Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  Farewell to Barn and Stack and Tree

  On 22 March 1985 a statue of Housman was unveiled in Bromsgrove High Street. Having been pedestrianised, the street was not as Housman had known it, but the weather seemed about right, the skies dark, the rain falling heavily and steadily. By the time of the unveiling, the downpour had stopped and large crowds had gathered to witness the Duke of Westminster pull on the cord that would release Kenneth Potts’s statue from its Union flag shroud. Standing on a rock, Housman is dressed for walking, his cap and walking stick in one hand, his other hand thrust casually into his trouser pocket. He looks down the High Street, which is now undergoing regeneration after a period of sad decay, with nail parlours and pound shops occupying premises that once served more traditional uses. Bromsgrove remains proud of its son, who is commemorated by five individual plaques on buildings associated with him, including Perry Hall, now a boarding house for Bromsgrove (formerly King Edward’s) School and renamed Housman Hall. The district council in association with the Housman Society publishes a well-designed and informative leaflet which latter-day pilgrims can use to follow ‘The Housman Trail’ in the area.

  Shropshire too has embraced its adopted son in the knowledge that many people are attracted to the region because of Housman and his poems. As Brian J. Bailey writes in a chapter of his Portrait of Shropshire titled ‘Those Blue Remembered Hills’: ‘Rural Shropshire is known the world over, not because of geography text-books or cheap package-tours but because of A.E. Housman.’ Acknowledging this, books about the county frequently mention or quote Housman, sometimes pointing out discrepancies between what he wrote and what the tourist might find, as at Hughley. Bailey rightly insists that ‘The purpose of art is exaltation, not topography, and what suited Housman’s poetic purpose has exalted this county’, and most guidebooks concur. H.W. Timperley’s account of Wenlock Edge in his Shropshire Hills is suffused with Housman. He notes the blooming of the wild cherries – the tree Housman had in mind rather than the pink-flowered hybrids that have in places been planted in mistaken tribute to him – and writes, in what is essentially a prose version of ‘’Tis time, I think, by Wenlock town’:

  When it is far away the Edge is often vividly remembered because of flower, tree blossom, or berry, once seen, or maybe usually seen at its best there. Not only the flower, but all the Edge round it is clear to the inward eye, and not coldly as something casually remembered and nothing more, but kindling the imagination, setting it aglow, until an old joy is revived as fresh as new, and one becomes a partly wondering, partly accusing self-questioner, saying: ‘Why am I not there now?’

  Since Housman actually visited Wenlock Edge, Timperley has some justification for describing him as ‘among the Edge’s willing bondsmen and their [sic] poet above all’. The sense of an ancient and mysterious past that is present in ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble’ strikes Timperley while he stands among the remains of the Bronze Age stone circle on another eminence, Stapeley Hill in the south-west of the county:

  There is one moment of the day when the solitude of the circle on its hill, the feeling it rouses that of all we should know about its significance the greater part will never be clearly known, and the far reach of the views to those remote mountain tops make me remember A.E. Housman’s

  Comrade, look not on the west …

  Edmund Vale, in his 1949 book on Shropshire for Robert Hale’s ‘County Books’ series, believes that the works of both Housman and Mary Webb embody a prevalent Salopian characteristic: ‘gaiety and sadness going hand in hand is in the people and in their scenery. You feel it by the Wrekin, and on the Clee Hills’ – apparently blown there from the neighbouring Welsh hills. If this seems somewhat fanciful, it is as nothing to Vale’s account of the burial of Housman’s ashes at St Laurence’s Church in Ludlow. Many guidebooks mention that Housman found his final resting place here, but Vale believes that it was requested that the ashes ‘should be lodged within the fabric of the church. This was done. The place selected was the north wall of the nave […] The ashes of the poet were injected through a joint in the masonry on the outside of the wall and sealed with a grouting of liquid cement. A brass plate marks the site on the outside of the church.’ How Vale came across this preposterous, macabre and wholly untrue story is not known. Anyone less likely than Housman to wish to become part of the fabric of a church is hard to imagine, and his ashes were in fact buried in the ground outside the church, between two buttresses on the north wall. Soil from his two childhood homes in Bromsgrove had not only been mixed with the ashes but was also sprinkled on top of the casket, rather as the Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey in soil imported from the battlefields of the First World War. The tablet on the wall (which is of stone, not brass, and quotes the poem Moses Jackson remembered in his final illness) was already in place, and a simple stone plaque bearing the legend HIC JACET / A.E.H. was placed over the grave itself. The cherry tree subsequently planted near the spot died, as did several successors before it was decided to plant one (a pink hybrid, alas) in another part of the graveyard. In the church itself is a brightly coloured wall-hanging made by the Borderers’ Patchwork and Quilting Group to mark the centenary of A Shropshire Lad.

  Elsewhere Housman’s most popular book has been commemorated on railways and canals and in breweries and nurseries. At the turn of the twenty-first century the British Rail Class 67 mainline locomotives were introduced on Britain’s railway network, among them No. 67012, ‘A Shropshire Lad’, which operated on several lines, including the Wrexham and Shropshire Railway, until the company closed in 2011. In its elegant silver and dark grey W&SR livery, the train was also produced as a 1:76-scale electric model by the well-known Hornby toy company. The real train ended its life with Chiltern Railways, and after it had been taken out of service its nameplate was auctioned for charity. ‘A Shropshire Lad’ far outclassed the other three nameplates at the sale at Pershore in Worcestershire in July 2015 – even ‘Thomas Telford’. Whereas the other plates sold for between £1400 and £3600 (excluding the additional buyer’s premium), a report of the sale stated that ‘A Shropshire Lad’ ‘pulled in a whopping £7,100 plus premium, costing the buyer just under £8,000 and setting a class record by a huge margin. The nameplate was highly fought for in the room but if you’re a Shropshire lad, worked for Wrexham and Shropshire railways and passed out your driving career on 67012 then it must have been worth every penny.’

  The winning bidder would have been able to celebrate with a pint or two of ‘Shropshire Lad’, an ale brewed by Wood’s Shropshire Beers at Craven Arms – a town in which you can also find Land of Lost Content, otherwise the National Museum of Popular Culture. ‘Shropshire Lad’ is a traditionally brewed spring bitter, first introduced in 1996 to mark the centenary of Housman’s volume. According to the manufacturers the flavour is ‘evocative of the county and a bucolic lifestyle’ – and it has proved one of their most popular beers. While Housman – and Terence Hearsay – would surely have approved of this beer, he might have balked at ‘Shropshire Lass’, ‘a blonde stunner […] lighter in strength as well as style’, which was introduced in 2007 in response to requests for ‘a golden ale to complement the strong and traditional virtues of Shropshire Lad’.

  As someone who watched beacons burn for his own monarch and whose youngest brother was a professional soldier, Housman might also have been pleased that a narrowboat called Shropshire Lad, manned by military personnel seriously injured in Afghanistan, took part in the Thames pageant organised for the present Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June 2012. Gardeners, meanwhile, can plant a rose named ‘A Shropshire Lad’, a peach-pink climber introduced by the nurseryman David Austin in 1996 to mark the book’s centenary. Austin has patented a collection of ‘English Roses’, bred to retain all the advantages of old roses but without their drawbacks, and this one is vigorous, repeat flowering, highly scented, and (unlike Housman) almost thornless.

  Housman’s spirit and words have been invoked a
s the centenary of the First World War is being marked around the world, a four-year act of commemoration that has resulted in all manner of events, exhibitions, books, films, concerts and recordings. Regardless of chronology, Housman continues to be associated with the national trauma of 1914–18. In the run-up to the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice on 11 November 2008, one of the poems displayed in London’s tube carriages as part of the ‘Poems on the Underground’ initiative was ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose’, written about the fallen of the Boer War, but like much of Housman’s poetry, both timeless and saying in a few words all that needs to be said. New settings of ‘The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair’ have appeared on centenary albums, and in new anthologies of First World War poetry Housman frequently takes his place alongside the soldier-poets. This is perhaps as it should be, for he was the supreme elegist of and for his age. He may not have been a combatant like Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, reporting back from the front line the shocking cost of modern industrialised warfare, but he understood those young men who had marched away in 1914. He knew, and could convey in poems that anyone could understand and appreciate, their moods, their fears, and what they had in their hearts. He also understood the world they had left behind them and distilled in his poems the essence of a rural England that was already passing in 1896. This may not be a real place, but it was one that people recognise and for which they still search. We all have our lands of lost content.

  And we all have our Moses Jacksons, people we have loved unwisely, secretly, consumingly, and with little prospect of reciprocation. ‘I suppose you have read A.E. Housman,’ the Second World War poet Keith Douglas wrote in 1939 to a young woman he was unsuccessfully wooing. ‘If you will take as from me the saddest and most moving love poem he ever wrote, and read it well, you will have much better what I want to say than I could tell you.’ This is one of the roles poetry plays in our lives: to put into words what we cannot, or at any rate not so effectively and memorably. For those who care about academic league tables, Housman may be a minor poet rather than a major one, but, as Auden pointed out, this ‘does not mean that his poems are inferior in artistic merit to those of a major poet, only that the range of theme and emotion is narrow, and that the poems show no development over the years. On the evidence of the text alone, it would be very difficult to say whether a poem appeared in A Shropshire Lad, published when he was thirty-seven, or in Last Poems, published when he was sixty-three.’ Another way of putting this would be to say that Housman’s poetry constitutes a coherent, consistent and instantly recognisable body of work.

  Housman’s notion that poetry should provide ‘that thrilling utterance which pierces the heart and brings tears to the eyes’ is what his own poems have done over many generations. The ‘peculiar function of poetry’, he said in his Leslie Stephen Lecture, was ‘to transfuse emotion – not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader’s sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer’. This direct connection between poet and reader, producing vibrations like those of a tuning fork that has been gently struck, is one of the principal reasons why Housman’s poetry has been taken into people’s hearts. A contemporary commentator described Housman’s lecture as ‘notably independent of current fashion’, and it was delivered at a period when the current fashion was for intellectualism in poetry, for the complex and allusive poems of T.S. Eliot and the rising generation headed by W.H. Auden. We know, however, that Auden rated Housman highly, while Eliot, who sent Housman an advance copy of Journey of the Magi inscribed with his ‘respectful homage’, is reported to have remarked: ‘We should all write like Housman – if only we could.’

  Fashion, literary or otherwise, was not something that greatly interested Housman. A Shropshire Lad had stood apart from the modish urban poetry of the period in which it was published and has survived many other fluctuations of literary taste since then. As the decades have passed, the book’s reputation has ebbed and flowed among our cultural arbiters, who are perhaps more swayed by fashion than the ordinary readers for whom Housman wrote his poems. And it is those ordinary readers who have done something much more important. They have continued to respond to the poems as Housman hoped they would, have felt that vibration he wanted to set up in them, and have continued to read A Shropshire Lad for 120 years.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Twenty years ago John Walsh commissioned me to write an article for the Independent about the centenary of A Shropshire Lad, and my first thanks go to him for planting the seed of this book in my mind. My agent, David Miller, watered that seed and contributed numerous ideas and suggestions for its cultivation. As always, Christopher Potter is my first editor, and my thanks go to him for this and for much else. Richard Beswick at Little, Brown was a model of enthusiasm, patience and editorial ruthlessness, while Iain Hunt provided considerable help compiling the source notes and saw the book through to press with great speed and efficiency. I’d also like to thank Steve Gove for his meticulous copy-editing. At FSG, I would like to thank Jonathan Galassi, Ileene Smith, Jackson Howard, Jeff Seroy, Maya Binyam, Charlotte Strick and Claire Williams.

  Many other individuals and institutions have contributed towards this book and my particular thanks go to Jim Page of the Housman Society for innumerable kindnesses; Iain Burnside, and all those involved in the Ludlow English Song Weekend; Salley Vickers, Maggie Fergusson and Michael Ipgrave, Bishop of Woolwich, for providing me with family stories of A Shropshire Lad in wartime; Richard Davenport-Hines for drawing my attention to Willa Cather’s letters and Douglas Hurd’s memoirs; and the late Elizabeth Jane Howard for remembering she had an unpublished letter from Housman somewhere in her files and allowing me to reproduce it here. Several biographies and other studies of Housman, all of which are listed in the bibliography, have proved invaluable, but special mention should be made of Archie Burnett’s editions of the Poems and the Letters, both of which have been on my desk throughout the writing of this book. Among others who have provided assorted material, interviews, information, leads, suggestions, advice, accommodation, encouragement and occasional welcome distraction, I thank Nicholas Allen, Adam Bager, Prasun Banerjee, Sarah Baxter (the Society of Authors), Edward Behrens, Judith Bingham, Thomas Blaikie, Polly Bolton, Mark Bostridge, John Bridcut, Robin Brooke-Smith (Shrewsbury School), Martin Bussey, Richard Canning, Niladri Chatterjee, Barry Cheeseman, Alex Clark, Peter Conradi, Ronald Corp, Minoo Dinshaw, Maggie Elkin, Paul Fincham, Brendan Finucane, Chris Fletcher, Jonathan Gibbs, David Graham, Georgina Hammick, Linda Hart, Selina Hastings, Alison Hennegan, Jonathan Hunt, Jennifer Ingleheart, Graham Johnson, Lyndon Jones, Peter Kurie, Philip Lancaster, Chris Lawrey, Julius Lunn, John Matheson, Jennie McGregor-Smith, Diana McVeagh, Candia McWilliam, Edward Mendelson, Michael Meredith (Eton College), Jean Moorcroft-Wilson, Michael Parkinson, Matt Perzinski, Ros Porter, Simon Rowland-Jones, Alice Sielle, Peter Sisley (the Housman Society), Nicola Starks, Adrian Symons, Ian Venables, Edward Watson, Sarah Watts (University of Southampton) and David Wheeler. My thanks also go to Jonathan Smith and the staff at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, and to the staff of the London Library and the British Library. If I have overlooked anyone, I hope that this will be put down to inattention rather than ingratitude.

  Additional thanks go to Trinity College Library, Cambridge, for permission to reproduce material from their holdings and the photograph of Housman used as the frontispiece. Unpublished writing by Katharine E. Symons is reproduced by kind permission of the Housman Society; the letter from A.E. Housman to Arthur Somervell is reproduced by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of A.E. Housman; the lines from John Masefield’s ‘London Town’ are also reproduced by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield. It has not always been possible to trace copyright holders, and the publishers would be pleased to hear from any who have proved elusive or been overlooked.

  I was for
tunate enough to be born and brought up on the fringes of Housman Country within easy reach of many of the places mentioned in A Shropshire Lad. Having, however, twice failed my driving test in Ludlow, I am eternally grateful to my late father and mother and to my sister, who severally chauffeured me round Housman sites in both Shropshire and Worcestershire. This book is for them.

  NOTES

  *Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.

  The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

  A Note on Sources

  References to quoted material are listed by page number and in order, identified by a brief phrase. Published sources are referred to by the author’s surname, followed by an abbreviated title where necessary. Books and individuals who occur frequently are referred to using the following abbreviations:

  AEH – A.E. Housman

  GR – Grant Richards

  KES – Katharine E. Symons

  LH – Laurence Housman