists of any short-lived British title.

Richard Boston and Terry Jones's money

Vole was founded by Richard Boston, a journalist known for his beer writing and his humorous, sceptical voice, who became one of the more distinctive British columnists of his generation. Boston's obituary record in The Guardian forms part of the magazine's source base, and his personality set Vole's: an environmental magazine edited by a humorist would treat the countryside as a place to be enjoyed and defended in the same breath, rather than as a subject for lamentation alone. Funding came from Terry Jones, the Monty Python member whose interests ranged across comedy, history and the natural world, and whose money allowed an independent title to launch without a corporate publisher.

The combination of founder and funder explains the magazine's freedom. Vole was not the organ of a campaign group, a publisher's list experiment or an advertiser's vehicle. It was a personal venture, bankrolled by a comedian, edited by a journalist with a cult following, and free to commission the writers and cartoonists its editor admired. Such ventures rarely last long, and Vole lasted four years. But the same freedom that limited its lifespan filled its pages with names that a safer magazine could not have gathered, and it is by those pages that Vole is remembered.

The Questing Vole: a title from Scoop

The founders' working title for the magazine was The Questing Vole. The phrase is a quotation from the fictitious nature column written by William Boot, protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's 1938 satire Scoop, whose celebrated sentence sends the questing vole feather-footed through the plashy fens. Boot's column, written in London by a man who could not tell one bird from another, is literature's most famous parody of newspaper nature writing. To name a real countryside magazine after it was a joke at the genre's expense and a promise about tone: Vole would write about nature without the hushed reverence and bogus expertise that Waugh had mocked forty years earlier.

At launch the title was shortened to Vole, a single syllable with the joke now available to those who recognised it. The shortened name had practical virtues too: distinctive on a cover, easy to say, and unlike any competing title. It also set the magazine's mascot in place. The vole, a small, unglamorous, genuinely British mammal, was the anti-eagle: no soaring raptor or noble stag for Boston's magazine, but a creature of riverbanks and hedgerows, questing or otherwise, that embodied the local, modest scale of the countryside Vole wrote about.

A lighter tone for ecology

Vole was intended to have a more light-hearted tone than the other countryside and ecology magazines of the time. The positioning was shrewd. By 1977 environmental concern in Britain had serious institutional voices, above all The Ecologist, founded in 1970, whose register was analytical and urgent, and a shelf of worthy countryside titles. What the field lacked was a magazine that treated ecology as a subject for pleasure, humour and good writing, capable of reaching readers who would never buy a campaigning journal. Vole occupied that empty space, with its London offices in Park Square East placing it in the professional magazine world rather than in a commune or a campaign headquarters.

The tone was not a dilution of the politics. The magazine is credited with contributing to the raising of awareness of serious Green politics in Britain, at a moment when the public image of self-sufficiency and environmental living was coloured by The Good Life, the BBC sitcom in which suburban green living was played for gentle comedy. Vole's contributors moved in the same territory, countryside, food, smallholding, wildlife and the politics of land, but from conviction rather than sitcom premise. Humour was the delivery system for an argument: that how Britain farmed, built, travelled and ate were political questions, and that a magazine could make its readers laugh and think about them at the same time.

The contributors

Vole's contributor list is its most frequently quoted feature, and it repays quotation in full. It included Richard Adams, author of Watership Down; the cricket broadcaster and writer John Arlott; Pete Atkin, writing about do-it-yourself; the Labour politician Tony Benn; Jeremy Bugler; John A. Burton; Catherine Caufield; Gillian Darley, the magazine's museum correspondent; the campaigning journalist Paul Foot; David Helton; Kate Hepburn; Richard Ingrams, co-founder of Private Eye; Terry Jones himself; the humorist Miles Kington; the nature writer Richard Mabey; Richard D. North; cartoonist Bryan Reading; the cartoonist and illustrator Posy Simmonds; Ralph Steadman; and Bill Tidy.

Read as a whole, the list is a portrait of a particular British cultural moment: the nature writer Mabey and the novelist Adams beside the satirists Ingrams and Steadman; a cabinet-level politician, Benn, beside the investigative journalist Foot; the voice of cricket, Arlott, beside the future chronicler of British landscape in Darley. Few four-year magazines of any kind assembled novelists, politicians, satirists, cartoonists and broadcasters of this calibre in one contents page. The list also documents Boston's method as editor: commission the best writers in and around the subject, whatever their usual market, and let the mixture itself make the magazine's argument about the breadth of environmental concern.

The Belchers

Throughout Vole's four-year lifetime it carried Bryan Reading's cartoon strip The Belchers, commissioned by Richard Boston. The strip featured the bucolic adventures of Nigel and Fiona Allbran, metropolitan emigrants to the countryside, and it gave the magazine a continuing fictional anchor: a couple whose attempt to live the rural dream supplied comedy from the gap between the countryside as imagined by town-dwellers and the countryside as it is. In the era of The Good Life, whose suburban self-sufficiency was the nation's reference point for downshifting, The Belchers was Vole's own, sharper contribution to the same comic territory, drawn by a cartoonist who remained with the magazine from beginning to end.

The strip's continuous run matters to the magazine's structure. A monthly or periodic magazine builds loyalty through fixtures readers follow, and Vole's other contents, essays, campaigns, reviews and reportage, changed with the issues. The Belchers did not. Alongside Posy Simmonds's and Ralph Steadman's and Bill Tidy's visual contributions, Reading's strip placed Vole in the strong British tradition of the magazine as a home for cartooning, where the drawings are not illustration of the text but a parallel editorial voice. Boston, a humorist himself, commissioned accordingly.

Editors and the final issues

In June 1980 the managing editor of Vole was Charles Alverson, the American journalist and writer long resident in Britain, who had worked in the underground and alternative press. Richard D. North, who would become a prominent writer on environment and countryside questions, edited the final issues of the magazine. That succession, from Boston's founding editorship through Alverson's management to North's closing hand, brought the magazine into contact with a younger generation of environmental writers for whom the subject would be a career rather than a cause of the moment.

North's own later account of the magazine, hosted on his website, forms part of Vole's surviving record, alongside the retrospective account published by Caught by the River, the nature-writing project whose sensibility, literary, humorous, place-attached, descends directly from Vole's. The standard reference dates for the magazine are 1977 to 1980. One retrospective account describes it as monthly from September 1977 to June 1981. The discrepancy is noted in the magazine's reference record; the four-year span from 1977 is common ground, and the magazine is best described as a 1977 foundation that closed at the turn of the decade, with its last phase under North's editorship.

Vole and the emergence of Green politics

Vole appeared at a precise hinge in British environmental history. The Ecology Party, founded as PEOPLE in 1973 and renamed in 1975, was contesting elections; the 1979 general election brought environmental politics a national platform; and the issues Vole treated with jokes and cartoons, land, food, wildlife, energy and the future of the countryside, were moving from the margins towards the centre of public argument. Histories of the period credit Vole with helping to raise awareness of serious Green politics, and its role was cultural rather than organisational: it made environmental concern literate, funny and normal for readers of general magazines.

That cultural role is easy to underrate beside party foundations and manifestos, but it is the role magazines actually perform. Before a politics can win votes it must win a sensibility, readers who feel that a subject belongs in their ordinary reading. Vole, with Tony Benn in its pages and Steadman's drawings on them, gave Green questions a home between cricket and satire. When Green politics entered British electoral life in earnest at the end of the 1980s, it addressed a public part of whose preparation had been done by magazines of Vole's kind in the decade before.

Closure and afterlife

Vole closed after four years, in the pattern of founder-funded magazines whose economics never matched their contributor lists. No scandal or suppression ended it; the money and the moment ran their course, and its final issues were edited by Richard D. North as the title wound down. Its offices in Park Square East closed with it, and the British magazine market lost its lightest-toned environmental title, leaving the field again to the solemn and the specialist.

The afterlife has been kinder than the lifespan. Caught by the River's retrospective celebration of the magazine introduced it to a new generation of nature readers, North's account preserves an insider's record, and Boston's Guardian obituary material keeps the founding story in the national record. The complete contributor list is preserved in the magazine's reference entry, where it continues to startle: Adams, Arlott, Benn, Foot, Ingrams, Kington, Mabey, Simmonds and Steadman, in a magazine named after a joke in Waugh, funded by a Python. Titles with a hundred times Vole's circulation have left thinner evidence of having existed.

Legacy

Vole's legacy is a proof of concept. Between 1977 and 1980 it demonstrated that an environmental magazine could be funny without being trivial, literary without being academic and political without being a party organ, and that the best writers and cartoonists in Britain would write for such a magazine. Its methods, humour as delivery, cartoons as editorial voice, the countryside treated as culture, recur throughout the British nature writing that flourished after it.

For WorldNM, Vole stands as the essential British Green magazine of the late 1970s: founded by Richard Boston, funded by Terry Jones, titled from Scoop, staffed by an extraordinary roster, anchored by The Belchers, and credited in its own time and since with carrying Green politics to readers whom no campaign journal could reach. Four years was enough.