Competition no. 224: results

Frank Sidgwick asks for a companion poem to go with Beachcomber’s ‘Epitaph on a Lighthousekeeper’s Horse’, which goes thus:

On December 13 1950, the poem cropped up in a radio broadcast on the Home Service, (recorded two days earlier) in which the poet W. R. Rodgers quoted it admiringly, and Dylan Thomas, chairing, said he couldn’t see why Rodgers though Beachcomber was a good poet. The show was reviewed for The Listener … by Martin Armstrong. Neither Armstrong nor Beachcomber (J.B. Morton, the Daily Express columnist for over 50 years and whose only rival as a humourist of this type is Flann O’Brien) would have been enamoured of Thomas’s work. Morton and Armstrong were NS judges. Thomas was an entrant!

Sidgwick suggested four-liners but gamely half-conceded this was not an absolute rule (not good! competitors hate it when the rules are not precise!). He had not bargained non the number of entries, however (54). The cause was easy to spot – there was a heatwave in July 1934, captured by this picture from the Getty Archive:

While George V stopped watering his gardens, a judge (Lord Merrivale) sat without a wig, and prayers were offered for rain. And NS readers in a mood of indolence, dashed off four line epitaphs to pass the time.

Sidgwick spends his time defining – how judges love doing this – what is not right about various entries. I don’t yet know which entrant was from Wimborne, in Dorset, but he or she sent in four entries that Sidgwick dismisses as being anything but companion pieces to Morton. They refer t0 a lighthousekeeper’s wife, girl, hens and debtors: but they don’t sound similar to Morton. He quotes approvingly two verses that are ‘hors concours’, which presumably in this case means he wrote them himself … a desperate strategy for any judge, although I confess I’ve done it once, as a TES competition judge. Here are Sidgwick’s efforts:

He quotes a failed entry by David Holland, but only out of admiration for the wonderful rhyme for 3d, he/ discrepancy. In the end he splits the prizes into five half-guineas and hands them out – now here’s a surprise! Out of retirement once more comes the veteran Seacape. He is joined on the podium by H.C.M., John Mavrogordato, Saumarez, and Alfred Holland (perhaps related to David? But if not, Alfred Holland was a Derby Methodist who became Clay Cross MP in the 1935 election, in succession to Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party leader (and first cabinet minister), who died in 1935. Holland, who was 35, won the seat as the third Labour MP for Clay Cross in four years. He died of spinal meningitis within a year.His last exchange in the Commons, in April 1936, was about head teachers refusing to allow fresh milk to be delivered. The Scots Conservative MP Frederick Macquisten picked him up on this – he suggested the milk being held back was pasterised, pasteurised milk being ‘devitalised’.

One of the entries has interruptions by Prodnose. A prodnose is an inquisitive person, but Sidgwick is referring to Beachcomber, whose columns were often ‘interrupted’ by Prodnose, playing the part of the readers who were bored with his rambling (in Flann O’Brien’s journalism as Myles naGopaleen, the same role is taken by ‘The Plain People of Ireland’).

 

Competition no. 223: results

Suddenly Vita Sackville-West sets a competition that is very much still in the prompt-box for modern setters: it’s a cento, or patchwork poem (although she doesn’t use this terminology). I’ve done several of these in my time, and very difficult they are, too – especially if you decide to involve an exacting rhyme scheme. They are poems made up – each line being different – of lines from existing poems (it’s generally poems) by different writers. Sackville-West supplies a nicely nonsensical example (rhyming on alternate lines) that she has made up herself:

She doesn’t give the sources, but she asks for an example using living authors (a handy trap for the unwary). Still how many can you recognise? I will return to this in a bit. There are a number of also-rans who have worked hard, but they a) include lines VSW has never heard of, b) include dead authors, or c) are incoherent. Being incoherent is the main difficulty faced.

I’m in a generous mood, so here’s how to do a cento and ensure at least the semblance of coherence. Go with a theme. Look for as many lines as possible that – for instance – mention food, or sunlight, or whatever is appropriate for the competition (being given a theme makes it easier, but it also means you are competing with a whole lot of others who also find it easier). So if it’s a free choice cento, put a brake on your ambitions by setting a theme of your own. Works for me! As VSW notes with surprise, only five took advantage of a title to add the sense of coherence.

She notes with amusement the recurring favourites. Top of the list is the Traveller (‘Is there anybody there’, 9 times), but he only just beats the need to stand and stare (8), with a fat white woman walking in the fields in gloves (4), going down to the sea again (5), not to mention the isle of Innisfree (5), one competitor (‘I.M.H.R.’, anyone recognise him or her?) going to the Isle of Innisfree with a load of Tyne coal.

Author of the triolet about the fat white woman in the field with gloves – Frances Cornford (1886-1960) seen here in 1914, without gloves. Or fat. Or fields. In the 1940s, Cornford won New Statesman competitions as ‘F.C.C.’

 

Allan M. Laing just misses out. There are three winners: Raphanus (pseudonym means ‘radish’, not much of a clue), and (tying) E.J. and J.R.B. – with the first getting £1 11s and 6d, and the other two getting 10s 6d. Raphanus and J.R.B. are footnoted with all their sources; but E.J. isn’t – another to have a go at.

Most of these are familiar to me (although not M. Armstrong’s ‘Miss Thompson Goes Shopping’ – cited in two of the winning centos, and to be found here – it’s Martin Armstrong, of course, and a poem of his from 1921). W.J. Turner wasn’t familiar to me; I had to think before I retrieved R(alph) Hodgson. The NS & N readers are probably a more open-minded lot than WR stalwarts – hence the inclusion of Farjeon.

We are evidently supposed to know E.J.’s sources, so how have you done? Here are the answers:

W.H. Davies: Leisure

John Masefield: C.L.M.

Rudyard Kipling: Buddha at Kamakura

W.B. Yeats: The Two Trees

Rudyard Kipling: Buddha at Kamakura (again – cheating, really)

Alfred Noyes – The Barrel-Organ

John Masefield: Reynard The Fox

John Masefield: The Everlasting Mercy (too much Masefield!)

Rudyard Kipling: Recessional

A.E.Housman: Terence, this is stupid stuff (two lines)

W.B. Yeats: The Two Trees (hmmm!)

Walter de la Mare: I Met At Eve

Walter de la Mare: The Mother Bird

Rudyard Kipling: The Ballad of East and West

Robert Frost: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

W.H. Davies: Leisure

A.E.Housman:  Along the field as we came by (two lines)

W.B. Yeats: The Song Of Wandering Aengus

Rudyard Kipling: The Last Suttee

Rudyard Kipling: Recessional

John Masefield: The Everlasting Mercy

Sir Henry Newbolt: Vitai Lampada

Not quite so impressive when you see that E.J. has only used nine poets! (Perhaps this is why VSW has left out the clues – it does read well, but it surely should.) And E.J. would surely have been well-advised to drop the last verse …

John Masefield

As for VSW’s own work (note that she doesn’t have to stick to her own rule about living poets), the cast list is

Florence Dorothea Hemans: Casabianca (two lines)

Thomas Hood: Faithless Nelly Gray – a misquotation – should be ‘And as his legs were off, of course’

Florence Dorothea Hemans: Casabianca (three lines)

Lord Byron: The Battle of Blenheim (two lines)

As it goes on, it becomes a mash-up of Robert Southey’s The Inchcape Rock, Macaulay’s Horatius, the ballad Sir Patrick Spens, and Tennyson’s The May Queen: maybe not such a great model! The poems here are a catalogue of poems I was forced to learn as punishments at the age of 11 or so.

The Inchcape Rock

 

 

 

 

Competition no. 222: results

Ivor Brown, always a dour judge, asks for an epitaph on a Dead Failure, in any field or sense. He admits to finding as many as forty good ones, and there is a string of also-rans, and a few quotations of which this one, by John A. Bellchambers, struck me as better than the actual winners:

Here lies a lass, who was, alas,
Long left upon the shelf:
She lost all lovers by her gas,
And so she gassed herself.

However, seeing off Sir Robert Witt, TE Casson, H.C.M., W. Leslie Nicholls, and others are David Holland and librarian Mariamne, the former punning on a sense of ‘ploughed’ that is, I think, no longer with us. (It is mid 19th century Oxford slang, and originally meant to be failed – and not to fail, as it is here.)

Competition no. 221: results

One craze that was gathering supporters in 1934 was the caravanning holiday – the acravan had become popular in the twenties, but the thirties (and later the fifties) saw a rapid growth in its popularity. This is from 1929:

The judge is Richard Church. Church notes that caravanning is all the rage, and that ‘motor-gypsies’ will threaten the countryside, requiring competitors to submit six rules. It is interestingly evident that Church is not a regular reader of the competitions – he gives out addresses, for instance, and makes a feature of where the people are from. So we are told that T.E. Casson is from Newton-le-Willows, Lancs. Casson has bothered Church because he (Casson) suggests that there should be no drinking. This does not fit with Church’s view. He conjures up several rural vicars from the entry, and says none of them had a problem with wine. The prize goes to James Hall, and the runner-up (with a very unsatirical set of instructions, leading one to believe that he was a caravanner) is Allan M. Laing. (He is from Lyndale, 19 Wavertree Nook Road, Liverpool 15.)

 

 

Competition no. 220: results

The setter of Competition no. 1 returns again: Martin Armstrong. He is fond, as ever of setting mind-bending (or -numbing) instructions. The premise this time is thart a benevolent dictator has abolished the radio and the printing press. Thirty years later a visitor to the States sends back a letter recalling what has happened. Why is the letter-writer in the States? Why is it thirty years later? I despair. Armstrong has been hoping for a Swift or a Montesquieu or a Voltaire, and ‘inspired frivolity’. However …

‘There were ten fairly good entries,’ says Armstrong, wearily. He quotes Guy Hadley and T.S. Attlee, but suddenly breaks off and awards the prizes to William Bliss and to Molly. Bliss characteristically appends a note, and on this occasion, it’s printed.

The thirty year rule and the USA location (which Molly exploits) don’t seem to add much.

Competition no. 219: results

After spending so long masterminding the competition, the WR’s editor, Gerald Barry, now on the board of New Statesman and Nation, judges his first competition. He has asked for a hate poem, of which he notes that there are examples in The Week-End Book (1923, with sixteen reprints before a new and expanded edition in 1928), an anthology edited by Francis and Vera Meynell that seems likely to be the major influence on the title of The Week-end Review. It was published by the Nonesuch Press. The targets of all this hate were to be either a) the manager of a pretentious country hotel that has monstrously overcharged, or b) a bank Holiday party that has marauded a local copse and uprooted wild flowers (a rare example of marauded as a transitive verb).

‘When I said ‘hate’, I meant ‘hate”, starts Barry, adding ‘and when I said ‘poem’, I meant ‘poem’.’ He concedes that you can’t order up hate as he has done; that a good hate poem is only going to come from genuine rather than manufactured rage. (Barry has had in mind something like Chesterton’s The White Horse (1911), a fragment of which appears in TWB.) Like Moore in 218, Barry has words of greeting for competitors old and new (he adds ‘Hail!’ to Lester Ralph’s name, and picks out W. Leslie Nicholls, Issachar and Marion Peacock amongst others). The prizes are split so that D.C.R. Francombe gets one and a half guineas, while H.C.M and Palermo get a half-guinea each. Francombe is said to be writing in the ‘style of Mrs. Kinsfoot’, a slip for ‘Mrs. Kinfoot’, who features in an elaborate social satire by Osbert Sitwell, printed in 1921 (sixteen pages long, and limited to 101 copies, you can pick one up today for between £100 and £250). Mrs. Kinfoot, an opinionated bore, is said to be based on the society hostess, Sybil, Lady Colefax (1874 – 1950). (There is a surprising number of mis-attributed photos of her on the web, mostly of Nancy Lancaster, who bought Colefax’s interest in the interior decoration firm, Colefax and Fowler, just before World War Two. The firm still exists.) There is one of her with Cecil Beaton, in the 1930s, at the National Portrait Gallery here. An extract from Osbert Sitwell’s lampoon of Mrs. Kinfoot appears in TWB. He, his brother Sacheverell, and his sister Edith, had contributed to The Week-End Review. Curiously enough, Osbert’s third (of three) forenames was Sacheverell.

Here is a sample from ‘At the House of Mrs. Kinfoot’:

The black curls of Mrs. Kinfoot
Are symmetrical.
Descended, it is said,
From the Kings of Ethiopia
But the British bourgeoisie has triumphed.

Mr. Kinfoot is bald
And talks
In front of the fireplace
With his head on one side,
And his right hand
In his pocket.

Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell

The Weekend Book was extremely popular and well-designed. After a collection of ‘Great Poems’ there are several further selections, including the Hate Poems, but also including songs, instructions on making cocktails, sandwiches and playing games of all sorts when out in the country. (The cocktails are lethal, and the presumption is that readers have driven to their destination.) There is an entertaining section on legal untruths, and the whole thing would appeal to anyone who liked This England. I rather like the first two and last two pages, which fold out to make a serviceable chess board and checkers board.

Inside The Weekend Book (1923) – note that it’s a ruler as well.

Competition no. 218: results

A return to the competition for John Moore. He reports the experience of receiving a letter from from an indignant male reader, who accuses him and his novel of ‘bare filth’ and ‘sensual garbage’ that is an ‘insult to the modern girl’. He has been advised that the book has been burned. How ought one to respond to such a letter?

James Hall proposes that he offers to charge him for a copy of his next novel, with all the objectionable bits marked up.  There are many names mentioned as runners-up, several familiar (Southron, W.E.B. Henderson, W. Leslie Nicholls, Marion Peacock, Allan M. Laing), but two notable. One is T.S. – Thomas Simons – Attlee (mis-spelt as Atlee); the other is W.A. Ismay. Tom Attlee (1880-1960) was the elder brother of Clement Attlee, with whom he had a lifelong correspondence – Tom was an architect, and had had a very different Great War – the elder boy had been a conscientious objector. Tom Attlee had also published a book called ‘Man And His Buildings’, an account of the influence of building on the working man’s experience. This was first published in 1919, but based on a talk he had done in 1914. The book was still being reprinted in the 1950s.

Tom, Laurence and Clement Attlee as children

W.A. Ismay – William Alfred – Ismay (known as Bill) was born in Wakefield in 1910, and died in 2001. He was a librarian who lived in a two-bedroom terrace in his home town, and accumulated no fewer than 3,500 pots, a collection that earned him the MBE in 1982, for services to studio pottery, of which he was an enthusiastic proselyte.

Bill Ismay

However, the winners are L.V.Upward and John Rutherford (a nice example of not using the words available):

Moore takes time at the end of his report to say how nice it is to see the Week-end Review crowd, noting in particular William Bliss and T.E. Casson, respectively memorable for adding footnotes, and for quoting from the Classics.

Competition no. 217: results

Gerald Bullett oversees this competition, which asks for an extract from Earle’s Microcosomography (you can read it here). This is the second time it has been used as the basis for a competition (it was used by Anthony Bertram in 170B). The idea is to come up with a denunciation of rearmament, and arms manufacturers (and by the by, to come up with a term of abuse for them). Rearmament had started to become a major issue with the failure of the Zurich arms conference in 1933, and Hitler’s rise to power – and his refusal to be part of the League of Nations. Macdonald’s government hads a huge majority, but he himself was now becoming ill. New Statesman and Nation was vocal in its antipathy to rearmament, thereby siding with the Labour Party in opposition (and Lloyd George’s Liberals and a few other Liberals). Baldwin, effectively the prime minister, began planning a growth in armament, and was harried by men like Churchill for moving too slowly. It is worth remembering that there was quite a feeling in favour of peace, as was suggested by the ‘Peace Ballot’ held later in 1934 – which found the population far from decisive about armament, and split 50:50 on the subject. There is a good outline here.

Bullett is aggrieved that no-one has come up with a good word; but he has no uncertainty about the direction to be taken by the prizes. In this still relatively rare political competition, it seems appropriate that the conscientious objector Allan M. Laing should grab the first prize. L.V. Upward is second. Redling is commended for the word ‘gunster’.

Competition no. 216: results

V.S.Pritchett asks us to assume Oedipus has just come across the fact that Freud has been mentioning him in his lectures, and brings an action for defamation of character. He wants up to 500 words of the speech for the plaintiff.

Pritchett says he finds judging this hard, and also says the entries fall into two categories: orthodox and original. The orthodox line says that Oedipus claims he didn’t know that his father was Laius and Jocasta was his mother. But, reasons Pritchett, isn’t the point of the Oedipus complex that it’s unconscious? (There is something slightly astray about this argument, but let it pass – from the point of view of a chooser of better winners, Pritchett is right.)

T.E. Casson, ever the classicist, is mentioned in dispatches for sending in an extract from an Aristophanic play. A new name, ‘Lamentable’, argues for Oedipus that his dignity is liable to be damaged. Pritchett comments that this is going to hold no water in an English court. He gives the first prize to Guy Hadley, who has done what winners do – gone beyond the brief. the The runner-up, Eremita, has Oedipus asking for the right to retire peacefully in Tunbridge Wells. Hmmm.

Hadley’s choice of an American wide guy is interesting in that many of the ‘Scarface’ films suggest an Oedipal motive. Freud himself, of course, was still alive, and still in Vienna – he didn’t come to England until 1938, well after Hitler’s annexation of Austria.

 

 

Competition no. 215: results

This is the first competition published in New Statesman and Nation to be judged by Sylvia Lynd. She must have been pleased by the move to the NS&N: her husband Robert, aka ‘Y.Y.’, was its star columnist. She chooses a subject still under debate today – pronouncing foreign place names. Why do we say Paris instead of Paree, but Nees instead of Nice? Answers on a postcard from the appropriately mispronounced place. (Even within England it is a problem. Nobody in Newcastle says Newcastle with a long a, and an emphasis on the second syllable; they say Newcastle with a short a, and an even beat on each syllable.)

She asks for a poem from 14-40 lines on the subject ‘The Discoveries of Foreign Travel’. This is characteristic of Lynd, who tends to give everyone a lot of rope, and then gives herself plenty of rope as well. 40 lines! And there is a specific insistence on the last line: ‘And Guadalquivir called ‘Gwad-al-kee-ver’. She doesn’t give a precise ruling on the weight on those syllables, and even her suggested pronunciation is open to doubt. For instance, here’s Fisher’s account of the river in 1797-8:

But here’s Paul Gwynne from 1912 (see the footnote):

These are treacherous waters. But here’s the picture from Gwynne’s edition:

Lynd’s style is as ever chatty and distinctive (very few of the judges can be recognised without seeing the name. Lynd is one; Squire another; the dreadful Agate a third). If Barry, now on the NS&N board had any advice, it would have been to clear an additional column (effectively what happens). A couple of entrants, Palermo and Bow-wow, attempt to impress (e.g. Chicago = Shee-cago), but the latter apparently can’t do Valladolid … Guy Innes sees his whole entry printed but Lynd says it’s too clever for her (she can’t ‘do his eighth or nineteenth line’):

Perhaps the problem here is the switch between new and old (has no/ doth oft). Lynd has a great line in suggesting that she has heard gentlemen fall out when lunching in Soho because one has pronounced the second t in risotto… In her scatty way, pausing to accidentally reveal Pibwob’s name but call him Goldsmith instead of Goldsmid, she winnows her list to four, discards Allan M. Laing, and divides first prize (a guinea each) between H.C.M. and E.J., with W. Leslie Nicholls sneaking in for the half-guinea.

H.C.M:

E.J.:

and Nicholls:

This is the first successful competition to be published in New Statesman, in my view.