CLAY LANE is inspired by the textbooks of NL Clay (1905-1991), Senior English Master at Ecclesfield Grammar School near Barnsley. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, Clay published more than a dozen books for students of English language and literacy for use at home or in school.
Clay believed that our country’s tradition of clear, plain speaking was under deliberate attack by figures in the media and in government who had a vested interest in keeping the public tongue-tied and narrow-minded. A command of clear, plain English, correctly spelled and punctuated, and a sympathetic (but not uncritical) knowledge of the ideas, events and writers the past, were therefore a conscientious citizen’s duty if freedom and democracy were to have any meaning. NL Clay aimed to give us the encouragement, confidence, training and stimulus to reach our own judgments, and to make our case courteously, but clearly.
Read his own words in these short extracts: Straightforward English, and Question More.
Norman Llewellyn Clay was my great-uncle.
The idea behind Clay Lane is very simple.
Read passages similar to those NL Clay collected in his anthologies of prose and verse, to gain a feeling for the language, history and culture of the English-speaking world.
Solve short mental agility puzzles similar to those NL Clay gave to pupils aged 12 to 13, to practise oral and written composition.
Clay Lane is inspired by NL Clay’s books — the spirit, the tone and the aim is the same, or I hope it is — but it is not those books themselves. The selection of prose and verse is my own, and the exercises have been refashioned with another age, another medium and another audience in mind. Any deficiencies must be laid at my door.
Although based in part on books written for school use, this website is intended for adult readers.
You are very welcome to ask me for help with anything on Clay Lane. Write to me at this email address:
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Our Calendars
Today is Wednesday April 23 on the Gregorian (New or Roman Style) calendar, and Wednesday April 10 on the Julian (Old or English Style) calendar.
We keep two calendars on Clay Lane, the Gregorian ‘New Style’ calendar familiar to everyone, and the Julian ‘Old Style’ calendar used in England from Roman times until 1752. We use the Gregorian calendar for all our historical events, and the Julian Calendar for our Church events: the Julian was the calendar of our great saints such as St Augustine, St Cuthbert and St Bede, and the calendar of the English Church throughout the Middle Ages and the Reformation.
Using the Julian calendar for Church feasts and fasts means that Christmas is not observed at the same time as its secularized imitation, which is arguably no bad thing; Lent and Easter are calculated differently too. However, these celebrations are observed at the same time as the Russian Church observes them, as she is still using the calendar of St Bede, and that too is no bad thing. “The English in Russia” Bishop Mandell Creighton said (or so John Birkbeck paraphrased him) in a sermon at St Petersburg, when he was in Russia representing Queen Victoria at the coronation of Emperor Nicholas II, “even if they saw around them modes of worship to which they were not accustomed, might at least learn a lesson from a nation which so evidently put the worship of God, whether in the streets, or in their houses, or in their churches, before everything else, and expressed in that worship all the articles of the Christian faith in better proportion than any other Church in Christendom.” See also Bishop Herbert Bury on If Russia Gives a Lead.
Using AI
In my experience, AI can understand the exercises on Clay Lane remarkably well, but the English it generates in response is often dull, awkward and even ungrammatical. By all means try these teasers out on your favourite AI assistant but don’t assume it is giving you good English in return — not yet, at any rate.
There is another reason to be wary of over-reliance on AI. The impulse among ordinary citizens to get ready-made opinions from expert authorities, rather than form their own, was something that NL Clay named as a serious threat to a democratic society back in the 1930s: see Question More. Handled in that same lazy fashion, the AI assistant is likely to be a danger even more insidious than the Radio Critic of Clay’s time, precisely because it is a bland machine and not insufferably human.
The skills practised on this site — chiefly expression, précis and paraphrase — are not going to lose their importance just because AI assistants can perform them more quickly. How many times has a fact buried in a report seemed unimportant today, but proved vital tomorrow! Yet the man who has used AI to précis the report has no idea it is there. The man who gets AI to do his writing for him will never grasp a topic like the man who does his own. As Professor Cavor says in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, nothing clears up one’s ideas like explaining them. AI cannot do that for us. It cannot think for us any more than the Film Critic can watch movies for us, or the Restaurant Critic can eat our dinner.
A Great Nation
“Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton remarked in a letter to fellow historian Mandell Creighton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” See The Verdict of History. Great nations face the same temptations.
Nations, said Lord Salisbury, should behave towards one another as neighbours should. Not long before, another resident of No. 10, William Gladstone had warned against letting love of country or of our way of life turn into a ‘pharisaical superiority’, in which we thank God that we are not as other nations are, and single out this or that country for invective or discrimination. See An Exceptional Nation. National greatness has nothing to do with claims of racial, moral or civilisational superiority, with crushing others in trade, or forcing our ideas on them. If we profess to be a Christian nation, then in our pursuit of greatness we should be guided by Christian principles at home and abroad. See John Bright on International Intermeddling, and Psalm 15.