A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  8. Searle, 177–8.

  9. Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899. Daimler’s first production motor cars had been seen on British roads since 1896 and aircraft were exploring a new spatial dimension by 1900 (the first Zeppelin).

  10. G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and British Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971), 51–2.

  11. BBNL, 8, 11, 57.

  12. Lawrence’s birthplace, Eastwood, is just two miles from Heanor. Bunting came to regard Lawrence as a ‘terrible jerk’ according to the poet, August Kleinzahler (PAID, 28). He ‘detested Lawrence, first for locking him out on a window-ledge at a party (in Paris, I think) and then for slipping him some hashish baked into a pastry of some sort and not telling him. Bunting did, however, greatly admire Sons and Lovers’ (A. Kleinzahler, ‘Blackfell’s Scarlatti’, London Review of Books, 21 January 1999).

  13. B. Bunting, ‘The Village Fiesta’, Paideuma, Winter 1981, 621.

  14. DESC.

  15. ‘Blaydon Races’, Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs and Readings (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1891), 451.

  16. The salmon story crops up in every account of Bunting’s childhood but I have been unable to find it in any of Bunting’s own recollections. Certainly there is photographic evidence of salmon fishing on the Tyne in the 1890s but the industrialisation of the river would have made it a pretty miserable way of earning a living by 1900. See FORDE 17; BBNL, 11; K. Alldritt, The Poet as Spy (London, 1998), 3; Basil Bunting: 1900–1985: A life in images, 3.

  17. The patient, Dorothy Ellison, remembered that Thomas wore rabbitskin gloves which led her to adjust the ‘Bye Baby Bunting’ nursery rhyme to include a reference to Dr Bunting going a-hunting. See BBNL, 62.

  18. J. M. Taylor, England’s Border Country: A History of Northumberland County Council 1889–1989 (Morpeth, 1989), 3–5.

  19. BB to EP, 21 March 1934, BRBML.

  20. Taylor, 19–33. For Messer see, for example, N. G. Rippeth, Newburn in Old Pictures (Eindhoven, 1993).

  21. J. Forsyth, Scotswood Road (Newcastle, 1986), 17.

  22. DESC.

  23. PAID, 127. Bunting recorded his debt to Edith Nesbit a few years later in a note to Villon: ‘catalytic making whisper and whisper/run together like two drops of quicksilver’, of which he wrote: ‘The image of two drops of quicksilver running together is from the late E. Nesbit’s Story of the Amulet. To her I am also indebted for much of the pleasantest reading of my childhood’ (CP, 225).

  24. DESC.

  25. DESC.

  26. In a curriculum vitae produced in 1952 (BBNL, 14) and repeated in 1963 (DESC). Newcastle Grammar does not feature in a curriculum vitae Bunting sent to the State University of New York in 1966 (BB to Mrs B. White, 24 April 1966, SUNY). Bunting claimed to have spent ‘about a year and a half’ at Newcastle Grammar (DESC) and it is unlikely that such a prolonged period of education would have gone unrecorded.

  27. DESC.

  28. E. B. Collinson (ed.), List of the Boys and Girls admitted into Ackworth School from the year of the Centenary of the School, 1879, to the end of 1930 (Scarborough, 1932), 67–9.

  29. Ackworth School Committee meeting minutes, 25 March 1912.

  30. FORDE, 24. After graduating from Edinburgh University Joyce completed a postgraduate course in Dublin before becoming a locum GP in London, after which she returned to the north east to become a Schools Doctor for Northumberland. Looking back in her mid-eighties she described her career to Victoria Forde as ‘partly assistant to doctors in general and partly in the School Medical Service’. Joyce and her brother were not close as adults but according to her son, Alexander Christie, there was no antagonism between them and he remembers normal family visits during holiday periods. Joyce died in March 1992.

  31. Ackworth School, Ackworth School 1779 to 1929 (York, 1929), 17–18.

  32. DESC. In later life he came to prefer ‘the Great Bible of 1539, which is Coverdale; or, Coverdale revising Tyndale’ (PAID, 128).

  33. E. Vipont, Ackworth School (London, 1959), 145–6.

  34. Vipont, Ackworth School, 158–9. These peace celebrations were scuppered in 1914 by the outbreak of one of the bloodiest wars in history.

  35. Leighton Park School, Leighton Park 1890–1940 (Reading, 1940), 1.

  36. M. Dawson, ‘Memories of Briggflatts’, MTBB.

  37. E. Vipont Foulds, The Birthplace of Quakerism: A handbook for the 1652 country (London, 1952), 18.

  38. Vipont, 13–15.

  39. E. Vipont, George Fox and the Valiant Sixty (London, 1975), xiii. Unless the ghost is that of John Handley, the cabinet maker who married Miss Elizabeth Rushford at the Meeting House in Brigflatts in 1810. See Monthly Magazine and British Register, Volume 30, Part 2, 278.

  40. The first Meeting House was built at Hertford in 1670. Brigflatts was the first to be built in the north of England.

  41. PAID, 168.

  42. Interview with Peter Bell 3 September 1981, published by Keele University, 1995.

  43. Interview with Peter Bell.

  44. CP, 61. Bunting clearly involved himself in the mason’s work. ‘I’ve rubbed down gravestones,’ he told an interviewer in later life, ‘and that’s how I know how it feels to rub down a gravestone. And how your fingers ache on the damn job … and so on. I take care not to write anything that I don’t bloody well know’ (AG, 12).

  45. Ackworth School archive. The dream device seems to have been Stephenson’s default position. ‘A Winter Dream’, an essay submitted to the Essay Society in autumn 1915, applied the same conceit to an Elizabethan ball. Yet it is deeply moving to read these dreamy romantic fantasies in the knowledge that a few months later Stephenson’s body was lying in pieces in a field in northern France. The AOSA Report of 1914 reported ‘a falling-off in the quality of the work of the Essay Society’ but praised Stephenson for being ‘gifted with the skill of the pen’.

  46. Bunting himself was elected as a member of the Lit & Phil on 10 July 1968 and was then made an honorary member on 11 July 1978 until his death.

  47. C. Parish, The History of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, Volume II, 1896–1989 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1990), 28.

  48. Parish, 30.

  49. BBNL, 29. According to Caddel and Flowers Whittaker’s influence on Bunting extended to ‘musical performance: Bunting owned a copy of Whittaker’s North Countrie Ballads, Songs and Pipe-tunes, from which he played (on recorders) and sang throughout his life’. He told an interviewer in later life that as a young man he had been ‘a good amateur singer and of course got some control over my voice that way’ (interview with Peter Bell, 3 September 1981).

  50. DESC.

  51. S. Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 2001), iv, 723 and viii, 660–1.

  52. Parish, 75.

  53. CP, 236.

  54. CP, 235–6.

  55. W. Blake, The Poems, with Specimens of the Prose Writings, of William Blake, with a Prefatory Notice, Topographical and Critical by Joseph Skipsey, ed. J. Skipsey (London and Newcastle upon Tyne, 1885), 32–3. Bunting observed in his introduction to Skipsey’s poems that Skipsey’s prefaces ‘like those of his contemporaries, are too long and too verbose, but sometimes unexpected or acute’. This is one such example.

  56. E. R. Pease, The History of the Fabian Society (London, 1925), 33–5. The Fabians were named after the Roman soldier and politician Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, nicknamed ‘Cunctator’ for his patient war of attrition that defeated Hannibal.

  57. Pease, 40.

  58. The Fabian Society’s membership records are kept in the London School of Economics archive.

  59. Hyndman had a habit of larding his speeches with generous layers of Latin, not a failsafe demonstration of class solidarity.

  60. Searle, 231.

  61. Fabian Tract No. 3 To Provident Landlords and Capitalists, 1885, and Fabian Tract No. 45, 277–8.

>   62. DESC.

  63. L. Robbins, Autobiography of an Economist (London, 1971), 87.

  64. N. and J. MacKenzie, The Diaries of Beatrice Webb (London, 2000), 175.

  65. MacKenzie, 176.

  66. K. Martin, Father Figures (London, 1966), 93. According to his membership record Wallas resigned in January 1904.

  67. MacKenzie and MacKenzie, 370.

  68. CONJ, 212.

  69. PI, 6. Perhaps this was the prize Bunting was referring to when he told Gael Turnbull that he had ‘won prize of £50 when aged 16 to be spent on books. Bought (and read) Abraham Cowley’ (Gael Turnbull, ‘A visit to Basil when he was at Washington New Town’, unpublished journal). It’s a little unlikely; £50 in 1916 would be worth over £4,000 today.

  70. MAK, 92.

  71. Ackworth Old Scholars’ Association Report, 1915, 73.

  72. Ackworth Report, 1915, 81–2. The other end of the spectrum was occupied by a boy who, when upbraided for poor results, assured his teacher that he was doing his best ‘but you see I am naturally rather thick’.

  73. Ackworth Report, 1915, 105.

  74. Ackworth Report 1916, 43.

  75. Ackworth Report, 1916, 52.

  76. ‘Roncevaux’, Ackworth School archive.

  77. ‘Into the vale they rode …’ Perhaps Bunting had been reading Hazlitt’s The Life of Napoleon which draws an explicit parallel between the Emperor and Child Roland, the legendary French courtly hero who defended Christian Europe. See W. Hazlitt, Selected Writings ed. J. Cook (Oxford, 1991), 240.

  78. Letter to Anthony Flowers in Ackworth School archive dated 21 September 1997. This visit took place in November 1968 (BB to GT, 29 November 1968).

  79. Letter from Frederick Andrews, Pontefract, to Charles Evans, 30 May 1916, Leighton Park School.

  80. T. Newell Price, manuscript at Leighton Park School.

  81. The form gives the Buntings’ address as 38 Moorside, Newcastle-on-Tyne.

  82. C. Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (London, 2005), 279.

  83. Newell Price.

  84. DESC.

  85. Newell Price.

  86. Leightonian, December 1916, 95.

  87. Newell Price.

  88. Although he is mentioned as a member of the Grove tennis team in The Leightonian of July 1917, so perhaps Bunting wasn’t as determinedly unsporting as he seemed. The Leightonian of December 1917 recorded that he had also been awarded a Bronze Medallion in the examinations of the Royal Life Saving Society.

  89. Memorandum from Bunting to Charles Evans, Leighton Park School archive. The file note Evans made to himself and the correspondence between T. L. Bunting and Evans are all to be found in the Leighton Park archive.

  90. Leighton Park School, Leighton Park The first 100 years (Reading, 1989), 34.

  91. Leightonian, April 1917, 126. The writer quotes directly from the minutes of the meeting of 19 February 1917. It is likely that the earlier date, that in the minutes, is correct.

  92. W. Blake, The Poems, with Specimens, 27.

  93. BB to TP, 1 October 1974, SUNY.

  94. Minutes of Meeting 141 of the Debating Society, Leighton Park School.

  95. Charles Evans file note, 17 April 1917, Leighton Park School.

  96. ‘The Present Social Condition of Shinfield’, July 1917, Leighton Park School.

  97. Charles Evans, file note, July 1917, Leighton Park School.

  98. Or ‘present Russian Dictator’ as the minutes record, although someone has later added ‘Prime Minister?’

  99. Not quite idle speculation this. In his introduction to his selection of Blake’s poems Skipsey draws a direct parallel between the young Blake and the young Poe. Bunting would have been familiar with Skipsey’s edition of Poe. See E. A. Poe, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe with a Prefatory Notice, Biographical and Critical, ed. J. Skipsey (London and Newcastle upon Tyne, 1885).

  100. The Leightonian of December 1917 recorded the ‘unusual merit’ of the paper, 178. Diana Collecott has pointed out to me that this story might tell us more about Bunting’s alienation from Leighton Park than the medical account of his state of mind favoured by his father and headmaster. It might also tell us something about the way he viewed his relationship with Peggy.

  101. Judges’ report on senior essay prize, 1917, Leighton Park School.

  102. First Hundred Years, 14–15.

  103. First Hundred Years, 153.

  104. Leighton Park School, Leighton Park 1890–1940, 6.

  105. First Hundred Years, 43.

  106. First Hundred Years, 13.

  107. S. Brown, Leighton Park: A History of the School (Reading, 1952), 100.

  108. Brown, 102.

  109. First Hundred Years, 52.

  110. First Hundred Years, 144. It seems that Evans himself may have taken on that role. See Brown, 104.

  111. Brown, 115.

  112. First Hundred Years, 14. This general attitude softened in the twenty years following Bunting’s departure. By 1940 thirty-six of the sixty Old Boys who were at university were at Oxbridge, a remarkable 60 per cent, albeit in a system with far fewer universities than today. See Leighton Park 1890–1940, 4–5.

  113. CP, 236. Perhaps Bunting had heard Newbolt’s lecture, Poetry and Patriotism, at the Lit & Phil in 1914.

  114. H. D., Selected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (Manchester, 1997), 25.

  115. See C. Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War (London, 1978), xix.

  116. Leightonian, December 1916, 96.

  117. The AOSA Report of 1918 is sobering. On page 26 John Allen Greenbank is mentioned as having ‘received grants for training expenses, uniforms, renewal of outfit, insurance premiums or maintenance’. Six pages later Stephenson appears in a lengthy list of old boys who had lost their lives since the previous report: ‘Ernest Cooper Apperley Stephenson (Scholar 1912–1916). 2nd Lt. R. F. C. Killed in action, March 21st, 1918’.

  118. Searle, 510.

  119. Brown, 119.

  120. Vipont, Ackworth School, 159–60.

  121. Ackworth Report, 1915, 81–2.

  122. Ackworth Report, 1915, 82. It is only fair to point out that the crack had existed since the birth of Quakerism in the middle of the seventeenth century. In the 1650s many Quaker leaders were ex-soldiers and Fox and other Quaker leaders broadly supported the activities of the British army and navy. See A. Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England (London, 2011), 107.

  123. Ackworth Report, 1919, 15.

  124. I. H. Wallis, Life of Frederick Andrews of Ackworth (London, 1924), 281.

  125. K. Robbins, The Abolition of War: The ‘Peace Movement’ in Britain 1914–1919 (Cardiff, 1976) 32–3.

  126. A. Hochschild, To End all Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain (Basingstoke, 2011), 353.

  127. Newell Price.

  128. D. Stevenson, With our backs to the wall: Victory and defeat in 1918 (London, 2011), 53. Stevenson’s account of the spring offensives shows just how far the Allies were from scenting victory as Bunting faced a hostile tribunal.

  129. Searle, 723–8.

  130. Searle, 742.

  131. Searle, 743.

  132. Hochschild, 188–9.

  133. Hochschild, 323.

  134. We might recall the effeminate peacemonger Ganelon in Bunting’s ‘Roncevaux’.

  135. Quoted in letter from George Simmers, Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 2011.

  136. BBNL, 23.

  137. Searle, 766. Not all COs justified their stance on religious grounds. Many socialists felt that the working class had no business fighting to maintain a ruling class status quo.

  138. A. Brown, English Society and the Prison: Time, culture and politics in the development of the modern prison, 1850–1920 (Woodbridge, 2003), 145–7.

  139. S. Hobhouse, An English Prison from Within (London, 1919), 5.

  140. Searle, 766. The other was the United States.

  141. Leightonian, December 1918, 254. Wormwood Scrubs was comm
only spelt with two Bs at the time. It is referred to as such throughout English Prisons Today: Being the Report of the Prison System Enquiry Committee (London, 1922).

  142. Bunting told Philip Norman in a feature in the Sunday Times in 1969 that at the Newcastle barracks six men at once were taken out dead. ‘There would have been an even greater scandal, but it happened to coincide with the last big battles of the war’ (P. Norman, Sunday Times Supplement, 19 January 1969, 34–8).

  143. Quoted in K. Alldritt, The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting (London, 1998), 21.

  144. Hochschild, 190–1, 301.

  145. Leightonian, July 1919, 42–3. The ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, actually the ‘Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill-health Bill’, had been brought in by Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government in 1913 to curb the effect of hunger-striking suffragettes.

  146. SSLT, 197.

  147. S. Hobhouse: Forty Years and an Epilogue: An Autobiography, 1881–1951 (London, 1951), 162–4.

  148. BB to TP, 15 November 1982, SUNY.

  149. transatlantic review, Volume 2, No. 1, 132.

  150. DESC.

  151. Hochschild, 366.

  152. R. Dahrendorf, LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford, 1995), 9, 41–3, 104–6.

  153. G. Rose, The Struggle for Penal Reform (London and Chicago, 1961), 108.

  154. W. D. Wills, Stephen H. Hobhouse: a Twentieth Century Quaker Saint (London, 1972), 58.

  155. S. Hobhouse and A. F. Brockway (eds), English Prisons Today: Being the Report of the Prison System Enquiry Committee (London, 1922), 488–500, 636–50.

  156. Hochschild, 325.

  157. PAID, 76.

  158. E. Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London, 1987), 431. It should, of course, be ‘Redimiculum Matellarum’.

  159. DESC.

  160. Interview with Lawrence Pitkethly and James Laughlin, October 1982, in R. Swigg, ‘Basil Bunting on Ezra Pound’, Paideuma, 38, 2011, 9.

  161. Interview with Peter Bell, 3 September 1981.

  162. FORDE, 17. Bunting claimed in 1966 that his poetic vocation came to him on his grandfather’s knee at the age of five (CONJ, 154–7).