Two years on one HESFES advert: try an archive investigation
An old advert names 2003 at the top and 2002 in its booking details. Use a calendar and a clearly labelled ticket-budget exercise to test the evidence.
The heading of an old HESFES advert names 2003. A few inches further down, families writing off for a booking form are told to address their envelope to “HES FES 2002”. Suppose you had to write a museum label for this scrap of festival history. Which year would you put on the card, and what would persuade someone who picked the other one?
You can try the puzzle at home with a pencil, two slips of paper and the original advert in the Education Otherwise newsletter. Find printed page 40 in the newsletter; a PDF viewer may use a different page counter. If two of you are playing, let one person start at the logo and the other at the booking details.
This is an investigation of a historical advertisement, not a current event or ticket offer. HESFES Archive is an independent publication, not the original festival organiser. Treat the old web address and booking details as part of the document; do not try its historical contact information to arrange a visit.
Let the Saturdays decide
Write 2002 on one slip and 2003 on the other. Now look for something in the advert that you can check without trusting either printed year. About halfway down, the organisers invite families to Charmouth in Dorset from Saturday 10 May to Saturday 17 May. The useful word here is the one a hurried reader might skip: Saturday.
Open a calendar for May in each year and find the 10th. In 2002 it fell on a Friday. In 2003 it fell on a Saturday. Put the 2003 slip beside the dates. A younger child can count seven squares along to the 17th. An older one might spot why checking that second Saturday adds less evidence than it first appears to. Once you know the day of the week for the 10th, the 17th has to match.
The source is the April 2003 issue of the newsletter. Taken together, the 2003 heading, calendar and issue date give us good grounds to label this an advert for the May 2003 festival. Keep the 2002 slip, though. Someone looking at the postal details really did read that year correctly. The page gives us no explanation for why it appears there.
What would £100 have bought?
Before putting the advert away, try reading it as a family deciding whether to pack a tent. An adult festival ticket with camping was advertised at £34. Children could camp free, for £7 or for £23, depending on age. Could two adults and two children get in and camp for £100?
Two adults account for £68, leaving £32 for the children. If one child qualified for the £7 rate and the other for the £23 rate, the tickets would come to £98. Two children at £23 each would bring the total to £114. So a family of four could come in under budget, but you’d need one more piece of information to price tickets for your own family. The advert leaves out the ages at which the rates changed. Our archive of HESFES ticket prices shows how the organisers described children’s tickets in other years. Borrowing an age band from a later festival would make the sum easier and the answer less reliable.
Give the advert a museum label
Try writing a label short enough to fit on the back of one of your slips. Start with what a visitor most needs to know: what the object is, where the festival was advertised to take place and when. Choose one detail worth leaning closer to see. The two years would do nicely. So would the £2 left in one imaginary family’s ticket budget. Make clear that the £100 exercise covers the advertised festival-and-camping tickets, not travel, food or the total cost of a holiday.
For a small display, borrow the folded-paper design from our pocket museum workshop. Put your own small May calendar on one panel, the two competing year labels on the next and a note about the conflicting booking detail on the last. Give your visitor the two year slips before you show them your label. If they pick 2002, ask what caught their eye. Then let them turn over the calendar.