Cotswold lawyer and poet revisited

W.H.Davies

W. H. Davies

A few weeks ago we were puzzling over a fragment discovered in the archive of Jot HQ. This was a draft in pencil of one page of a letter written in reply to literary journalist Ivor Brown around 1943. The hand was very hard to read at times, but persistence paid off and eventually I produced a decent stab at the letter. From its contents I deduced that the writer was probably an elderly lawyer from the Cotswold region of the UK who had been friendly with tramp poet W. H. Davies, enjoyed the poems of John Betjeman, Clare and Blunden and had published a slim volume of verse himself, as had his son, a former army officer.

Further research revealed that this apparently obscure amateur poet was the rather famous ‘ friend to  the poets ‘ John Wilton Haines, from Hucclecote, near Gloucester, who over nearly five decades befriended , not only Davies, but a number of  twentieth century literary figures, including Edmund Blunden, John Masefield, W. H. Hudson, J. C. Squire, Seigfried Sassoon,  Eleanor Farjeon, J. Gould Fletcher, Sir Edward Marsh, Walter de la Mare, C. Day Lewis, Lascelles Ambercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Ivor Gurney, Robert Frost, Wilfred Gibson, James Elroy Flecker and Edward Thomas. He also communicated with some eminent musicians and composers, notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald Finzi and Herbert Howells.

Born in 1875 to a lady from India and a Gloucester solicitor whose family had practised law for generations, Haines trained as a solicitor after leaving school and then joined the family firm. Always passionate about classical and modern literature, and a dedicated book collector, Haines made it his business to seek out local authors and  poets, notably those ‘ Georgian ‘ poets who had settled in and around Dymock, on the edge of the Forest of Dean. He made friends with them and offered them financial help and legal advice. In return many sent him their latest work for his opinion. In 1921 Haines himself had a collection of his own poetry privately printed. On his death in 1960, Haines’ son Robin ( b 1913), whose own slim volume, Somewhere, Somehowhad come out in 1942, inherited his father’s literary archive, which eventually passed to his widow. It was she who donated the papers to the Gloucestershire Archives, where they can be examined today.  [RMH]

 

Walking with G.M. Trevelyan (1910s)

Found– Walking by G.M. (George Macaulay) Trevelyan* (Mitchell, Hartford, Dry_stone_wall_20Connecticut 1928)  – a special American edition. The great historian ‘s paean to the joys of walking (” I have two doctors, my left leg and my right..’) was published first as an essay in 1913 in Clio, a muse, and other essays literary and pedestrian and the American introduction  by J. Brooks Atkinson notes that the walking world has changed much since then: “..the motor car has completely separated the walkers from the riders. It lays a new responsibility upon the walkers to conduct themselves nobly in God’s light.. they cannot be road walkers now, like Stevenson, since roads have  become arteries -hardened arteries- of traffic. They are pushed willy-nilly into the hills, meadows and woods beyond the clatter and the evil fumes of the highway..” (he then launches an attack on the new walking clubs- ‘their walking is a bastard form of motoring.’) Trevelyan’s essay recalls a  world now largely lost, although our great modern walkers (Iain Sinclair, Robert Macfarlane, Will Self) still find great places to ramble. GMT writes:

The secret beauties of Nature are un-veiled only to the cross-country walker. Pan would not have appeared to Pheidippides on a road. On the road we never meet the “moving accidents by flood and field ” : the sudden glory of a woodland glade ; the open back-door of the old farmhouse sequestered deep in rural solitude ; the cow routed up from meditation behind the stone wall as we scale it suddenly ; the deep, slow, south-country stream that we must jump, or wander along to find the bridge ; the northern torrent of molten peat-hag that we must ford up to the waist, to scramble, glowing warm-cold, up the farther foxglove bank ; the autumnal dew on the bracken and the blue straight smoke of the cottage in the still glen at dawn ; the rush down the mountain side, hair flying, stones and grouse rising at our feet ; and at the bottom the plunge in the pool below the waterfall, in a place so fair that kings should come from far to bathe therein yet is it left, year in year out, unvisited save by us and “troops of stars.”
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Banned books

Lummox coverBanned books: No 12: Lummox by Fannie Hurst

Found in the Summer 1924 issue of Now & Then (Jonathan Cape) is this brief announcement:

‘LUMMOX finds new admirers every day. Miss Hurst is expected in England shortly, and many admirers are hoping to meet her. She is a prominent figure in New York literary and dramatic circles and has a number of friends in Europe also. The ‘ ban ‘ of the circulating library still remains, but the book is on sale at the bookshops. The current impression is the third.’

This ‘ban’ is a bit of a puzzle. The journalist for Now & Then places the word in quotation marks, which suggests that although Mrs Hurst’s book was in the shops, it was not available for borrowing in certain circulating libraries, though these libraries are not specified. Nor is it clear whether these libraries are in the U.S. or the U.K. A thorough online trawl has revealed nothing on this issue.

At the time Fannie ( or Frances ) Hurst, as the report suggests, was an immensely popular, best-selling American author of rather sentimental and melodramatic novels, many of which had been adapted for the cinema. It has been claimed that she accepted $1m for the film rights of one particular novel. As for the problematical Lummox there seems little in this tale of a young female immigrant who is exploited and abused by her rich employers that could possibly offend even the most delicate sensibilities of an average circulating library subscriber. However, Hurst’s proto-feminism and support for the oppressed in society might have touched a few nerves among members of the wealthy middle class in post-war Britain. [RR]

 

The Writers’ and Artists’ Year-book 1923

 

Artists and writers yearbook 1923 001In the year in which the UK edition of The Waste Land was published, as well as novels by Lawrence, Wells and Huxley, comes this copy of The Writers and Artists Year-book. Evidently owned by a lady who wished to make money from her writing, the blank pages at the back of this book devoted to a record of contributions includes mostly household and beauty tips, such as ‘ Dangers in the Kitchen ‘ ,‘To Clean Hats ‘, ‘ My Great Grandmother’s Beauty Tips’, and ‘Adulterated or Not ‘, all of which were accepted. However, it seems as if this writer was also concerned with the role of women in society; she sent an article entitled ‘Women as Prison Wardresses’ to the Yorkshire Post, which though it was not published there, was re-sent to the Yorkshire Evening Post, where it appeared in May 1923 in the ‘Work for Woman’ series as ‘The Prison Wardress’. Other magazines to which she sent feature articles include Farm, Field and Fireside, Pearson’s and the Westminster Gazette.

Our freelance journalist also appears to have been interested in contributing verse. In the section covering ‘ Magazines and Journals’ she has underlined in pencil references to ‘ verse ‘ , ‘ humorous verse’ or ‘ poems’ in the Times (really?), the Prize, Lady’s World, Ideas, Humourist, Home Notes, Graphic, Colour, Chummy Book Annual, Children’s Companion, Boys’ Own Paper, among other periodicals. There are pencil marks next to the names of various American periodicals, too. Continue reading →

Joan Abbay – Art & The Holy Grail

IMG_1131

Found —  a slim volume of poetry from 1927 Lodequest: A Ballad of the Grail (Ancient House, Ipswich 1927) by Herbert Hudson. His wife produced the illustrated cover and also contributed one of the poems. She was Joan Abbay an East Anglian artist, and this is the only example of her work currently online, although it is possible some of her paintings are occasionally sold at auction.

The introduction to the book places the Grail legend in context, quoting from Jessie L Weston’s The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913)- (also an influence on a somewhat better known poem*):

“Every student of mediaeval literature will bear witness that there were strange current stirring in those days, that more was believed,that more was known than the official guardians of faith and morals cared to admit; that much, very much of this undercurrent of yearning and investigation was concerned with the search for the source of life; life physical, and life immortal. I contend that the Grail romances were a survival that period of unrest….The secret of the Grail I hold to be above all a human problem. When seekers after Truth will consent to work together in harmony, doing full justice to each other’s views, then,and not till then, the secret of the Grail will cease to be a secret.” Continue reading →

The Wheel of Orffyreus 2

The second and last part of a chapter from this fascinating forgotten work Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Allan, London 1928) by R.T. Gould. Gould was a polymath who appears to have tolerated fools and cranks gladly...however Johann Bessler was no fool (although he may have been insane) and no less a figure than the philosopher Leibniz and  and the scientist and Newtonian Willem Jacob 's Gravesande thought he had the secret of perpetual motion. Gould gets to the heart of the matter -as always with footnotes blazing...

Was Orffyreus honestly deceived when he wrote down such an incorrect description (for so we must regard it)† of his own mechanism? The thing is unlikely–but it is possible, as a later case has sufficiently shown.

 † The supposition that the wheel was kept going by external power does not, of course, exclude the possibility that it also contained "overbalancing" mechanism. If well made, this would waste very little power, though it could not generate any: and it would certainly impress an amateur mechanic like the Landgrave–the only man who ever saw it.

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The Wheel of Orffyreus 1

Yet another chapter from this fascinating forgotten work Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Allan, London 1928) by R.T. Gould. Gould was a polymath who appears to have tolerated fools and cranks gladly...however Johann Bessler was no fool (although he may have been insane) and no less a figure than the philosopher Leibniz and  and the scientist and Newtonian Willem Jacob 's Gravesande thought he had the secret of perpetual motion. Gould gets to the heart of the matter -as always with footnotes blazing...this is the first part:-


ORFFYREUS' WHEEL

The history of human folly, on any scale commensurate with the vast and "ever-increasing amount of material available, remains to be written. A casual effort in this direction was made by Sebastian Brant, who published his Ship of Fools* in 1494. But while this book may have inspired Erasmus to take up the cudgels "for self and fellows", and produce his Praise of Folly,† its satire fell, for the most part, on deaf ears. Centuries later an atrabilious Scotsman, peering at the world from an anacoustic study in Chelsea, recorded his conviction that it was peopled by "too many millions, mostly fools”–a sweeping statement, but embodying an essential truth. Most of those, for example, who have had experience (internal or otherwise) of Government Departments can testify to having, like Oxenstiern, been amazed at discovering how little wisdom it takes to govern the world; and if there be any truth in the often-quoted assertion that "a nation gets the government it deserves”, Carlyle's apothegm must be regarded as resting upon a very solid–one might even say dense–basis of fact.

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Vulcan 2

The second part, from the fascinating forgotten work Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Allan, London 1928) by R.T. Gould, on the non-existent planet Vulcan. The first part can be found here.

Vulcan Landscape (from Star Trek, the Motion Picture)
 Leverrier, once convinced as to the real character of Lescarbault's discovery, lost no time in performing the necessary calculations which that worthy had found so baffling. He obtained, for the new planet's mean distance from the sun, about 13,000,000 miles, and for its period of revolution 19 days 17 hours. Lescarbault, who had seen Mercury in transit over the sun with the same telescope, and the same magnifying power, on May 8, 1845, considered that the new planet (which he decided to name "Vulcan") had a disc rather less than a quarter as large. Accordingly, Leverrier calculated that Vulcan's volume was probably about one seventeenth that of Mercury. It did not escape him that, supposing its mass to be in anything like the same proportion, Vulcan could not be held responsible for more than a small fraction of the disturbances observed to be taking place in Mercury's orbit.

   He also calculated that Vulcan ought to be in transit on the sun's face on or about April 3rd and October 6th of every year, at which times it should, of course, be visible in the same manner as it had been to Lescarbault. He did not hold out much hope of its being seen at other times, since he computed that its lustre would be so feeble that it might easily remain unseen, even during a total eclipse of the sun.*

   * Proctor has questioned this statement. By his calculations, Vulcan and Mercury, seen during eclipse at their greatest angular distance from the sun, would appear about equally bright.

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R.T. Gould and The Planet Vulcan 1

T.T. Gould & his wife Muriel
Found - a fascinating forgotten  work Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Allan, London 1928) by R.T. Gould. Rupert Thomas Gould (1890 – 1948), was a lieutenant Commander in the British Royal Navy noted for his contributions to horology. While in the navy in WW1 he suffered a nervous breakdown. During long recuperation, he was stationed at the Hydrographer's Department at the Admiralty, where he became an expert on various aspects of naval history, cartography, and expeditions of the polar regions. He gained permission in 1920 to restore the marine chronometers of John Harrison, and this work was completed in 1933. Jeremy Irons played him in Longitude, a dramatisation of Dava Sobel's book about John Harrison Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, which recounted in part Gould's work in restoring the chronometers.

Something of a polymath, he wrote an eclectic series of books on topics ranging from horology to the Loch Ness Monster. He was a member of the Sette of Odd Volumes (Brother Hydrographer) and the book Oddities is dedicated to the club. He was a science educator, giving a series of talks for the BBC's Children's Hour starting in January 1934 under the name "The Stargazer", and these collected talks were later published. He was a member of the BBC radio panel Brains Trust. He umpired tennis matches on the Centre Court at Wimbledon on many occasions during the 1930s. This is the first part of the chapter on the planet Vulcan (more to follow)-

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How to be Happy on the Riviera 4


The concluding part of a posting of a complete book How to be Happy on the Riviera by Robert Elson W. (Arrowsmith Ltd., 11 Quay Street, Bristol, 1927).The appendix has a wealth of information, much of it aimed at the long stay vacationer and the expat or 'remittance man' (similar to the trustafrian of our time). The address and name of the British Consul in Monte Carlo (G W Hogg) the address of the British Library and the Anglo-American Library (in the Grand Hotel building.) There was even a weekly paper for the British abroad,The Cote D'Azur,that came out on a Friday. There is good advice for those who 'winter abroad' -- Hyeres is suggested for those who like it quiet, Monte Carlo for those who want it lively (but the bathing is poor). Also invaluable advice for the journey there, that might still hold true:-
"Don’t trust the time-tables as to there being a restaurant-car on any train southward from Paris (except the Calais–Méditerranée); bring a tea-basket with you and be prepared to grab things from the buffets at the Gare de Lyon and at Marseilles, or you may go foodless."

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How to be Happy on the Riviera 3

The penultimate part of Robert Elson's 1927 book dealing with indoor and outdoor amusements and of course gaming. There is a good description of a Gala dinner which has the authentic 1920s tone:

 "A gala dinner may be ...a more elaborate entertainment indistinguishable from a fête, the room being decorated for the occasion–sometimes in a really artistic manner–and a good programme of show-turns provided. There are sure to be surprises–toys to make noises with, balloons, etc. The peculiarity of surprises is that they are always the same. Occasionally really attractive gifts are distributed, or prizes given in connection with dancing or a tombola (raffle). If you are in an appropriately happy-go-lucky mood, a gala is usually quite enjoyable. It is good to play the fool sometimes, pelting and being pelted by the occupants of neighboring tables with little coloured balls, and trying to hit people at a distance with harmless projectiles. Also, you never know what may come of it. A happily-married lady of my acquaintance first made her existence known to her husband by hitting him on the ear with a flying sausage; he asked her to dance, and the thing was as good as done."

Such goings on would have been vieux jeu by the 1940s. Interestingly many fetes described have gone - The Venetian Fete at Cannes has been replaced by a film festival, car shows and uphill car racing at Monte Carlo has become the Rally, but the Burning of the Boat still goes on and the Battle of Flowers - so all is not lost.

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How to be Happy on the Riviera 2

The second part of a posting of a complete book How to be Happy on the Riviera by Robert Elson W. (Arrowsmith Ltd., 11 Quay Street, Bristol, 1927). There is plenty on food and restaurants (including menus and tips on coffee, ice cream and liqueurs) and some good descriptions of gamblers in Monte Carlo - 

"Little old women in Victorian black silk dresses and bonnets; others attired in the fashions of twenty or thirty years ago; exotic-looking young women, wearing extravagant parodies of the fashions of to-day – some exactly like cinema vamps; women like men, and girls like boys. A duke who is a frequent visitor summed it up neatly: 'There are always a lot of queer wild-fowl about'...you may see incredibly ancient men; wild-looking men with immense manes of hair; gaunt men with sunken cheeks and bony hands who might have come out of a novel by Mrs. Radclyffe, unnatural-looking young men who might have been created by Mr. Michael Arlen; people who impress you as half crazy, others who look as if they had been dead a long time, only they don't know it.'

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How to be Happy on the Riviera 1927

We are putting up an entire book on Jot101, a fairly early book on the Riviera. Very much of its time with local prices, information about the weather and sports facilities and recommendations for hotels and cafes and cabarets. Here are the first 4 chapters...


HOW TO BE HAPPY
ON THE RIVIERA

BY ROBERT ELSON


First published in August, 1927

Printed in Great Britain by J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd., 11 Quay Street, Bristol

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Bloomsbury lampooned (1925)

Confident that art and brains
end with them (and Maynard Keynes)
the school of Bloomsbury lies here,
greeting the unseen with a sneer.

From Lampoons by Humbert Wolfe (Benn 1925) a collection of humorous epitaphs of (mostly) living writers.

Of Galsworthy he writes:

Ash to ash, to earth the earthy,
was not spoken by John Galsworthy.
Like his books the soul of John
goes marching on, and on, and on.

It is interesting to note that as early as 1925 Bloomsbury was recognised as a 'school' and its members a rather contemptuous, haughty crowd...Humbert Wolfe is somewhat forgotten and almost uncollected, except his Circular Saws-- wanted only in its dust jacket, designed by Evelyn Waugh.

Coloured pyjamas in Alassio

From Gone Abroad (London 1925) by the somewhat forgotten travel writer Douglas Goldring. The chapter 'In Liguria' has much on the beach resort of Alassio at the time much favoured by the English. However according to Goldring they tended to leave at the beginning of June when the heat was becoming too much, to be replaced by native Italian tourists. Goldrings notes on fashion are interesting, portraying a lost world of men and women walking around the town in coloured pyjamas and screaming Italian bathers with exotic swan shaped rubber rings:

Then follow the two months of its "grand season," when prices are nearly doubled and the town makes more money than during the whole half-year of the English occupation. On July 1st, from Milano and Torino, comes the first train-load of holiday-makers, and from then onwards till the end of August the town is gradually packed to suffocation with Italian business people and their wives and families. The transformation is amazing. As if by magic the sands become covered with bathing-tents and thronged with bathers, from Santa Croce almost to Laigueglia. The sea is studded with little white-sailed yachts, canoes and motor-boats. Inside the town, caffés one had scarcely noted during the winter blossom out with bands and concerts and are filled with visitors eating gelati, spumoni and cassate, or drinking their "caffea espresso." The narrow Via Umberto Primo—nicknamed by the English "'the main drain "—swarms with young men in brilliantly coloured pyjamas. The shops are freshly stocked, and many of them display fantastically shaped bathing bladders of red india-rubber, some in the form of fishes, others fashioned like swans. And everywhere one sees pyjamas—purple pyjamas, blue pyjamas, pink pyjamas, striped pyjamas. So attached are the Italians to this form of costume that, despite the entreaties of the hotel-keepers, they often wear their pyjamas at dinner, and even dance in them afterwards. . .

To the traveller familiar with a French or English plage the bathing at Alassio, from the spectacular point of view, is depressing. Anyone expecting to find dark-eyed houris tripping about on the sands in brightly coloured maillots would be doomed to disappointment. To begin with, unlike her brothers, the middle-class girl of Northern Italy, in my experience, is rarely blessed with charm or comeliness. For ten Apollos, with bronzed skin and rippling muscles, you will not encounter more than one passably good-looking female. And whereas the men are allowed to bathe in comfort in short drawers, the girls are forced, by Italian prudishness, to clothe themselves in thick, voluminous and unbecoming garments of which the predominant colour is a dingy black. Their method of bathing is for a group of about a score to enter the sea together. They walk in up to their knees, form a circle, and bob up and down, uttering the while shrill screams of terrified delight. They can continue doing this for about two hours at a time.

Hope Mirrlees The Counterplot (1925)

Found in the Donald Rudd collection of detective fiction at the back of Death of a Millionaire (Collins 1925) amongst the publishers announcements of forthcoming books this summary of the plot of the very rare Hope Mirrlees novel The Counterplot. These publishers advertisements  are useful to dealers, scholars, collectors etc., as they are able to ascertain what a book is about without the tedium of reading it. Also they are particularly useful for collectors of fantasy to see whether there is any supernatural content. Hope Mirrlees did write one fantasy Lud-in-the Mist published by Collins in 1926. This novel was described by Neil Gaiman as 'one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written.' Her novel The Counterplot contains within it a 100 page play. Hope is also celebrated for her ultra modernist long poem Paris (Hogarth Press 1919).

The Counterplot

The Counterplot is  a study of the literary temperament. Teresa Lane, watching the slow movement of life manifesting itself in the changing interrelations of the family, is teased by the complexity of the spectacle, and comes to realise that her mind will never know peace till, by transposing the problem into art, she has reduced it to its permanent essential factors. So, from the texture of the words, the emotions, the interactions of the life going on around her, she weaves a play , the setting of which is a Spanish convent in the 14th century, and this play performs for her the function that Freud ascribes to dreams, for by it she is enabled to express subconscious desires, to vent repressed irritation, to say things that she is too proud and civilised ever to have said in any other way.

The Art of Dancing by Anna Pavlova

Found in the first issue of The Dancing Annual (1923) from the Mayfair Press in London. Anna Pavlova had been living in London for over 12 years and this appears finely written, possibly ghosted, with some vehemence towards a style  ('the lowest slang of dancing') that was prevalent in the early 1920s and has never strictly gone away...

The Art of Dancing by Anna Pavlova

To me, the fascination of dancing lies in this: you can express with it so many moods, and so many beautiful thoughts and poems.

People imagine that self-expression in dancing is only for those who, through many long years of training, have arrived  at the perfection of their art in its highest forms of drama, poesy, or tragedy.  But though this is true, so far as it goes, it does not mean that all those who are not expert ballet dancers are for that reason unable to enjoy some share of its pleasures.

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Fairies at Work and Play

From Fairies at Work and Play by Geoffrey Hodson. Published by the Theosophical Society in 1925 (and still in print) the book is a sort of Varieties of Religious Experience anthology of meetings with and sightings of fairies, elves,devas, sylphs, 'mannikins', gnomes and brownies. All the observations are by Geoffrey Hodson (1886-1983) who wrote many other religious and occult works in a long and productive life.

Dancing Fairies
Lancashire, 1921

We are surrounded by a dancing group of lovely female fairies. They are laughing and full of joy.

The leader in this case is a female figure, probably two feet high, surrounded by transparent flowing drapery. There is a star on her forehead, and she has large wings which glisten with pale, delicate shades from pink to lavender; in rapid movement, however, the effect of them is white.

Her hair is light golden brown, and unlike that of the lesser fairies, streams behind her and merges with the flowing forces of her aura. The form is perfectly modelled and rounded, like that of a young girl; the right hand holds a wand.

Although her expression is one of purity and ingenuousness, her face is at the same time stamped with a decided impression of power. This is especially noticeable in the clear blue eyes, which glow like flame, and have all the appearance of a living fire. Her brow is broad and noble, her features small and rounded, the tiny ears are a poem of physical perfection. There are no angles in this transcendently beautiful form. The bearing of head, neck and shoulders is queenly, and the whole pose is a model of grace and beauty.

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Rant against War (Charles Richet)

An impressivee  rant against war by the Nobel Prize winning French scientist Charles Richet published about 1925 in his book Idiot Man or The Follies of Mankind (L’Homme Stupide.) A now rare and undeservedly forgotten book in which Richet seems to see ahead to all the millions of deaths in wars of the next 90 years...

  When I evoke the vision of war–bloody, cruel, hideous war– burning, shuddering pictures instantly swarm into my mind, so numerous and vivid that I am dazed by them.
  Thanks to war, the proofs of human ineptitude are so blatant that any words could only weaken them. But I shall do my best to dam this overwhelming flood of ideas and to calm my indignation.
  It is futile to reiterate that war means death, death, and yet again death. But it is not these countless deaths that are my chief charge against it. After all, we must all die someday. A little sooner, a little later, what does it matter?
  There are fifteen hundred million human beings on the face of the globe, and glorious war of 1914–18 was only able to destroy fifteen millions. That's nothing, for these fifteen millions represent a mere fraction of mankind; one per cent, which is next to nothing. Two years of increased fertility will make up for this holocaust. And I am almost tempted to use the words of Napoleon, who murmured with a kindly smile as he gazed on all the corpses which his vain glory had piled up on the field of Eylau: "One night in Paris will make up for all of this."

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