Ted Hughes

British Library apologises for linking Ted Hughes to slave trade

This article is more than 1 year old

The poet had been wrongly included among more than 300 figures whose collections were associated with wealth obtained from colonial violence

Treasure trove' of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found

Alison Flood

25 November 2020

The British Library has apologised to Carol Hughes, the widow of the former poet laureate Ted Hughes, after it linked him to the slave trade through a distant ancestor.

Hughes’s name had been included on a spreadsheet from the library detailing more than 300 figures with “evidence of connections to slavery, profits from slavery or from colonialism”. Hughes’s link was through Nicholas Ferrar, who was born in 1592 and whose family was, the library said, “deeply involved” with the London Virginia Company, which was set up to colonise North America.

Ted Hughes, in 1966. Photograph: Jane Bown

Hughes was not directly descended from Ferrar, who died childless. Jonathan Bate, a biographer of the poet laureate, had hit out at his inclusion on the British Library’s list earlier this week. “Black Lives Matter, but this is going too far,” he wrote on Twitter. “Also, Nicholas Ferrar had no children: are we sure that the connection wasn’t family myth-making? Has anyone actually done a family tree?”

Now the library has publicly apologised for his inclusion, saying that the link should not have been made. “In particular we wish to apologise to Mrs Carol Hughes and to other family members and friends, owing to a reference included in the spreadsheet to a distant ancestor … which we withdraw unreservedly,” said the library. “While the document involved has been removed pending review, this reference will not be made again.”

The British Library said that its curators were working to identify collections “associated with wealth obtained from enslaved people or through colonial violence”, with the aim of sharing the information with researchers. But it admitted that “early presentation of these findings has caused confusion and concern, particularly in relation to connections drawn between named individuals and their ancestors”. “We regret profoundly the distress that this has caused and have removed the spreadsheet pending a review of this research,” it added.

Ted Hughes
David Levine

In a statement to the Times, Carol Hughes welcomed the “full apology” for “highly misleading comments … attempting to link the poet somehow with tenuous allegations of involvement in slavery by someone alleged to be a very distant ancestor who was born in the time of Shakespeare”. She also noted the library’s “acknowledgment of the distress caused by comments on the library’s website that should not have been made, and its assurance that these comments will not be repeated”.

Bate called the inclusion of Hughes “an error on so many levels - not only the tenuous, centuries-old connection, but also the fact that Nicholas Ferrar wrote a pamphlet attacking slavery even before the British slave trade had begun!”

“Over-zealousness of this kind undoes the important work of excavating the history of the institutions that have benefited from slavery - it plays into the hands of both the ‘cancel culture’ and the ‘anti-woke’ press,” he said.

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ferrar is chiefly known for bringing the poetry of George Herbert, which Herbert had asked him on his deathbed to destroy or publish, to public attention. He was also the founder of a Christian community at Little Gidding.

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Ted Hughes and Barrie Cooke pike fishing in Ireland, 1978-9. Photograph: Aoine Landweer-Cooke

 

Treasure trove' of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found

Alison Flood

14 November 2020

This article is more than 10 months old


Affectionate friendship between the two poets and artist Barrie Cooke, united by a love of fishing, revealed in a collection of correspondence that was believed lost

Alison Flood

Saturday 14 November 2020

A “treasure trove” of unseen poems and letters by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke has revealed the depth of a close three-way friendship that one Cambridge academic has described as a “rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group”.

Cooke, who died in 2014, was a leading expressionist artist in Ireland, and a passionate fisherman. Fellow fishing enthusiast Mark Wormald, an English fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, came across his name while reading Hughes’s unpublished fishing diaries at the British Library. He visited Cooke in Ireland, and discovered the close friendship between the three men.

“Barrie told me that ‘outside Seamus’ family, I’m the closest man to Seamus alive’. And he said, ‘Ted and I have fishing in common, and Seamus and I have art and mud in common’,” said Wormald.

The academic visited Cooke again years later when the artist had developed dementia, and read to him from Hughes’s fishing diary, written in February 1980, detailing the moment the poet laureate landed his first Irish salmon.

“The diary ended: ‘It’s the most beautiful fish I’ve ever seen, said Barrie.’ And Barrie, who’d been listening rapt, said, ‘I did say that, Mark.’ And then he said, ‘would you like to see the letters?’” said Wormald.

Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Barrie Cooke, c 1980. Photograph: The Estate of Barrie Cooke

Cooke showed him an old cardboard box stuffed with “the most wonderfully expressive letters”, photographs showing the affection the three men held for each other, and 85 poems by Hughes and Heaney, some unpublished; a collection that was believed to be lost, and reveals the direct influence Cooke had on the work of the two poets.

In a letter from Heaney in March 1972, written as he was deciding to embark on life as a freelance writer, his friend: “Your confidence in us engendered confidence in ourselves and it is strange how the secret will to change burgeoned after that morning’s walk at Luggala and then, more irresistibly, in your kitchen on the Saturday night when we ate the pike. The first supper!”

There were 25 letters from Hughes, written over 30 years; a poem by Hughes titled Trenchford on Dartmoor, written for Cooke and his then-partner Jean Valentine; and a sketch by Hughes called The Dagda Meets the Morrigu on the Unshin Near Ballinlig, an angler’s retelling of Irish mythology.

When Hughes spent time with Cooke, his head and heart turned “Irishwards” towards a “freedom and flow”, he wrote; finding an “inner freedom” that made him and his son Nick “completely happy”, as he told Heaney.

“For Ted Hughes, tortured soul, controversial figure, to find that complete happiness is pretty remarkable,” said Wormald.

The friendship between the three men was already known: Heaney and Hughes worked together, while Cooke is credited for suggesting and illustrating Hughes’s poem The Great Irish Pike. But the collection also contains “wild” images of Hughes’ work Crow, and shows that their collaboration went back to the early 60s.

Ted Hughes cartoon of the Morrigu eating the Dagda, plus marginal notes and poem Trenchford on Dartmoor in the guest book of Cooke and Valentine. Photograph: Mark Wormald/The Estates of Ted Hughes and Dennis O’Driscoll and of Julie O’Callaghan

“For both Heaney and Hughes, evasiveness was a really significant principle of their work and they needed to protect their privacy. They regarded Barrie as a kind of secret friend … an exemplary devotee of art, and drew huge strength from that. And they knew that basically it was under the radar,” said Wormald, who has co-edited two books on Hughes, and whose book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes is due to be published in 2021.

“The tenderness of the letters between these men takes my breath away, and it transforms what we know about their work and personal lives. Hughes emerges as an absolutely devoted father, a wonderfully generous friend, and someone who lived and breathed nature through fishing. And Cooke’s influence on Heaney, as an artist who was completely committed to the natural and mythological history of Ireland’s waters, was real and enduring, as was the nourishment Heaney took from their friendship.”

Cooke’s daughters gave Pembroke College, Hughes’s alma mater, first option to acquire the collection.

In a video by Cambridge University about the acquisition, the academic describes the “deep triangular friendship” as “a rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group, but completely unrecognised”.

Pembroke College will now catalogue and curate the collection in its library, with a series of exhibitions to follow.

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‘People think of poetry as deeply off-putting and not their cup of tea. But the stuff of poetry is humanity’
... David Constantine

David Constantine wins Queen's gold medal for poetry

Poet laureate Simon Armitage, a previous winner, praised the humanity of the author’s work ‘noticing and detailing the ways of the world’

Alison Flood
Fri 18 Dec 2020 13.25 GMT

The Queen’s gold medal for poetry has been awarded to David Constantine, a “long overdue” prize for a writer praised by the poet laureate, Simon Armitage, for his “humane” writing.

Constantine is the 51st recipient of an award for excellence in poetry that dates back to 1933, and includes Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and WH Auden among its former recipients. A poet, translator and novelist, Constantine published his first collection, A Brightness to Cast Shadows, in 1980. His 11th, Belongings, was published in October.

“Above all, David Constantine is a ‘humane’ poet – a word often used in connection with his work, as if in noticing and detailing the ways of the world he is doing so on behalf of all that is best in us,” said Armitage, who received the medal in 2018 and who, as the current poet laureate, chaired the committee that chose Constantine.

Constantine said he was “completely overwhelmed” when he was informed by Armitage of his win. “These past few days I have been thinking of the many people, living and dead, who have accompanied me in the writing of my poems. It has made me all the more grateful for this generous award,” he said. “The kind of poetry I write and have written from the age of 16, has depended almost totally on people – having people around me whom I wanted to write about, or who encouraged me, whom I loved, or loved me. That’s become very, very clear now – how I’ve been helped along the way, by people whom I think of as touchstones of what I should try to be like.”

He pointed to his grandmother, whose husband was killed on the Somme. “She couldn’t speak about it until right at the end of her life and I was the person she spoke to about it, and I suddenly knew what it was my responsibility to try to do.” He wrote about his grandfather in the poem In Memoriam 8571 Private JW Gleave, in his first collection.

Constantine said he was very touched to be described as humane. “People think of poetry as deeply off-putting and not their cup of tea. But the stuff of poetry is humanity. It’s what we are and our relations with the world around us, which is getting increasingly catastrophic,” he said.

“So much is going wrong at the minute, so grievously wrong. I don’t think poetry can put it right – proper humane politics might begin to put it right. But poetry keeps on saying what it is we risk losing, what we are losing and what we might do about it. It is a celebration of things that are threatened, things without which life isn’t worth it.”

Constantine was one of the first poets published by the small press Bloodaxe, in 1980. Its editor Neil Astley said he “knew immediately on reading his first manuscript that this was a poet whose distinctive tone and voice was fully formed and very different from anyone else’s, yet steeped in the lyric and narrative traditions of English and European poetry – and most importantly, informed by a generous spirit and profoundly humane and compassionate vision of the world.

“His poetry has a remarkable unity of thought and feeling, formally exact but free-ranging, highly musical and rhythmically adventurous at the same time,” said Astley. “The recognition he has received through the award is both well deserved and long overdue.”

Lake by David Constantine

Sole self that day with a working pair of legs

A beating heart, attentive senses, climbed

High enough, far away enough, slowly

Against the river’s hurry, quietly

 

Against the din of it, keeping close to it 

And passing the highest shieling that an ash

Had burst as thinking will a head, I came 

At dusk to a lake in its own terrain.

 

There the hills backed off in a spacious horseshoe

On that flat plane I was the only upright 

The banks were low, looped in a contour line

The lake had nothing to mirror but the sky.  

 

Sole self I bedded down close as I could

To listen: lapping, birdlife homing, settling

I watched the wind shunting the low black clouds

In tatters, fast, under a pale still ceiling.

 

Woke once or twice feeling a breath of rain

Glimpsed, silver on black, bits of a star-figure

Heard very high a flight of fellow humans

Touching on dawn after the black Atlantic.

from Belongings (Bloodaxe Books, 2020)

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Ray Bradbury poem about George Bernard Shaw's spade unearthed

George Bernard Shaw

Ray Bradbury poem about George Bernard Shaw's spade unearthed

Auction of Shaw’s much-loved spade will include SF legend’s unpublished tribute to the playwright and his garden implement

Alison Flood
Monday 22 September 2014



Ray Bradbury wrote of George Bernard Shaw’s spade: ‘The ghost of Shaw climbs up through me’

A spade once owned by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, which was hymned in verse by a subsequent owner, Ray Bradbury, will be auctioned in Los Angeles later this week.

Bradbury, a lifelong fan of Shaw’s, was given the spade as a Christmas present. Shaw had used the tool to plant a mulberry tree on his 80th birthday, in 1936. In the lengthy, unpublished poem, titled GBS and the Spade, Bradbury wrote of how, holding it, he could feel the Nobel laureate’s influence:

I hold the dear spade in my hands,

Its vibrant lightnings strike and move along my arms, 

The ghost of Shaw climbs up through me

I feel a fiery brambling of chin 

I feel my spine 

Stand straight as if a lightning bolt had struck 

His old voice whispers in my ear, dear boy 

Find Troy, go on, dig deep, find Troy, find Troy!

The Fahrenheit 451 author, who died in 2012 at the age of 91 and left some of the most acclaimed science fiction of the 20th century, had spoken many times of the influence Shaw had on his writing. In Steven Aggelis’s Conversations With Ray Bradbury, he said Shaw was the one person he would choose to interview, describing him as “the greatest playwright of our century”, and adding: “There was no one anywhere near him when it came to playwriting.”

Ray Bradbury’s unpublished poem, GBS and the Spade

Shaw won the Nobel prize in literature in 1925, “for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”.

The spade bears a plaque reading: “With this spade Bernard Shaw planted a mulberry tree in the public garden in Great Malvern on his 80th birthday, the 26 July 1936. He then presented it to Harry Batchelor Higgs, his gardener and faithful friend for 34 years’’. It will be auctioned online by Nate D Sanders on 25 September, alongside other items from the Bradbury estate, including a large collection of art owned by the late author. Bids for the spade are to open at $5,000 (£3,000).

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The 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
Photograph by Our Lady’s School

Unseen JRR Tolkien poems found in school magazine

Two works by the Lord of the Rings author discovered in the 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire

Alison Flood

Tuesday 16 February 2016 12.34 GMT

Two poems by JRR Tolkien, in which The Lord of the Rings author writes variously of “a man who dwelt alone/beneath the moon in shadow”, and of the “lord of snows”, have been discovered in a school magazine in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

Believed to have been written while Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, the poems were found in the 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire. The discovery was made when the US Tolkien scholar Wayne Hammond contacted Our Lady’s headteacher, Stephen Oliver. Hammond had found a note from Tolkien in which The Hobbit author mentioned that he had published two poems in a magazine he named as the Abingdon Chronicle.

Hammond realised this was Our Lady’s school magazine, and got in touch with Oliver. Initially, the latter could not locate the correct edition of the magazine, and passed Hammond on to the archives of the Sisters of Mercy, who had founded the school in 1860.

“Then, while preparing for an event for former pupils of the school, we uncovered our own copy and I saw the two poems Mr Hammond had been looking for. My excitement when I saw them was overwhelming. I am a great Tolkien fan and was thrilled to discover the connection with the school,” said Oliver.

The first poem, The Shadow Man, is an early version of a poem that Tolkien went on to publish in his 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It tells of “a man who dwelt alone/ beneath the moon in shadow”, who “sat as long as lasting stone,/and yet he had no shadow”. When “a lady clad in grey” arrives, he wakes, and “clasped her fast, both flesh and bone;/and they were clad in shadow”.

The second, Noel, is a Christmas poem, albeit one set in scenery that would not be out of place in Middle-earth. “The hall was dark without song or light,/The fires were fallen dead,” writes Tolkien, going on to portray “the lord of snows”, whose “mantle long and pale/Upon the bitter blast was spread/And hung o’er hill and dale”.

The school is now planning to show the poems at an exhibition about its history. “Both poems are very atmospheric and imbued with an air of mystery. I was very moved when I first read them,” said Oliver.

“Noel is a beautiful and unusual take on the Christmas story, set in a wintry landscape. The focus is on Mary, which may be why Tolkien wrote the poem for the school magazine, given that we are dedicated to Our Lady. The Shadow Man is also a very beautiful story, about two people finding each other and thereafter casting only one shadow – it feels like a poem about marriage. The Shadow Man is incomplete until a woman comes to him and relieves his loneliness.”

Oliver is confident the poems “will be enjoyed by lovers of Tolkien everywhere”. Fans of the novelist have been given a wealth of previously unpublished material to enjoy in recent years, from last year’s release of his retelling of the Finnish epic poem The Story of Kullervo, to the unfinished Middle-earth story The Children of Húrin. David Brawn, Tolkien’s publisher at HarperCollins, said that some unpublished poetry had been included in the revised edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 2014, and that “there is often scope to add rare material to future revised editions”.

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Odes to roads, sausages and other English icons penned for National Poetry Day

Odes to roads, sausages and other English icons penned for National Poetry Day

Organisers of the annual celebration have commissioned works giving voice to local landmarks in ‘a lyrical mapping of the English landscape’

Alison Flood
Thursday 6 October 2016 07.00 BST

From the “worst road in Britain”, the “Essex/Suffolk artery” of the A12, to Leicester’s Golden Mile via a Lincolnshire sausage, a host of poets have adopted the voices of local landmarks in order to mark Thursday’s National Poetry Day.

Channelling WH Auden, who wrote that a poet’s hope is “to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere”, the 40 poets were commissioned by BBC local radio to dream up poems in the voices of local landmarks. Luke Wright takes on Suffolk, plumping for the A12, “England’s crude appendix scar … salt-baked, pot-holed, choked with cars”, which will “take you from the fug and sprawl / to Suffolk’s icy brine and foam”.

Lucy Ayrton writes about the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, and Akshay Sharma takes on Leicester’s Golden Mile of restaurants, writing of how: “My pavements are infused with molecules of spice, rice and diced onions,/Concoctions of flavours from neighbours’ kitchens/and ageless mixtures of this that and the other.”

“They said I could choose what I wanted, and the clock tower jumped out at me first – it’s an old, famous landmark in the centre of town, and I was going to do something on time,” said Sharma, who is Indian. “But I thought instead of something closer to me and my heritage and culture: the Golden Mile. People come from all over to see it and to shop and eat there.”

Gemma Baker, meanwhile, adopts the voice of a Lincolnshire sausage for her contribution, which includes these poignant lines: “my happiness fell still / as one by one they fed my family / into the grill,” before adding that “in shock and grief I rolled to the floor / convinced there may be something more / than an early cremation / I launched myself / in aim of Lincoln station.”

The poems are being broadcast on BBC local radio’s 40 stations, in what organisers of National Poetry Day said was “an unprecedented lyrical mapping of the English landscape”.

“When you hear a poem about a place, that place changes: poetry puts it on the imagination’s map. Westminster Bridge and Tintern Abbey were transformed in the public mind when Wordsworth wrote about them, just as much as the White Cliffs of Dover were transformed when Vera Lynn sang about them,” said Susannah Herbert, the director of the event, which is run by the charity the Forward Arts Foundation.

“National Poetry Day’s collaboration with the BBC local poets makes the whole nation look at itself in a different way: we hope it inspires countless local acts of celebration. These 40 poems – and the thousands they will inspire – mean that beloved local landmarks that have been taken for granted will become part of … the nation known and cherished by the imagination.”

The theme for this year is “messages”, with organisers inviting the public to “say it with a poem”, whether that’s “thank you”, “sorry” or “I love you”. Events are taking place around the country, from Sally Crabtree in Staffordshire who is using carrier pigeons to fly verse across the skies as the world’s first “poetry postie”, to St Pancras International’s transformation into “poetry central”, with poetry-printed train tickets given to travellers and poet-storytellers drawing commuters into immersive experiences.“National Poetry Day’s collaboration with the BBC local poets makes the whole nation look at itself in a different way: we hope it inspires countless local acts of celebration. These 40 poems – and the thousands they will inspire – mean that beloved local landmarks that have been taken for granted will become part of … the nation known and cherished by the imagination.”

The day will kick off with Prince Charles’s reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem The Shipping Forecast on the Today programme, a recording created for a new Northern Irish community centre, Home Place, which celebrates the late Nobel laureate’s life and work. It will also be marked with a special postmark from the Royal Mail, while on Channel 4 and More 4, poems from young refugee and migrant poets including 19-year-old Afghan Shukria Rezaei and 18-year-old Vivien Urban, originally from Hungary, will replace the introduction on the idents throughout the day.

Edinburgh will feature an answerphone turning anonymous messages into poems, while Wales will see four young poets composing 100 poems in 24 hours, taking suggestions for subjects from social media and BBC Radio Cymru.

Further afield in Antarctica, British Antarctic Survey scientists will be reading a climate change poem by Nancy Campbell to the penguins.

“A poem can reach places that prose just can’t,” said Herbert. “That’s why we’re inviting all with anything important to say today, to say it with a poem. It can be new or old, utterly original or a familiar favourite. It can be deep and dark, funny or memorable. By enjoying, discovering or sharing a poem – words that draw attention to themselves – you change the nature of the national conversation.”

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