At the meeting at Borrat on Sunday, 6 June 1652, the day after he spent the night at Brigflatts, Fox saw in the Westmorland Seekers the people in white raiment of his Pendle Hill vision. Thus began the Society of Friends, and Brigflatts, a tiny community of flax weavers on the River Rawthey, was at its heart. The Valiant Sixty was the name given to the first Quaker missionaries by John Handley of Brigflatts, the same John Handley who haunts the attic of the house.39 Built in 1675, the Meeting House at Brigflatts is one of the oldest in the world.40 It was built by the community: ‘Those Friends who had good oak growing on their land gave it, and those who had none, carted it or gave the labour. At first it consisted of nothing but the bare walls and roof. There was no ceiling and each winter two Friends were appointed to stick moss under the slates to keep out the rain and snow. What warmth there was would be from a hearth fire at the west end.’41 Today Brigflatts Meeting House is as unadorned as it was when it was built in 1675.
Bunting paid his first visit to the Greenbank family home in Brigflatts in 1913. He would spend at least a week of each of the shorter holidays and at least three weeks of the summer holiday there each year for the next four or five years.42 Brigflatts was to become a pivotal influence on his life and work and, one hundred years later, it is virtually unchanged. John Allen Greenbank’s father, also John, was a monumental mason and it is his chisel that clinks out the flinty rhythm of the opening of Briggflatts. John Greenbank’s workshop had been situated at the end of the garden, separated from the house by an orchard, and the sound of his daily etching into stone the names of the newly dead would have rung throughout the hamlet. John Greenbank was Brigflatts’ genius loci. The stonemason’s daughter, Peggy, was eight years old at the time of Bunting’s first visit. Greenbank’s young sister was Bunting’s ‘delight from the first time I set eyes on her’.43
In 1913 the Greenbank household consisted of Peggy’s 65-year-old widower grandfather (also a monumental mason), his son John, who was forty and married to Isabel, who was three years younger than her husband, and John and Isabel’s four children. These were Bunting’s close friend John Allen Greenbank, his younger brother George, and their sisters, Annie and Margaret. The 1911 census reveals that a further child had died. Margaret (Peggy) was four years younger than Bunting. Bunting and she quickly became very close friends and it is the memory of this young love and its loss that inspired, fifty years later, some of the greatest lines of twentiethcentury poetry:
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.
A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot.
Decay thrusts the blade,
wheat stands in excrement
trembling. Rawthey trembles.
Tongue stumbles, ears err
for fear of spring.
Rub the stone with sand,
wet sandstone rending
roughness away. Fingers
ache on the rubbing stone.
The mason says: Rocks
happen by chance.
No one here bolts the door,
love is so sore.44
These are the opening three stanzas of Bunting’s masterpiece, Briggflatts, written in the early 1960s, fifty years or so after the events on which they draw. The beautiful lyricism of the opening of the poem sings a song of innocence. The young love it celebrates, and the simple, peaceful environment in which it grew, were the formative influences on the poet’s life. It was a life that brimmed over with drama, adventure, passion and, at times, overwhelming drudgery, but underneath it all the spring-swollen Rawthey flowed, the stonemason clinked out the names of the recently dead and the great passion of his life, Peggy Greenbank, never faded. Their parting, which was probably very early in 1918, was not intended to be final but Bunting failed to answer a letter and postponed a visit for fifty years. It was, he felt, the greatest betrayal of his life, but Peggy stayed in his thoughts throughout. It is a great twentieth-century love story and it is commemorated in one of the century’s most influential and moving poems. Indeed it is a love story that is contained almost entirely within the poem.
A tale of blood and death
Bunting’s first surviving work of fiction is a story written in autumn 1914 and submitted to Ackworth’s Essay Society. ‘T’ versus ‘N’ is a fantasy of chivalry and adventure set in the late summer of 1812 as Napoleon begins his disastrous retreat from Moscow. Bunting helpfully explains at the outset that ‘N’ was ‘Napolean’s [sic] monogram. ‘T’ was the symbol of the Tagendbund [sic], a German political society, opposed to the French.’ The narrator is in Paris in the autumn of 1854, ‘reporting the departure of troops to the Crimea & interviewing sundry august personages for Lampton’s Review, a thirdrate periodical, long since defunct’. The hero of the story is one Baptiste Rénaud, a veteran of the 1812 campaign who regales his friends with a ‘tale of blood & death’ in a café in Senlis. Part Arthurian Romance, part Gothic horror tale, ‘T’ versus ‘N’ is a remarkably imaginative and confident debut. Describing the retreat from Moscow Rénaud laments that his ‘brave Hussars, the Hussars of Chalons … fell by the score. The infantry fell by the hundred. Before that awful retreat was ended, indeed, my beautiful Hussars were themselves turned entirely into a regiment of light infantry. They carried their horses – inside them.’ Marshal Ney has given Rénaud a vitally important communication to take to Napoleon but Rénaud is easily sidetracked by a vulnerable maiden in a bosky forest and various adventures involving a hand-to-hand fight with a German spy and chastening a ruffian for beating another vulnerable maiden with the stock of a long whip. The delay incurs the wrath of Napoleon who accuses Rénaud of spoiling his ‘last chance of conquering Russia’. Rénaud is not intimidated by the legendary general: ‘“Sire” I replied “I have done my duty, & what you have lost by those dispatches you may well gain by these” & I flung the captured [from the German member of the Tugenbund] papers on the table; I stalked out into the sunrise, thinking bitter thoughts.’ All ends well though as within weeks Napoleon has changed his position and Rénaud ends his tale with the great man thanking him for saving his army from the Tugenbund and pinning the Légion d’honneur on his chest
‘T’ versus ‘N’ is a good story, told with imaginative flair and a rich vocabulary. A direct comparison with a story submitted at the same time by Bunting’s friend, Ernest Stephenson, shows just how far Bunting was ahead of the field. Stephenson’s story, ‘A Summer Dream’, is a conventional tale of murderous druids whose sacrificial blood lust is only avoided by the hackneyed device of waking up.45
Newcastle Lit & Phil
Bunting didn’t derive all his intellectual nourishment from school, and Quakerism wasn’t the only early influence on his development. Another was the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Thomas had joined the Lit & Phil in 1898 when the Buntings were living at 95 Jesmond Road, Newcastle, and was a member until he was ‘resigned’ after his death in 1925.46 Founded in 1793 as a ‘conversation club’ the Society had long been a powerhouse of liberal enquiry (admitting women as members as early as 1804 and becoming a host for the anti-slavery movement in 1820). George Stephenson’s miners’ safety
lamp was first demonstrated there in 1815 and in October 1880 the society’s lecture theatre was the first public room in the world to be lit by electric light. There were two elements of the Lit & Phil’s mission that are important to our understanding of the way Bunting was developing, a bold and eclectic lecture programme that was able to attract the most brilliant minds of the day and a deep investment in music.
By the time Bunting was thirteen the Lit & Phil was flourishing, with more than three thousand members and an average lecture attendance of nearly six hundred.47 One of its musical advisers was the Bach scholar, choral conductor and composer William Gillies Whittaker. In 1915 Whittaker founded the Newcastle Bach Choir which gave the first complete modern performance, which Bunting attended and in which his aunt Jennie Cheesman performed, of Byrd’s Great Service in Newcastle Cathedral in May 1924.48 Whittaker, who was also an expert on Northumbrian folk songs, was a friend and neighbour of the Bunting family in Jesmond and Bunting frequently attended rehearsals of Whittaker’s choir.49 Many years later he told an interviewer that
I never played anything, and it is with great astonishment that anybody ever found out that I sang. But I had an aunt who was a very good pianist. I was able to listen to good music continually from a very early age. And Dr. Whittaker, who ran the Newcastle Bach Choir in those days, was not only learned but showed great sense of music and art in general and I learned a lot from him. And Dr. Fellows [sic] just then discovered the manuscript of Byrd’s Great Service, which had been lost for more than 300 years, and I was present at many of the services.50
It is interesting that Edmund Horace Fellowes isn’t credited in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as having discovered Byrd’s Great Service, although his considerable editorial work on Byrd is damned with faint praise.51 This doubtless cropped up as a topic of debate, as we shall see, in Kleinfeldt’s, a public house near London’s Tottenham Court Road that Bunting frequented in his twenties.
During Bunting’s teenage years alone seven hundred scores were added to the Lit & Phil collection; the Purcell Society’s publications were bought as well as sets of the Breitkopf and Härtel editions of Bach, Mozart and Schubert and a selection of modern British, French and Russian music. The society had a flourishing University Extension Centre (affiliated to Cambridge University) which conducted well-attended courses (average attendance was 155 at lectures) on a wide range of topics. On top of the university extension courses in 1916 alone nearly twenty ‘miscellaneous’ lectures were delivered on subjects as diverse as Virgil’s picture of the after-life and the geology of the Dogger Bank.52 Ezra Pound delivered a ‘miscellaneous’ on the troubadours in 1919.
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, slow
Bunting published one poem at Ackworth School, The Song of the Ackworth Clock, which was printed in the Headmaster’s Annual Report of 1916. The clock tower surveys the life of the school through the different seasons, a stanza for each, with an extra stanza of more general reflection. The Song of the Ackworth Clock is therefore schematically an uncanny foreshadowing of Briggflatts. We can’t claim too much for it, it is the work of a schoolboy, but in a limited way it looks forward fifty years to Bunting’s masterpiece. Briggflatts also surveys a life through four seasons in four parts, with a fifth general unaligned one. To give it its due The Song of the Ackworth Clock has its slight charms. We tend to read into the juvenilia of writers who become celebrated rather more that it deserves. If The Song of the Ackworth Clock had been written by Bunting’s friend John Greenbank we wouldn’t be hearing notes of future masterpieces. Richard Caddel asks, ‘Is it just possible to hear cadences which foreshadow the later, more subtle, concern for sound and quantity?’ Maybe; just:
When the asphalt bubbles tar,
And lazy lads from near and far
Wander to and fro,
Or seek the Elms’ welcome shade
Where record cricket scores are made,
And Simpson’s do a roaring trade.
Is this what you know?
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, slow.53
I can’t hear it myself and I think Caddel is on surer ground in finding ‘perceptible rhythmic echoes of the Buntings’ old family friend, the Newcastle pitman poet, Joseph Skipsey’,54 although the most obvious influence is Kipling.
Skipsey’s presence can be felt at both ends of Bunting’s life. It is harder to detect in-between. It’s difficult to read Skipsey with much pleasure today. His literary world was irrecoverably swept away by the modernist revolution, and his rhythms seem artless and archaic in a way that, say, A. E. Housman’s don’t. He is guilty of the ultimate sin of sentimentality and yet his voice is undoubtedly authentic and surely this is what drew Bunting to him. Skipsey’s poetry was part of the local song culture that Bunting drew on throughout his life. He also helped to shape Bunting’s unshakeable, lifelong belief that ‘meaning’ in the conventional sense is unimportant in poetry. Skipsey wrote of Blake’s Thel that it is:
full of tenderness, sweetness, and delicacy throughout. Indeed, this is a real and genuine poem, and I say this without presuming to be able to decipher in clear terms the author’s drift, for I do not regard that particular ability altogether essential before such a verdict is given, so long as the product possesses to me a meaning – an undefinable one though it may be – or constitutes spells by which visions of beauty and delight may be conjured up in my imagination, and visions of which the poet himself may never have dreamed; – for it is in the nature of things that the seer may see further than he thinks; that the singer may sing more than he knows; that, in short, the poet’s words may awaken and arouse the mind of the reader to the perception of a star-like galaxy of ideas, before whose dazzling splendour the light of his own particular drift may seem in comparison but the insignificant piece of yellow flame of a farthing candle.55
Bunting was a great poet, and Skipsey wasn’t, but nowhere does Bunting articulate their shared manifesto of the role of ‘meaning’ in poetry more simply, directly and beautifully than Skipsey does here. Skipsey’s assessment of Blake was also soon to surface in Bunting’s adolescent development.
Fabian founders
Bunting’s father was also a member of the Fabian Society, the left-wing research organisation that was founded in January 1884 for the purpose of ‘reconstructing society’.56 He joined in September 1892 and remained a member until his death in 1925.
George Bernard Shaw, with his social ideal of a birthright life interest in national wealth, began contributing his formidable intellectual energy in May 1884, although he was not elected as a member until September.57 Shaw was the driving force behind the Fabian Society from his election to the Executive Committee in January 1885, but Sidney Webb (Thomas’s friend), the political scientist Graham Wallas, and W. B. Yeats’s friend Annie Besant also joined the society within a couple of years of its formation. Bunting joined the Fabian Society in November 1916. His father doubtless helped out with the £1 1s 0d subscription that was paid on 23 October. He remained a member until he resigned in September 1921.58
By the time Bunting was born socialism, broadly defined admittedly, already had a twenty-year history in Britain but it was not a cohesive force for improving the condition of working people, with trade unionism and the early socialist societies, such as Henry Hyndman’s Marxist Social Democratic Foundation, being at loggerheads. Socialists such as William Morris, leader of the Socialist League and an artist and poet, the Etoneducated Hyndman and the openly homosexual Edward Carpenter were, quite literally in some cases, not speaking the same language as the trade unions with their monomaniacal wage and conditions reformist agenda. 59 The Fabian Society had a utopian communitarian agenda from the outset but the middle-class intellectuals it attracted weren’t natural bedfellows of the action-oriented unions and the Fabians quickly became a kind of protothink tank, a ‘metropolitan social research bureau, placing “facts” at the disposal of any political group which cared to study them, part of its famous strat
egy of “permeation”’.60
The Buntings’ friend, Graham Wallas, was an intellectual pioneer. Shaw paid generous tribute to Wallas in his appendix on the history of Fabian economics that appeared in Edward Pease’s The History of the Fabian Society, published in 1925. Shaw considered Wallas’ Life of Francis Place a pivotal intervention in the intellectual development of socialism, showing Wallas’ ‘power of reconstructing a popular agitation with a realism which leaves the conventional imaginary version of it punctured and flaccid; and it was by doing the same for the Chartist movement that he left his mark on us’.61 Wallas’ was a powerful intellect and his contribution to the intellectual development of the Labour movement was immense.
As a Bunting family friend Wallas was to play a significant role in the intellectual environment in which Basil Bunting grew up. Bunting remembered him as a charismatic, ‘inspired’ and popular lecturer and he clearly put his experience as a teacher to work when he addressed the Newcastle Lit & Phil and, later in his career, at the London School of Economics: ‘He could make any subject interesting. The result was that if they had to get across something which nobody on earth could be expected to take any interest in, they gave it to Graham Wallas to teach. And he would begin with a class of five and by the end of the first term he would have a hundred fighting to get in the room. I remember a series of lectures on the history of the internal organization of the War Office which began and ended that way!’62 The distinguished economist, Lionel Robbins, later a friend of Bunting at the London School of Economics, remembered Wallas as a teacher, in which capacity ‘he surpassed anyone I have ever known’.63
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