Prinknash Abbey Pottery Ashtray, twentieth century. (© The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester, 2025)

Preserved for their evidential and informational value, archives are hallowed forms of material culture, seen as ‘the very life tissue of their creators’ (Pamela Banting). But not all the elements within an archive’s compass are always accorded equal status as written texts and so-called ‘text-like records’ tend to be privileged in hierarchies of importance. Objects, for example, are often orphaned from their archives for, as Arjun Appadurai has observed, ‘western culture has a strong tendency to oppose words and things and to regard the world of things as inert and mute… knowable, only by persons and their words’. But objects accrue life histories (and even have careers) as they move through different hands, contexts and uses, accumulating biographies as they go (Igor Kopytoff). Take for example the object shown here, the ashtray that once belonged to the polymath­mystic-theologian-ecumenist-bohemian-poet-monk and priest, dom sylvester houédard (dsh). Though the practice of smoking was once ubiquitous ‘for adult men and women of all social classes and economic strata’ (Ben Rapaport), it is worth considering its particular significance, and that of its associated paraphernalia, for dsh.

Luckily, glimpses of him smoking survive within dsh’s archival record. In footage shot at the first International Poetry Incarnation in 1965, we catch sight of him in the background as Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, Ernst Jandl and many others tread the boards at the Albert Hall. Sharp in shades and his black clerical suit, his studied gestures, cool to the point of glaciation, evoke the emblematic status of smoking for the beatnik or monknik (in the common monastic parlance of his preferred epithet). A ‘symbol of rebellion against the prevailing conformist norms of society’ (Discount Ciggs blog) his smoking practices were far from being at odds with his vocation as Simon Tugwell, O.P., in his aptly titled essay of 1969 ‘Thoughts of a Monknik,’ explains. Within the context of Vatican II, many saw the monastery as the blueprint for the ultimate counterculture, and the site of ‘the future kingdom, [and] the new creation’.  And the monk, as the ‘full time drop-out’, lived his whole life as a witness to the ‘dream of human society in which love is all you need’. So in returning to the object set before us it comes as no surprise to find this ashtray, despite the lingering second-hand smoke of its last owner, carries a monknik-ness all its own. Inscribed within its form this object embodies meaning through its actual materiality and in its own right (Lisa Darms). For not only was it made in the pottery at Prinknash Abbey by those who formed dom sylvester’s monastic family for over forty years, it was also fashioned from the very clay on which the abbey was built. Invested with powers and associations of its own its presence in dsh’s archive perhaps can show us things that otherwise are missing amid the cacophony of its texts.