A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Prison was not kind to COs and several died as a result of the harsh conditions they faced. According to Gilbert Murray, in his preface to Stephen Hobhouse’s An English Prison from Within: ‘Of the 54 men [COs] who have died since arrest, 8 died actually in prison, 1 in an asylum, and 11 in Home Office camps, and 6 committed suicide. Thirty-seven men have become mentally affected, while 189 have been released from prison because of their shattered health …’139 Whatever it was that compelled these young men to avoid conflict it certainly wasn’t cowardice.

  It seems ludicrous now that a principled young man should have been sent to prison straight out of school six months before the capitulation of the German army. But, as we have seen, there was no way of foreseeing that collapse and in any event Britain took some of the moral high ground by being one of only two nations in the First World War to even recognise the existence of conscientious objection.140

  The Leightonian of December 1918 reported on the whereabouts of recent leavers. E. P. Southall, who we last met complaining about the music, was in prison and Bunting was serving ‘a sentence of 112 days in Wormwood Scrubbs, after refusing agricultural work on the ground that in effect that was sending another man to fight for him’.141

  Ordeal by chicken

  We tend to think of boys leaving school and going straight to prison as a relatively recent phenomenon. During the war years, however, many Quaker boys refused service, although not all of them ended up in Wormwood Scrubs. After his arrest Bunting was transferred to Fenham Barracks, where he enjoyed the doubtless generous hospitality of the Northumberland Fusiliers for a month,142 after which he spent the next six months or so in Wormwood Scrubs, various military hospitals and Winchester Prison (where the COs circulated an underground newspaper called The Whisperer). Bunting did talk about his early prison experience many years later to his friend Peter Quartermain. Fenham Barracks was

  a large, crowded, underheated eighteenth-century-style room … Many of his companions there were pickpockets and thieves. Most of the prisoners were grown men and rough, not middle class boys of eighteen. There were a few blankets for which the prisoners fought. One prisoner, a large angry man, managed to get hold of two blankets and gave one of them to Basil. It turned out that his benefactor, the only person in the room to treat Basil with kindness, had committed a double murder. He had poisoned two women.143

  Even if Bunting’s imagination plays the lead role in this story there’s no doubt that conditions were harsh. According to Adam Hochschild, ‘those refusing conscription were sentenced to hard labour. For the first two weeks, a prisoner was given no mattress to sleep on in his seven-by-twelve-foot cell. Prison labour usually consisted of sewing a daily quota of thick canvas mailbags with a big skewer-like needle.’ Towards the end of 1917 imprisoned COs had their daily bread allowance halved to just 11 ounces; that’s a piece of bread roughly four inches square.144

  Bunting gave a fuller account to The Leightonian in a letter that was published in the July 1919 edition:

  ‘I am able to answer your letter myself, because it arrived here just two or three days after I was released under the Cat and Mouse Act. I spent all last winter and autumn in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, making mailbags and twisting ships’ fenders. I forfeited my remission, because, for some while before the armistice I refused to do prison work, so I was not released till the end of January. Then I had divers adventures, into which I need not now enter, and after a long sojourn in a military hospital, whither I was sent to get rid of a septic ulcer, I found myself on Salisbury Plain. There, after I had visited Stonehenge, and satisfied my curiosity as to the internal appearance of Y.M.C.A. huts, I repeated the farce of refusing to obey an order, for which I was court-martialled a second time, and sent to do a year’s hard labour in Winchester Civil Prison. There were only half a dozen C.O.’s left there, all the rest having been released under the twenty months order, and since I did not see why the rest of us should be left behind, I went on hunger strike. They were very merciful with me. I have come to the conclusion that they only wanted an excuse to let me out, because three days proved sufficient to do the trick, and they gave me six weeks (till June 15th) to do as I like in.’

  On June 24th, however, B.C.B. visited the school in person, and informed us cheerfully that he was now living in London and avoiding the police.145

  Bunting also talked about his prison experience to his friend, the poet and actor, Denis Goacher. Goacher was well aware of Bunting’s selfmythologising tendencies (‘it was sometimes quite difficult to disentangle the real truth from his Ford Madox Ford-ing of it’) but he was sure he had the essence of Bunting’s first imprisonment:

  What they did was to put you in a totally darkened cell, without a window, without any heating, and no furniture whatever, no clothes whatever. (It was up North, remember, Newcastle.) You just had to lie, when you could sleep, on the floor, naked; and you were allowed, once a day, a bowl of water and a crust of bread. This lasted for three days and you were then examined by a doctor, to see what condition you were in. If he considered that your condition was sufficiently sound, you went back on that regime for two days. If, at the end of say five or six days, your condition had deteriorated, you were then given a minimum of clothing and a little bit more food and water. At the end of that three days, in a slightly improved condition, you were put back on the no heating, no clothes and no light whatever. The idea, of course, was to break your spirit. Well Basil, who was a tough man, survived this for six weeks, and at the end of the six weeks he was still unbroken. So they let him out, and he was set to work making jute bags, which they had to do for twelve hours a day. Very bad food, of course. He discovered, I don’t know how, that these bags were being used for the Services, so he refused to make them. He was slapped back in a cell and it started all over again … Basil told me that this experience embittered him for life. He didn’t make any bones about it. He said it coloured all he thought about England, about the Establishment, the ‘Southrons’ as he called us.146

  Bunting may have been characteristically reluctant to talk about his time in prison, but others weren’t. Another imprisoned Quaker CO, Stephen Hobhouse, described long rows of cells, four or five storeys of them, facing each other across an open area: ‘Across the central space at first-floor level is stretched a wire netting to catch an unhappy man trying to commit suicide from above.’ All the cell doors had peepholes, ‘through which at times could be seen the sinister eye of the warder spying on the inmate from without’. Warders sometimes padded silently along the corridors in felt slippers, to catch the prisoners unawares. Two of the day’s meals consisted only of porridge, dry bread, and salt; the third was mostly potatoes. Prisoners were allowed to send and receive one letter a month – but none at all for the first two months.147

  In 1982 Bunting recalled the prison regime in 1918 in a letter to Tom Pickard: ‘In 1918 all the writing even the most privileged were allowed was confined to a slate. When you had filled the slate you wiped it off and started again. Most of us didn’t even have a slate. You were allowed to receive one letter and write one, as much as you could get onto one very small sheet of notepaper, every month after the first three, which were blank, provided you broke no rules meanwhile. You were allowed to talk, an hour a day, after the first two years, which were silent.’148

  Bunting later put his prison experience to very good use. While ‘Villon’, written in 1925 but not published until 1930, may be Bunting’s starkest expression of prison life his review of Conrad’s novel, The Rover, in the transatlantic review of August 1924 gives a better flavour of his time in prison:

  I read Romance for the first time in the solitude of an English prison. The Book of Kings, Isaiah’s harsh splendour and the voluptuous majesty of the Song of Solomon had tempered my weariness for several months, but somehow – a reminiscence of schooldays, perhaps – I always looked upon the Bible as prison reading. Romance was a real book, a book written by man and not by the heavy finger of God. In that empt
iness, where no new thing ever enters, it took possession of my eyes and ears. My cell grew full of aromatic bales, fading into the shadows of Don Ramon’s warehouse; Thomas Castro walked with me around the patch of rotting cabbage-stalks that was our daily exercise ground; even Seraphina visited me occasionally, keeping modestly to the dark places, an indistinct but sympathetic form. It was all amazingly concrete. I saw that warehouse; I saw the bay and its town, the hovels, the cathedral, the palace; I watched the hanging of the pirates at Kingston; and when I came to the long trial at the end of the book I heard the rustle of the public and the muttering of the turnkeys to one another.149

  This lengthy aside on Conrad’s collaboration with Ford Madox Ford, the novel Romance, in a review of Conrad’s The Rover is typical of Bunting’s cavalier approach to book reviewing. It extols Conrad’s qualities as a writer, but rather shirks the responsibility of a reviewer to say something interesting about the book under review: ‘It would be useless … as well as impertinent for me to expatiate on Mr. Conrad’s themes or to discuss his stories. Those who do not already know them can only truly satisfy their curiosity by reading them. I would like to write about how he does it. I wish I knew.’

  Bunting didn’t like talking about his time in prison. He slid off the subject rapidly in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal by invoking Graham Wallas and setting off a useless research trail for would-be biographers. His long spell in jail wasn’t ‘a matter of much interest nowadays. The jails have been altered. Anybody who wants to know what they were like can get from a library Graham Wallas’s book on the subject which has some footnotes by me and which was the main evidence before the Royal Commission that reformed the prisons.’150 Nobody has been able to find this book. That is because it doesn’t exist. Bunting’s contribution to prison reform is elsewhere.

  The Quaker conscientious objector Stephen Hobhouse spent two terms in prison, one in Wormwood Scrubs and the other in Exeter. The experience had shattered his health but on release he quickly plunged into a huge task. Hobhouse was Beatrice Webb’s nephew and the Webbs were at that time working hard on the state of British prisons as part of their monumental work on English local government. They set up the Prison System Enquiry Committee (a sort of unofficial counterpart to the hugely influential Gladstone Committee that had been set up in 1894), which included Bernard Shaw and Lawrence Housman, under the chairmanship of Sir Sydney Olivier (a socialist ex-Governor of Jamaica), and Hobhouse was appointed as the committee’s Secretary with sole responsibility for collating information and writing a report. When it was published in 1922 that report immediately became an ‘acknowledged landmark in prison reform’.151 English Prisons Today: Being the Report of the Prison System Enquiry Committee is an exhaustive account of the nature and roles of British prisons at that time and buried within its 749 pages I believe we can find Bunting’s contribution. Graham Wallas isn’t mentioned anywhere in those pages, and neither is the non-existent Royal Commission, but this volume surely contains whatever contemporary views of prison Bunting expressed. The chapter on political offenders draws in a sympathetic and deeply affecting way on the anonymous personal statements of some two hundred COs, of whom it is inconceivable that Bunting was not one, especially given that the Chairman, Sydney Olivier, was a close Oxford friend of Graham Wallas. Hobhouse’s uncle, Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, one of the great liberal intellectuals of the day, was also connected to Wallas as he was Britain’s first Professor of Sociology at LSE from 1907 until his death in 1929.152 It is also possible, of course, that Bunting contributed actual footnotes as well as personal testimony to this progressive report, including the moving ‘Specimen of Evidence’ supplied by one CO as an appendix. I think Bunting was genuinely misremembering rather than trying to lay a false trail because he disliked expressing his opinion about his prison experience. After all, he needn’t have mentioned it to Jonathan Williams at all. Hobhouse and Brockway did have enormous impact. Margery Fry called it the ‘Bible for the reformers’,153 and the newly appointed Chairman of the Prison Commission, Sir Maurice Walker, immediately did everything possible to put the report’s recommendations in place and, according to Hobhouse’s biographer, English Prisons Today ‘had perhaps greater practical success than any single volume on prison reform that has ever been published. If it had achieved nothing but the abolition of the iniquitous silence rule it would have been worthwhile, and one finds a certain satisfaction in the fact that a Quaker did so much to remove an enormity first introduced into prison by well-intentioned but wrong-headed Quakers two centuries earlier in Pennsylvania.’154 Graham Wallas, social pioneer though he was, didn’t reform British prisons; Stephen Hobhouse did.

  Bunting was emphatically correct about one thing though. After reading the stories about life in prison as a CO in Hobhouse and Brockway’s report no one would require any further gloss from Bunting. His prison experiences and those of the other COs surveyed by the Prison System Enquiry Committee, as we shall see, underpin Bunting’s first great poem, ‘Villon’.155

  By the end of the war imprisoned conscientious objectors were certainly flexing their muscles. In May 1918 conscientious objectors jailed in Liverpool announced that they would ‘break all prison rules they considered “inhuman and immoral,” including the rule of silence. For ten days the prison resounded with talk, laughter and singing. Then the warders cracked down, moving the men they thought to be ringleaders to other prisons. Some COs went on hunger strikes, only to find themselves force-fed like the suffragettes.’156 Bunting’s story, as told late in life, was different. He told Carroll F. Terrell that he went on hunger strike and vowed to die there if he wasn’t released.

  After he’d been on the strike for a week, the warden played, said Basil, a dirty trick. Each day, a beautiful, plump, enticing roasted stuffed chicken was placed without comment in his cell. The very odor was enough to drive a hungry man to distraction. He was sorely tempted, but he never touched the chicken. The warden concluded that if this ploy didn’t work, nothing would. Probably also that a man of such sterling character ought not to die in prison. So, on the eleventh day of the strike four or five days after the chicken torture, he was discharged a free man.157

  There are a number of factors that might lead us to doubt this tale. It is true that English prison authorities were sensitive to the hunger strike tactic. The suffragette movement had been using it since the beginning of the century to great effect. Suffragettes were usually released after six days as the last thing the authorities wanted to do was create martyrs of the women. But conscientious objectors were not likely martyrs. Their constituency was, as we have seen, tiny, and outside it they were despised. It is doubtful that the prison governor would waste something as valuable as a chicken three days running on a CO. He would have been an unusual prison governor indeed if he had recognised ‘a man of sterling character’ lurking inside a notorious coward, for that is what COs were regarded as. Furthermore the war was over; why go to the trouble of roasting chickens when a door could be left open accidentally one dark morning? Most compelling of all though is the fact that this story comes at the very end of Terrell’s long account of his visit to Bunting in Northumbria. As we shall see the poet teased and misled his guest mercilessly during his entire stay. I suspect the chicken story was his parting shot.

  The story, true or not, was immortalised by Pound in Canto 74:

  Bunting

  doing six months after that war was over

  as pacifist tempted by chicken but declined to approve

  of war “Redimiculum Metellorum”

  privately printed

  to the shame of various critics158

  My business was to be a poet

  From the age of five Bunting, ‘never had any reason to change the conviction then borne in me that my business was to be a poet … my father used to read poetry to us from the earliest years and included amongst the poems for the children a number of the less recondite bits of Wordsworth. It made a great impression on me early in l
ife.’159

  Poetry was certainly an important component of Bunting family culture. He was given Rossetti’s poetry at the age of fourteen, and ‘got an enormous lot of them by heart’.160 In an interview in 1981 he recalled that, ‘by the end of my childhood I was familiar with most of Wordsworth, except for a good deal of “The Prelude”. When I was about the beginning of my teens I read Rossetti’s translations of the early Italian poets. And when I was about 15 I came across Walt Whitman … At a later date I would have to add Horace, in Latin.’161

  Bunting’s sister, Joyce, told Victoria Forde that it amused her to think that ‘up to the age of 8 or 9 if asked what I would be when I grew up, I always said, “a poetess”’. For Joyce this soon faded, but Bunting remained faithful to his nursery school ambition: ‘when Basil was 12 years old, our parents encouraged us and a cousin to write poems about a holiday we had had in the Lake District by offering a small prize and Basil won it’.162

  By the time Bunting left Leighton Park he had published three poems, the two school poems we know about and a third that apparently won a prize and was published in the Leeds Mercury.163 Bunting claimed in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal that he ‘wrote always’ but had had the ‘good sense’ to destroy all his early work:

  I could see that they were no good. I didn’t always have that much sense immediately, but I remember sending one [poem] to a London paper when I was about 17, and the editor, a kind-hearted fellow though an extremely bad poet himself, sent for me and said, well, we can’t print this, it’s not good enough. But it’s getting on for it, you know. You must just try a little harder and you’ll have it … But mostly I had the sense to destroy them before I got to showing them to anybody. And I think the earliest poem that I preserved is only a fragment of one that I wrote in 1923.164