Authors: Mike Read
Thankfully the two volumes have been selling consistently since 1997 and 1998.
I’ve always had Rupert Brooke’s poems around for as long as I can remember. He looked too modern for his era and I always thought that he and his circle were the forerunners of the Swinging Sixties set, but were curtailed by two world wars and two periods of austerity. They went barefoot, had unchaperoned weekend camps, played guitars, read poetry and planned to change the world; the girls were emancipated and Brooke grew his hair long. Brooke was feted with eulogies and effigies after his death at the age of twenty-seven. Much has been made of our stars who died at this age, such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Robert Johnson, but Brooke was the first icon of the twentieth century to do so and create a stir in the hearts of those he left behind. He was referred to as a ‘Young Apollo’, whence the name of my Rupert Brooke musical, and Winston Churchill wrote a glowing obituary in
The Times
, commenting, ‘We shall not see his like again.’
Brooke’s Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, reflected on why so many people thought him charismatic and rather special:
Is it because he was a hero? There were thousands.
Is it because he looked like a hero? There were few.
Is it because he had genius? There were others.
But Rupert Brooke held all three gifts of the gods in his hand.
After a couple of decades the inevitable iconoclasts appeared in an attempt to swing the pendulum the other way, so in the ’90s I decided to write a balanced account of his life, neither being eulogistic nor iconoclastic. In working on
Forever England
I travelled the length and breadth of the country, taking in places that he’d been drawn to for one reason or another. I motored from Becky Falls to Llanbedr, East Knoyle to Dymock, Lulworth Cove to the Lizard and Rye to Moffat. All were able to add something to a fuller and more rounded story that uncovered some unknown facts and facets of Brooke’s character and 27-year journey. On my travels I met with the son of Brooke’s great friend Dudley Ward. Peter Ward was one of only two people I encountered that had been alive during Brooke’s time, albeit as very young children. Peter was mentioned in Rupert’s correspondence twice, once in 1914 and again early in 1915 following a long-lost letter being delivered to him from his Tahitian girlfriend Taatamata. There were hints in that letter that she may have been pregnant with his child. As Dudley Ward had been Rupert’s main confidant, I asked Peter if he could throw any light on the possibility of a child. Boxes came down from the loft that had never seen the light of day, containing hundreds of snapshots sent back to England from Tahiti with the intention that some would be enlarged when Brooke returned. The outbreak of World War One consigned them to sit in an attic for decades and decades. In the bottom of one of the boxes were a few letters that told an extraordinary tale. Late in 1935, twenty years after Brooke’s death and a respectful time after the death of his mother, Dudley Ward, a man not given to flights of fancy, began to make serious enquiries about the possibility of Brooke having had a son or daughter. It appeared that Rupert had asked him to put these wheels
in motion. With little to go on, he wrote to Viscount Hastings, who owned a property on Moorea, an island north-west of Tahiti. Hastings thought that Norman Hall, who had recently directed
Mutiny on the Bounty,
might be able to help as he had a wide circle of friends there. Word came back from Hall that Taatamata was still alive, but he was leaving Polynesia for San Francisco and wouldn’t be able to contact her. Hall died in 1951, but I tracked down his daughter Nancy, who confirmed that her mother had told her in confidence that Arlice Rapoto, a great friend of theirs, was the daughter of Rupert Brooke and Taatamata. A photograph she sent me of Arlice, taken around 1950, shows an uncanny resemblance to Brooke. And so I was able to add to the Brooke legend and publish a photograph of his daughter, who sadly died a few years before I wrote the book.
The other person I met who had known Brooke was his second cousin, Winifred Kinsman, whose grandmother, Lucy Hoare, had been Rupert’s mother’s sister. Winifred was a charming lady and it turned out that she also used to ski at Lech, but back in the ’30s. She kindly opened our Rupert Brooke Museum at the Orchard, Grantchester in 1999. There were three of us who founded the Rupert Brooke Society: the late Robin Callan, the owner of the Orchard, where Rupert had lived; Dr Peter Miller, former chairman of the Brooke Centenary Committee; and me. Peter, no inconsiderable age himself, took on the mantle of president, Robin enabled the re-construction of the museum building and staffed it, while I chaired the society and edited the magazine as well as ensuring that the museum contained the story of Brooke, books, artefacts and some of his belongings. Between us we had his steeplechase cup from Rugby School, the binoculars he wore en route to a Gallipoli that he never reached, buckles from his uniform, signed books, a lock of his hair and a growing amount of things that people offered or brought in.
I was lucky to beat an American university to one of several poems that Brooke lost somewhere in Canada, en route to San Francisco in the summer of 1913. The poem, ‘For Mildred’s Urn’, was in Brooke’s
handwriting but experts had no idea what the subject matter was. I adore literary sleuthing, and was soon able to come up with a rational explanation by bringing together the literary, genealogical, historical and geographical. When Brooke sailed to the USA on the SS
Cedric
from Liverpool in May 1913, he discovered that the poet Richard Le Gallienne and his wife Julie were also on the ship. Rupert was disparaging (probably a pose) about the man, ‘who mooches about with grizzled hair and a bleary eye’, in a letter to Eddie Marsh. Le Gallienne would also have been carrying the ashes of his former wife in an urn. Case solved; the poem is on sometime loan to the museum. Fifteen years on the society is still going strong, spurred on by
Forever England
, which will be re-published in 2015, the centenary of Brooke’s death. Sadly Robin Callan won’t be here for the anniversary and the erection of a blue plaque, having passed away in April 2014. I read ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ at his memorial service.
For twenty years I’ve been in and out of the Orchard, letting many an hour slip away with Robin, discussing Brooke, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Henry James and many others who passed through these gardens and stayed at the house. We also talked of England, its past, present and future, and the future of the Orchard, which he put into a charitable trust to preserve this piece of history. In the Orchard an hour turns into a morning turns into a day; as Brooke himself wrote, ‘I only know that you may lie, day-long and watch the Cambridge sky…’ Robin was a quietly spoken but brilliant man, who invented a method of learning English at four times the normal speed, the
Callan
Method. At his memorial service the vicar mentioned that he’d lived life as an eighteenth-century aristocrat.
Sometime in 2000, I was at a small gathering on the south coast that included several musicians. Tales were swapped and old photographs from the ’60s were dragged out, and I knew this could provide the foundation for another book. The photographs could be dated almost to the month, by the hairstyles, clothes, stances, and the makes of guitars and amplifiers. Putting the book together was a labour of
love. I didn’t realise it would take me a year with my nose firmly to the grindstone, or in this case the Fender Stratocaster. I interviewed hundreds of singers, guitarists, drummers, bass players, pianists, organists, managers and other folk of all kinds, many still playing, who were on the scene during the decade of musical excellence. Long-disbanded groups got together round kitchen tables to reminisce, recall, sometimes argue over historical points and laugh about old disputes or the musical differences that had brought about the outfit’s demise. For some, their roots went back to the days of skiffle or jazz; others had bought instruments and learned as they went, and there were those who’d tried to run before they could walk and had fallen by the wayside. There were some tragedies, some success stories, but mainly tales of almost making it. All of them were delighted that
The South Coast Beat Scene of the 1960s
brought their own stories to life and gave them their own personal place in musical history. Tim Rice’s school group at Lancing College had cunningly called themselves the Aardvarks, so that when fame arrived they would always be top of the bill alphabetically, even when touring with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. I was glad to be able to fulfil his distant schoolboy dream when the Aardvarks opened the batting for the groups, listed alphabetically, in the book. The Urchins, the Vikings and the Web clearly hadn’t thought it through. There were potted histories too of south coast clubs, including the Shoreline at Bognor Regis, the Top Hat at Littlehampton and the Mexican Hat at Worthing. A good year’s work.
About the same time another book,
Major to Minor
, was published. I’d been working on and off on this book for a year or two, looking at the reasons behind the rise of the professional songwriter from the mid-1800s to the present day. Classical composers aside, for one could make a great case for someone like Schubert being a writer of popular songs, Stephen Foster was the man that led the way. Songs became so powerful that they almost became weapons in the American Civil War, with the Confederates singing ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’, ‘God Save the South’ and ‘Dixie’s Land’, while the Unionists gave out with
‘The Minstrel Boy’, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and ‘John Brown’s Body’. Both sides used ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’, a hit exactly 100 years later for Adam Faith. While those songs were firing up the South and the North in the US, we were cheerily chirping the smash of 1862, ‘Blaydon Races’.
Stephen Foster died prematurely and in poverty. Like Elvis he earned more after his death than he did during his lifetime. Despite the racial divide, especially in the South, there were successful black writers too. James A. Bland wrote over 700 songs, thirty-seven of which are in the US Library of Congress. The music halls opened the door for songwriters in Britain, although they also encouraged charlatans who claimed they owned the publishing rights. Performers would often cough up a relatively small amount rather than go through the extensive and complex system of checking credibility or getting entangled in litigation.
By the end of the nineteenth century, sheet music had become phenomenally popular, with upwards of twenty million copies being sold annually from 40,000 song titles. Eminent UK songwriter Leslie Stuart came to blows with someone on a street corner illegally selling sheet music for one of his songs, while in the US the songwriters fought to get royalties from the newly formed gramophone companies. New York restaurants were brought into question: should they be paying for playing music on their premises? Did the diners come because of the music or was it incidental?
My next book of poetry,
New Poems for Old Paintings
, which came out in 2003, was inspired by a birthday present. When Julie Dene, the wife of my pal and radio colleague Graham Dene, sent out the invitations to her celebrations, I hit upon a wheeze for a unique present. She is a direct descendent of the painter J. M. W. Turner so I got Tony James (you remember, Rhino) to copy Turner’s
Rain, Steam and Speed
, which famously depicts a railway engine going over Maidenhead Bridge. He did such a stunning job that I had it framed and was moved to write a poem to go with it, as part of the gift. I have
to say, it went down rather splendidly. The night of the party Tony Blackburn and I had a slow waltz to encourage other people to get on the dance-floor. A tender moment, but we remain just good friends.
The poem, and Julie’s enthusiasm, spurred me to write some more. Music has inspired art, art has inspired music, words have inspired music and music has inspired words. In this book, art was the inspiration for poetry. Sometimes the poems took the title of the painting and sometimes not. The paintings appeared on one page and the poem, unless longer, on the facing page. I wrote poems based around paintings by the likes of Pissarro, Monet, John Singer Sargent, Cézanne, Constable, Holman Hunt, Lowry, Toulouse-Lautrec and, of course, Turner. I also had to include a couple of my favourite paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw,
Golden Light
and
October.
The following year I collaborated with Richard Havers on
Read’s
Musical Reciter
, intriguingly subtitled ‘Lids lifted, stones turned, tales told, stars stripped, rock mined, pop plundered and pseuds cornered’. Bursting with tales of all kinds from the world of music, it sits on the shelf of many a downstairs loo. Neither friend, acquaintance nor the coolly cordial can deny the fact. I have visited some loos even when unnecessary, with the sole purpose of checking the location of their
Read’s Reciter
. I’ve lost count of how many loos I’ve flushed without reason and how many taps I’ve washed my hands under for the sake of appearances. The book seems to have found its spiritual home.
Having inherited the spirit of enjoying comics from my maternal grandfather, as a boy I read them, re-read them, studied the characters, and even smelled the paper. I’ve already touched on the US comics that I obtained from our American neighbours, but
The Beano, The Dandy
and later
Wizard
and
Roy of the Rovers
were favourites. My mother also had old copies of
Film Fun
and
Radio Fun
kicking around, both of which ran until the early ’60s. Radio Fun had strips featuring the likes of Benny Hill, Arthur Askey, Petula Clark and Norman Wisdom. I reflected, if indeed young boys do reflect, on how marvellous must be to actually feature in a comic. I would never have imagined
then that I’d not only feature in Britain’s most popular comic,
The Beano
, but on three occasions. As my grandmother pointed out, ‘Your grandfather would have been tickled pink.’