A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Wallas was a close friend of the Webbs. Beatrice described him as ‘six foot with a slouching figure, good features and genial open smile, utterly unselfconscious and lacking in vanity or personal ambition. Without convictions he would have lounged through life – with convictions he grinds … To his disciples he appears a brilliant man, first-rate lecturer, a very genius for teaching, a suggestive thinker and a conscientious writer … A lovable man.’64 Her observation that Wallas ‘imparts the morality and scrupulousness … [that] appeals to those of the upper and educated class who have good intentions’ accurately described the Bunting milieu.65 The academic, journalist and editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, remembered Wallas as, ‘the most kindly of human beings, immensely stimulating and encouraging to the young. He was an eager rationalist, who resigned from the school where he taught in Highgate because he disapproved of religious instruction. He resigned from the Fabian Society in 1902 because, as he said, “the Webbs had an inadequate conception of liberty”.’66

  By the time Bunting would have become conscious of the presence of such an articulate and well-connected friend Wallas had become a considerable public figure, pacing impressively on the international stage. Beatrice Webb looked back in 1916 with a degree of pleasant surprise: ‘The oddly slovenly young man of a quarter of a century ago … is now a leader of thought, with a settled and sufficient livelihood and a body of devoted disciples … His books are widely read in the U.S.A., his lectures are well attended, he sits on royal commissions, and is often referred to and consulted.’67

  A loud raspberry of farewell

  In 1915 Bunting discovered a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that a librarian at the school had hidden so no young people could be debauched by it (at least as he told the story over sixty years later).68 He was captivated by its music and that same year he delivered a paper on Whitman, which he said ‘won a more or less national prize – a national prize for Quaker schools, or something of the sort … – to the great annoyance of my schoolteachers. And this caught the eye of an old gentleman living in Sheffield who got on his pushbike and rode thirty or forty miles in order to call on the fifteen year old critic of Whitman. That was no less a person than Edward Carpenter.’69 Bunting later came to disparage Carpenter’s championing of Whitman: ‘Whitman’s imitators were mere catchers at ideas & vague words – Edward Carpenter – with no understanding of what made him as a poet.’70 Ackworth’s headmaster, Frederick Andrews commented on Bunting’s essay at the end of term gathering on 30 June 1915 that, ‘Basil Bunting in an essay, with youthful ardour and perhaps more than youthful erudition, championed the poetry of Walt Whitman.’ 71 Andrews went on to reflect on the standard of scholarship in the school and it is clear that Bunting was at an extreme end of the intellectual spectrum:

  An essay on a subject such as ‘Walt Whitman,’ always raises a certain doubt as to how much is the boy’s own thought and how much he has got from books. I think the immaturity of that particular essay proves that it was strictly original, but as a further proof, since hearing the essay, I have remembered that I had a short reply to a history question by the same boy, which was answered without books or any material at hand. The question came in the ordinary course of history and was taken from an examination paper. The question was:– ‘ “The Spacious times of Great Elizabeth.” What does this mean? Illustrate the saying from the history you have learnt.’ This was the answer:– ‘ “The Spacious times of Great Elizabeth” Under the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth, all the knowledge, all the experience, all the discoveries, gleaned during the troublous years past were put to use, a good use, the development of England. Religion settled into an easy course of moderate toleration. The new world was explored, exploited, colonised. The new learning manifested itself in the writings of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and others. The new national spirit, roused to wrath against the Spaniards, defeated them in the Channel when the Armada came up from Cadiz to conquer England. New charity made the poor law; new trade the East India Company. The whole horizon was enlarged, and England took a new place in the state system of Europe. For the first time we tasted real power, and it so intoxicated us, that we have been unable to forget it since, and always think of Elizabeth as England’s Greatest Monarch.’72

  This is not a bad spontaneous answer for a boy who, if he had turned fifteen, had only just done so. In July 1915 Bunting, along with Greenbank, Stephenson and fifteen other students passed the Northern Universities’ School Certificate,73 and in the summer of 1916 Bunting together with Stephenson obtained the Senior School Certificate (Matriculation), with Distinction in English.74

  As if to illustrate the Quaker ambivalence to the Great War (see p.58–64) or perhaps, more accurately, to expose it, Bunting submitted an essay, ‘Roncevaux’, to the Ackworth School Essay Society in December 1915. In July the following year he still considered it good enough to enter for the school’s prestigious Broadhead Competition, and to help him win it ‘for skill in debating ability in speaking’.75 ‘Roncevaux’ can be read as a contemporary morality tale dressed up as a conventional chivalric romance, those stories of legendary heroes who ‘are tragic in the highest sense of the word, for they are weighted with a burden of sorrow too heavy for any tale of lesser things’.76 The sound of William Morris stamping around heavily behind Bunting as he wrote this essay is sometimes a little distracting.

  ‘Roncevaux’ tells the story of Charlemagne’s campaign against the Saracens in Spain in 777. Hearing that the Saxons have crossed the Rhine to attack his northern border the Emperor holds a war council during which the ‘faint-hearted knight’ Ganelon urges appeasement of the German hordes and ‘open & honest’ Roland advocates speedy reprisal. The way Bunting describes the hero of the peace faction wouldn’t have endeared him to the pacifists around him: ‘[Roland] detested [Ganelon’s] cruel yet weak smile; the narrow, shifty eyes; the effeminate mode of dress & of speech; the craven heart; in fine, all the outstanding characteristics of the man who had spoken for peace.’ In the battle that follows Ganelon’s betrayal of the Emperor it is Roland’s Frankish warriors who are glorified: ‘picked veterans, dark-complexioned, rough, weather-beaten soldiers, hardened by a score of campaigns & battles against Saracens, Saxons & Lombards. There was not a novice, not a faint heart amongst all that company; nor had one man of them ever known defeat.’ In Bunting’s version Roland’s army is wiped out in a Boy’s Own bloodbath, with towers of corpses dominating the landscape, but not before Tennyson is invoked, in case anyone is still not getting the point.77 What is provocative about ‘Roncevaux’ isn’t its pro-war stance but its glorification of heroic battle in a submission for a Quaker school’s most prestigious prize. It may be possible to argue that ‘Roncevaux’ demonstrates that the price of warmongering is complete destruction, but I don’t think that was what Bunting was getting at. Like the final blast of Roland’s horn that was heard ‘from Seville in the south to Aix in the north, from the seashore in the west to Rome in the east’ ‘Roncevaux’ seems to blow a loud raspberry of farewell to the values espoused by Ackworth School.

  LEIGHTON PARK SCHOOL, 1916–1918

  Despite his parting shot Bunting seems to have regarded Ackworth School with great affection. Ackworth archivist, Frederick A. Davies, recalled a former housemaster telling him that ‘one dark rainy evening a man came through the front door of the school, thrust a package into his hand with a muttered “I thought my old school might like this” and disappeared. It was an autographed edition of his work.’78 Affection then, but typically no sentiment. His start at his next school was charged with sentiment but no affection.

  Bunting was becoming increasingly unsettled in this period. A letter dated 30 May 1916 to Leighton Park’s Headmaster Charles Evans from Frederick Andrews at Ackworth hints at previous problems while, typically, accentuating the positives:

  I think Bunting does show real talent in literature & in grasp of history. I think his failure in Latin arises from a disinclinal [?] for
its study – In fast time he has worked at the subjects he likes & given the go-bye to others – & now he finds it hard to recover lost ground. He is now much more amenable to advice & discipline – & will I think fall in comfortably with your school life … If you have the 1918 A.O.S. report you will find on pp. 81–2 a short history answer wh. I think is good for a boy of 15 yrs of age as he was when he wrote it.79

  His parents were aware of Bunting’s educational shortcomings and possible mental instability. As Tim Newell Price, until his recent retirement Leighton Park School’s archivist, says, ‘the matter of “mental balance” requires some close attention. How far was it dramatic delusion – part of a front to protect his real self from the outside world? Much evidence from October 1916 suggests that he had been on the verge of insanity at times for at least a few years.’80 Thomas Bunting sent an application form and medical report to the school on 6 June 1916 and the covering letter to Evans acknowledged that Andrews’ assessment had been correct: ‘the boy has not worked at subjects which did not attract him, but, from some talk I had with him recently, I fancy he is beginning to realise the folly of this’.

  Thomas’ application form81 confirms that ‘the boy’ is not a member of the Society of Friends, that he has shown aptitude for history and English, that his favourite pursuit is reading and that he is destined for a career in ‘journalism, or other writing’. It specifies that he is to learn Greek rather than German and, surprisingly perhaps, that he is not to learn a musical instrument. Thomas believed that his son would proceed to Oxford or Cambridge ‘if he take a scholarship’. The form has two simple notes in Evans’ hand, ‘accepted’ and ‘Grove House’. There is something deeply poignant about this document. It compresses sixteen years of Bunting’s life into terse answers to thirteen questions and, in that subdued Edwardian way, it expresses hopes and fears for a troubled boy in a deeply troubled world. As Thomas completed this form the reverberations of Dublin’s bloody Easter Rising were still thudding across the Irish Sea. It had been over for barely a month and Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Tom Clarke had been executed by the British at Kilmainham Jail at dawn on 3 May. Another twelve rebel leaders were executed in the following days causing political uproar throughout the nation.82 The defining naval battle of the war, Jutland, had raged during the previous week and, although it had been a British victory, it launched a deep and thick cloud across the country. The Daily Express headline took a pessimistic line, ‘Heavy and Unaccountable British Losses’. As Thomas wrote his letter to Evans news of another naval disaster, the sinking of HMS Hampshire, was emerging. The loss of the Hampshire to a mine off the Orkneys was bad enough. The fact that it took Field Marshall Horatio Herbert Kitchener, hero of Omdurman and Secretary of State for War, down with it was a national disaster. Matters were, if anything, even worse on land. As Thomas completed his form, urging Evans to teach his son Greek rather than German, the Battle of Mount Sorrel had been bloodying the fields around Ypres for four days. Nearly fifteen thousand allied and German soldiers died around Mount Sorrel between 2 and 14 June 1916. The start of the truly terrible Somme campaign, the biggest military disaster in British history, was only three weeks away. In the context of this carnage there is something quietly moving about the ordinariness of Evans’ note, ‘accepted’, in the top left corner of Thomas Bunting’s application for a place for his son at Leighton Park School.

  Less moving, but perhaps more revealing, is the medical report that accompanies the application, detailing Bunting’s medical history. We learn that he had suffered with endocarditis (inflammation of the lining of the heart) at the age of six (but Thomas thought it had not left a permanent lesion), that he had already had measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, influenza and mumps, and that he had been vaccinated once in infancy. Thomas was, however, doubtful of the diagnosis of ‘scarlatina’ (scarlet fever). More importantly, Thomas refers to his son’s ‘billious headaches’. He is uncertain if they are ‘gastric in origin, or true migraine’. These headaches surely explain some of what Newell Price describes as Bunting’s ‘wild moods’ at Leighton Park.83

  Law and liberty

  The sixth form at Leighton Park was a new challenge. There were no girls for a start, and it was culturally different, ‘one of the expensive public schools for the rich – the kind of place in which Cadburys and Frys get their education’.84 He was there for just four terms, starting in September 1916, but he packed a lot in. There is a great deal of archival material relating to his time at Leighton Park and we can, for the first time, get a clear picture of Bunting as a young adult. According to Tim Newell Price, the teenage Bunting was, ‘unusually precocious, forthright and determined. He was also a great poseur and rather emotionally unstable with it … he suffered the strain of containing the convictions of an unusually dedicated and outspoken adult within a youth’s body.’85

  Bunting seems to have been accepted quickly by the school community and soon involved himself in the school’s cultural societies. He launched his public career at Leighton Park on 13 September 1916 when he read a paper to the 140th meeting of the Essay Society. The minute for that meeting records that

  B. C. Bunting read an essay on ‘Law and Liberty’. He said that the spirit of British law was just; but the letter unjust. He laid down as the guiding principles of state affairs collectivism, liberty of conscience, equality and mercy, and looked towards a communism like that of the early Christians for the fulfilment of these ideals. The style of the essay was considered very successful in that it conveyed the desired ideas without distracting the attention. The only adverse criticism offered was upon the use of the personal pronoun: no definite decision was arrived at upon the subject by the Society, feeling being strong in both directions. The discussion which followed upon the matter of the essay was poor, owing to lack of free expression of opinion.

  This rather puzzling final sentence is clarified in the report of the debate in The Leightonian of December 1916: ‘Not a very good discussion followed, since there was unfortunately not time to consider the whole question of Socialism, and it was difficult to discuss the essay without taking up the larger issues.’86

  Bunting’s paper, ‘The Relation of the State and the Individual Liberty and Law’, exists in Leighton Park’s archive. It is a remarkably sure-footed and mature interpretation of the law’s continuing failure to live up to the principles of Magna Carta. It starts with a confident flourish:

  We English are accustomed to look on our own country as the home of liberty. No-where else, say we, has man so great a measure of freedom; no-where else is equal justice so carefully maintained; no other land can boast a Magna Carta, a Habeas Corpus Act. In our arrogance we sing that Britons never shall be slaves, & far & wide we proclaim that the Union Jack means liberty, happiness & freedom from oppression. We rarely stoop to argue with those who question our superiority; and yet it behoves us as a nation either to cease from this bombast, or to bring forward proofs of the truth of our professions.

  Bunting’s argument in this essay rings with the preoccupations of his later life: ‘Greed, that greed which is so common that economists call man a “covetous machine”, has brought about the downfall of Christendom … The greed of manufacturers created modern poverty.’ He defines the spirit of British law:

  All men are equal, & have equal rights in all things: everyman, while bowing in matters of state to the will of the majority, is free to hold & to express any beliefs whatever: & the precedents of Pym and Hampden show that conscience has an absolute veto on any law: & the trial of prisoners shall be conducted with every mercy of safeguard for the liberty of the prisoners. Or, in fewer words, Equality; Freedom of conscience; Collectivism in state affairs; & Mercy. These are the watchwords of the Social Revolution.

  I have utterly failed to be happy here

  Minutes of a meeting of the (Senior) Essay Society on 9 October 1916 report that he was elected as a member of the society and, furthermore, that he and one N. L. White ‘were elected
representatives of the Society on the Union Committee for the coming year’. Bunting was also ‘appointed to serve on the Committee to arrange for next meeting’. It had been a busy meeting for him. Newell Price provides a useful gloss on this. Leighton Park had been established:

  to provide a very broadly based ‘polish’. Learning to manage a community was part of it, especially for those who were (in due course) expected to play a leading role in public life. The Union Committee was a mixture of senior boys and masters in a school which turned out to be more like an enlarged country house family served by a small team of private tutors. The Committee decided about everything from expenditure on newspapers, a wide range of hobbies and societies and the running of games. They even appointed the cricket professional. Leighton Park was still essentially like that when Basil Bunting arrived.87

  It’s unlikely that Bunting’s views on cricket were valued too highly88 but the fact that he was elected to this important committee within a month of joining the school indicates that he was not entirely unclubbable. Nor was he averse to the society scene. He was elected a member of the Debating Society on 17 November 1916 and to the committee on 29 January 1917, and he was also elected a member of the influential Literary, Historical and Archaeological Society (LHA) in his first term.

  All this committee work notwithstanding Bunting had a terrible start at Leighton Park, being ‘defiantly homesick’ according to Newell Price. Within a month of arriving he wrote an extraordinary memorandum to the head teacher, Charles Evans. It is extraordinary enough to quote in full: