Competitions nos. 105A and 105B: results

A new judge, Edward Shanks, sets a Wellsian competition – entrants are to imagine a World State, one hundred and fifty years in the future, looking back after its first fifty years at the earlier years. Shanks had in fact written a post-apocalyptic novel in 1920, so Wells would have interested him. He’s imagined a scholarly piece that covers history from the French Revolution to the foundation of the World State (so that’s 1789-2032), but specifically wants comments on Wells’s influence. The phrasing of the instruction does your head in a little,

As it did the entrants then: Shanks admits that he wanted one or both of a) irony and b) a serious assessment of Wells. ‘I have been disappointed,’ he says’ in both directions.’ He’s been handed a lot of doom and gloom – that things will get worse before they get better. He also gets rather tetchy over some of the opinions of Wells (‘a clerk turned revolutionary’; ‘a friend of international bankers’).

His choice of winners is odd. He tells us (no surprise!) that there is money going begging from the B competition, so there is half-a-guinea to add, and he awards this third prize to an entrant called E. Miller, whom he judges to be young and who deserves to be encouraged. But he suggests not printing Miller’s piece! That seems a text-book way of discouraging a young writer.

The winners are the old lag, Non Omnia, and, wait for it, wait for it, T.E. Casson, who has thus secured his second half-guinea, and is commended for having had fun with the piece. (Oddly enough, both Shanks and Casson had had a poem set to music by Ivor Gurney.)

The B competition asks for a ‘Sicilian octave’ (eight lines, rhyming alternately) on a living actor or actress. Oh dear. Entrants send in two quatrains, and alter the rhyme-scheme. This whittles the field down to one winner, J.H., who has picked the most popular subject, Charlie Chaplin (the second most popular was Edith Evans).

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that’s a Sicilian octave, as it ought to rhyme abababab.  So I think even Shanks is in a state of confusion. Still …

Competitions nos. 62A and 62B: results

Martin Armstrong – and ready yourself, this is a red-letter day in one hitherto unhappy household – sets two competitions. 62A  points out that Sir J.C. Bose, the Indian scientist, has shown that vegetables are affected by stimulants, poisons, shocks and other ‘ills and good that man and beast are heir to”. It asks for a lyric (max 18 lines) rebuking the vegetarian for cruelty to vegetables.

Sir J.C.Bose

There are many commendations, mostly the regulars (Chauve-Souris, Seacape, Issachar, Gertrude Pitt, W. Hodgson Burnet, H.C.M. – and also an M.J.Dickson who is probably the literary scholar who contributed to English Studies in 1931). In the end, Armstrong actually draws lots, and the top prize goes to a new name, Nosnikrap (i.e. Parkinson spelled backwards), while L.V.Upward takes the half-guinea:

62B quotes Pope: ‘For what I have published, I can only hope to be pardoned; for what I have burned, I deserve to be praised’ – in the preface to his Poetical Works

Alexander Pope – caught out

Armstrong wants this statement rendered into epigrammatic verse. While he is judging it, however, it occurs to him that Pope has trapped himself into something of a solecism – ‘he did not mean that he deserved to be praised for the verses he had burned, but because he had burned them, a very different matter’. Always nice to catch the top dogs out. He says he hasn’t penalised anyone who has committed a similar lapse. Five make the winners’ enclosure, and after discarding Guy Innes, Mariamne and John A. Bellchambers – the latter is John Archer Bellchambers (1866-1945), a lawyer’s clerk in 1911 in Islington – he arrives at two winners. Firstly, Ciel. She is joined by, after over 55 attempts, T.E.Casson, who finally gets more than honorary mentions and nods and even rewardless entries being printed. He gets his half-guinea at last!

Armstrong prints Innes and Bellchambers as well, as the proxime accessits – something being done slightly more frequently now.

T.E. Casson is Thomas Edmund Casson (1883-1960) who was born (and died) in the Ulverston area. He can be found contributing to scholarly literary magazines from 1909 onwards, and in 1914, he had a collection of poems (Masques and Poems) published. He had a further collection of poems published in 1930 (Lord Derwentwater’s fate and other poems), a collection in 1938, simply called Poems, and George Fox, a poem in twelve books in 1947. All four appeared under the name Edmund Casson. Under the name Thomas Edmund Casson, he had published, in 1927, A Century of Roundels, on the centenary of the Oxford-Cambridge cricket match (he seems to have been an Oxford graduate, given the journals in which he is published). However, he does also publish his poems (e.g. in Poetry Review) as T.E.Casson, and he also publishes a book on Thomas of Kendal under this name in 1935. All his books are published in Kendal.