LOVE LYRICS

 

THE LOVE LYRICS OF ALAN STANLEY
BY
BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

 

‘Your life was in its spring time when we met,
The flowers bent down in homage as you came
Whispering of love; I never could forget,
Once having seen, that body white of thine,
Or dear gold hair crowned with the purple vine,
And crimson mouth which set my blood a-flame.’
 

[Surrender. Love Lyrics. 1894. p. 10]

 

 

In 1894 a slim volume of poetry titled ‘Love Lyrics’ was published by the London publishers, Gay and Bird; its author was a young unknown poet named Alan Stanley, a pseudonym of Stanley Addleshaw, later Reverend Canon Stanley Addleshaw. The volume is not a very remarkable collection of poetry being for the most part derivative of the so-called decadent period and there are more than a few hints of ‘unwholesome’ or some would say ‘unnatural’ acts of passion. Many passages in Love Lyrics speak of the poet’s desire for a younger ‘golden haired’ lover, a love the poet has been cultivating for two years until there are signs of reciprocal passion. I believe the book relives this flourishing passion in poetic form with the usual mystique surrounding such intimate declarations of affection, necessary for its time. There are moments of sheer indulgence and attempts to merge into the world of sinful aestheticism centring on an overpowering lust, the blossoming fruit of every youthful thought; and there are instances when the verse fails, but there is tremendous promise if the poet had continued to develop, which unfortunately he did not. I do not wish to be a harsh critic, many others before me have filled that role; I value the book simply for its historical interest and somewhat endearing ‘schoolboyish’, naive charm, perhaps the flowering of the folly of youth.

Stanley Addleshaw was the fourth and final child (all boys), born to the Manchester solicitor, John William Addleshaw (1836-1924) and his first wife, Rachel Ann Heyes Hemingway (1839-1873) who were married at the Parish Church in West Derby, Lancashire on Thursday 16^th November 1865 (1). Their first child was the barrister, poet and author, William Percy Addleshaw, born 22^nd September 1866, [Christened on 28^th November 1866 at Bowdon, Cheshire] who like Stanley, had similar influences and desires. William, or Percy as he liked to be known, was educated at Shrewsbury School, entering in the Easter term of 1880 and leaving in 1886. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, matriculating on 12^th June 1886, aged 19 and studied Law, B.A. 1890 and he was called to the bar in 1893. Percy, under the pseudonym, Percy Hemingway, published a collection of stories: ‘Out of Egypt: Stories from the Threshold of the East’ in 1895 and the following year a volume of poetry, ‘The Happy Wanderer and Other Verse’ (1896). (2) There are several instances in Percy’s ‘Happy Wanderer’ of a close-guarded love between it seems two young men (many of the poems had already appeared in The Academy and two of the poems were published in the Pall Mall Gazette). The volume opens with Percy’s poem to his friend – In Memoriam Roden Noel (obit May 26^th, 1894), where he declares that ‘the doors are shut, the locks are sealed, / and many weep above your grave, / some for the secrets unrevealed, / and all remembering what you gave.’ (p. 1) The poem goes on, saying ‘But I, who loved your songs and you, / a gracious presence still shall meet, / on peaceful days of August blue,’… In another poem, To John Addington Symonds (p. 17) he calls him ‘friend’ and he says they had made plans to meet but unfortunately Symonds died on 19^th April 1893 before it was carried out. In ‘The Refugee’ (p. 38) Percy, under the heavy ache the poet suffers for love, says that ‘It is my fate to suffer, this I know, / for I have touched the stinging hand of Sin, / and where he beckoned jauntily would go, / learnt all his tricks and skilfully grew therein.’ And in ‘Lovers’ (p. 40) he concludes ‘”For in his presence I may doff the sham, / because he loves me even as I am.”’ adding, ‘such is the love of friends in every land, / but only they who love may understand.’ Perhaps the most revealing of the poems is ‘All Souls’ Night’ (p. 43) where he confesses ‘’tis no phantom wooes me on this night; / my lover’s limbs are strong, his heart is light,’. The poet rounds off the volume with a series of quatrains he dedicates to Frederick York Powell (1850-1904) who was a lecturer of Law at Christ Church, Oxford and later in 1894, Professor of Modern History. (3) The next child born to John and Rachel Addleshaw was Harold Pope Addleshaw, born on 24^th February 1868 (Christened on 10^th September 1868 at Bowdon, Cheshire). Harold attended Shrewsbury School in the Easter Term of 1880 and left in 1886 and like his father, became a solicitor. (4) The third child born to the Addleshaw’s was John William Heywood Addleshaw, born on 14^th May 1869 (Christened 9^th October 1869 at Bowdon, Cheshire). J. W. H. Addleshaw entered Shrewsbury School in the Easter Term of 1883 and later became a solicitor. (5) Then the last child, Stanley Addleshaw, was born on Friday 1^st December 1871 at Chorlton. Actually, there was another child, Rachel Theodora Addleshaw, born in Whalley Range, Manchester on Thursday 11^th September 1873 who sadly died [Manchester Evening News. Friday 12^th September 1873. p. 4] and it was either giving birth or complications following the birth, that Stanley’s mother, Rachel Addleshaw died; she was just 34 years old. In the 1881 census [RG11, piece/folio: 3886/95. p. 12, line: 8] nine year old Stanley is living with his widowed, 43 year old solicitor father in Stretford, Lancashire. They have three servants: Agnes Reefe, 22 from Worcester, Emily Bexter or Bixter, 27 from Suffolk and Lucy Brown, 28 from Lincoln. Stanley’s brothers, 13 year old Harold and 14 year old Percy are boarding at Shrewsbury School in Shropshire which they entered in the Easter term of 1880 [RG11, 2649/16, p. 25, line: 17]; 11 year old John William H Addleshaw is possibly boarding at Harrow Moor School, Sharrow Vale Road, in Eccleshall Bierlow, Yorkshire, West Riding [RG11, 4634/10, p. 13, line: 9] but I cannot be altogether certain of this; but we do know that he entered Shrewsbury School two years later in the Easter term of 1883.

On Friday 24^th January 1890, the three brothers: Percy, Harold and Stanley Addleshaw attended a Grand Ball hosted by the Mayor and Mayoress of Manchester at the Town Hall, Albert Square [Manchester Courier. Saturday 25^th January 1890, p. 6]. The guests, of which there were between 400-500, arrived at 8 p.m. and were presented to Alderman and Mayoress, Mrs. Mark; there was a refreshment buffet and the large hall had three huge mirrors installed and was used for dancing while the music was courtesy of Mr. F. Vetter’s quadrille band – 18 waltzes, 2 Lancers and 2 polkas. Supper – ‘boars head a la Windsor’, was at 11 p.m. and the music resumed at midnight till after 2 a.m.

Stanley Addleshaw went up to Pembroke College, Oxford on Saturday 25^th October 1890, aged 18 – Third Class History 1894, B.A. 1895, M.A. 1905. Within his first month at Oxford Stanley is cox in the winning Pembroke College boat in the rowing tournament on 21^st November [The Oxford Magazine. 26 November 1890. p. 122]. While at Oxford, Stanley, like his older brother, Percy, wrote verse which extolled the beauty of young men and boys, a fashionable pursuit at Oxford in the nineties by young bachelor scholars. Percy and Stanley both came under the influence of Oxford’s aesthetic movement and both had become acquainted with the poet, and Cambridge Apostle, the Honourable Roden Noel (1834-1894). They also both later attended the funeral of the author on art and editor of The Studio – Joseph Gleeson White (1851-1898) which took place at Hammersmith Cemetery on the afternoon of Saturday 22^nd October 1898 – White died aged 46 on 19^th October and his coffin was of ‘polished elm, with massive brass furniture’ [Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette. Thursday 27^th October 1898. p. 6]. Gleeson White had designed the cover to Percy’s volume ‘Out of Egypt’ in 1895 and the following year included four quatrains of Percy’s in ‘The Pageant’ (6); along with Edward Fairbrother Strange (1862-1929), (7) Gleeson was the editor of the Bell’s series of Cathedral books and they had edited Percy Addleshaw’s book on Exeter Cathedral published in January 1898, nine months before Gleeson died in October.

Throughout the eighteen-nineties, the Addleshaw brothers, Percy, Harold, John and Stanley, generally took their holidays in Buxton and usually Mary McDonnell, whom John married in 1893, would come too; Mary Gertrude Shore whom Harold later married also attended on some occasions. In 1891, John, Harold, Stanley (of ‘Pembroke College’) and Miss McDonnel stayed at The Hollies in Buxton from 15^th - 27^th April (8).

Stanley Addleshaw had two articles published in The Spirit Lamp in 1892 and 1893; firstly, a ‘Short Note Upon a New Volume of Poems’, a review of ‘Silhouettes’ by Arthur Symons in volume II, number IV of the Spirit Lamp (6^th December 1892, pp. 117-118) in which he says Symons ‘writes as one bored with life; he is a pessimist and a cynic. Nearly every poem in the book is unhealthy; the atmosphere is that of the hot-house. Those of the poems which deal with nature are melancholy in the extreme, and those that deal with mankind show a morbid love of depicting sin in its most hectic colours.’ The article goes on to say that ‘these are the orchids of the muse, and he who loves but wild-flowers may not approach them.’ (p. 118) The second article is titled ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in volume III, number II of The Spirit Lamp (17^th February 1893, pp. 30-32) which is a review of the O.U.D.S. play of 1893 which Stanley believes was a poor choice and ‘cannot be called a very interesting comedy, and it is certainly much more charming to read it than to see it acted.’ (p. 31)

Love Lyrics appeared under the pseudonym Alan Stanley while Stanley Addleshaw was still an undergraduate of Oxford University in November 1894. (9) The poet served his dedication of the feast, the ‘poor, frail flowers’, ‘To G___’ like cold soup, somewhat embarrassingly on the final page of the book (p. 54), saying: ‘These poems are all of love, and you / inspired them, sweet. / Your beauty thrilled me through and through; / as melody to viola / so was I tuned to you. / What else, fond lover, can I do / but lay these offerings at your feet - / these poor, frail flowers at your feet?’ The first of the ‘frail flowers’ to adorn the volume is ‘At Evening’ (p. 2) in which the poet lays his sentimental agony before us right away – ‘Do your lips tremble now to mine? / In your eyes can I see / spring up a light of love divine, / a new born ecstasy? / Ah, dear, I shiver ‘neath your kiss, / have I not waited long for this - / that you should turn to me?’ And in similar mood he lays his tortured heart before the simple beauty of a child – ‘My heart’s desire is white and fair, / more gold than sunshine in his hair,’ and the syrup keeps on flowing from the poet’s sweet lips – ‘So frail he is, so slim and rare, / a willow wand he seems to be / that quivers with each passing air, / - My heart’s desire.’ But he is not done with us yet, for ‘His beauty fills me with despair, / it overwhelms me so; I dare / scarcely to pray on bended knee / that I may kiss him reverently, / fearing to stain beyond repair / my heart’s desire.’ [To a Child, pp. 4-5) In another poem, Love in Autumn, the poet’s ‘heart grows weary’ and he sighs to recapture ‘the golden glories that are fled’ (p. 7) before the reader succumbs to the charm of the final verse in ‘To a Dream’ (p. 12) and we find new peaks to the poet’s misery when he recalls how he ‘felt warm kisses fall / on upturned throat and barren breast, / then stirred I with a wild unrest / to know the sweetest kiss of all.’ One wonders if indeed he ever did get to know the ‘sweetest kiss of all’? The poet has placed a fair broth of sentimentality before us that we spoon down between prized lips all too eager to taste of that much talked about ‘sweetest kiss of all’, yet we must suffer in silence for now and continue in the hope of Swinburnian touches of brilliance. And it comes, or at least a passing shadow of lyrical beauty, in the form of The Dawn Nocturne (August Blue) where we find a young bather lingering around the third verse – ‘stripped for the sea your tender form / seems all of ivory white, / through which the blue veins wander warm / o’er throat and bosom slight, / and as you stand, so slim, upright / tho glad waves grow and yearn / to clasp you circling in their might, / to kiss with lips that burn.’ (p. 15) Quite beautiful and even the printing mistake following those ‘glad waves’ that should have read ‘glow’ and not ‘grow’ is a fortunate accident for indeed it defines the hunger in the yearning better, I believe. But let us not be too hasty to leave the water, for ‘a very nymph you seem to be / as you glide and dive and swim, / while the mad waves clasp you fervently / possessing every limb.’ (p. 15-16) Such heights of ecstasy seem almost unreachable for the young poet and it is almost certain that he was inspired by the famous painting by Henry Scott Tuke’s of four youths, three nude, bathing in Falmouth harbour, called ‘August Blue’ which was begun in Cornwall in 1893, a place Percy, Stanley and Roden Noel liked to visit; we can of course speculate that Stanley may have met Tuke or visited his studio. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition between 7^th May and 6^th August 1894 and it is probable that Stanley saw the exhibition and the painting inspired the poem. We can only assume in the next poem, Now Dies the Sun, (p. 17) that the remarkable youth has left the water and taken with him all the exhilarating rays of that glorious orb of fire and our poet once more is in darkness and despair, for ‘Lo! the pale moon by gentle breezes led / drifts like a wraith, ere night has yet begun, / all grows so hushed, the very world seems dead, - / now dies the sun.’ I am particularly fond of the poem, ‘Love at Hinksey’:

 

In the grey city at our feet
The lights gleam out, and one by one
Each gas-jet makes a mimic sun
Now the real sun has set, and sweet
The air grows with the heavy scent
Each flowering bush of May has lent;
The sky above a clear-cut gem,
And the moon rising from the sea
Trailing her white robes silently,
Has seven stars for a diadem.
 
When the sun set the breeze, too, fell,
Fluttering down like a wounded bird,
Now only its dying call is heard
From where wan river waters swell,
Amid tall lilies golden grown
We two in silence stand alone.
Your trembling hand in mine is prest,
I know within your sweet grey eyes
Love lights a torch which never dies
But flares for ever in unrest.
 
Ah dear, you love me now, and yet
Have I not often felt despair
Lest I should never touch your hair,
Or that our lips had never met?
I thought that you would never be
More than a simple friend to me.
Have I not known you two long years?
Have I not striven to make you love?
I think some angel from above
Has moved you by my aching tears.
 
You are a perfect poem, sweet,
Sung to an angel’s melody
Before the Throne in ecstasy,
Where choir to choir the song repeat
Through all the columned courts of Heaven.
Dear God to you such grace has given,
Has wrought you as a golden flower,
Or as a drifting nenuphar,
Or as a wondrous ivory tower.
 
For in the hush of that young corn
Where only birds and flowers may see,
You shall be all in all to me,
And we will rest there till the morn
Turns emerald-sky to ruby red
And crowns with gold your golden head.
And lends unto your eyes new fire,
And makes your splendid, curving mouth
A gorgeous poppy of the South
Culled for some God’s desire.

Hinksey is a little village just outside Oxford and the poet says he has known his friend for two years, which would be 1892 while he was an undergraduate at Pembroke College; I believe he is directly addressing the poem to the same ‘G___’ he dedicates the volume to and it is clear that on some beautiful evening, the poet and his friend stride out towards Hinksey. Stanley reminds me of A. E. Housman’s unrequited passion for Moses Jackson but unlike Jackson, Stanley’s ‘friend’ relents under the two years of tender bombardment and it seems that both succumb to an overwhelming passion and lips meet…

In the poem At Bournemouth (pp. 29-30) the poet is once again watching the bathers – he is not making a good impression upon the reader I’m afraid, with all this lurking about and staring at nude and scantily clad swimmers –  and he wishes to ‘join that happy throng, / and lose my care and laugh as they, / or kiss the lips of one I love,’ (p. 30) We can only guess whose lips, but most likely the same ‘golden haired’ G___ whom I believe also is the person the poet sits with ‘in the late afternoon’ at a café in Marseilles and their hands touch lightly and the poet ‘did not draw my hand away.’ (p. 35) The poet is torn by his feelings and back home, in the north of England with its ‘gas-jets’, ‘hawkers’ and ‘poor waifs of sin’, he reflects upon that touch and wishes to  be back in the south; yet he is tempted for a moment by the beauty of a woman –

 

‘Thinking of one, I could not stoop so low
Although her face was fair, and her great eyes
Grew pleading as she begged me with her go.
 
Aye, she was fair, and all the fire that lies
Deep in man’s heart began to burn and glow
In a white-heat of flame that never dies.
 
I stooped and kissed her lips, but lo, there rose
A visioned face that falling tears did stain,
And through my heart there shot a sudden pain,
As half aloud, I cried, “my loved one knows”.’

 

Then the poet ‘turned away! Nor kissed her lips again,’ [In a Northern Town, pp. 39-40] for he knows that he has sweeter lips to kiss. In the poem, A Night Thought (p. 44) he lies where the ‘fading roses lie, / in the drear garden of our dead delight?’ Dead perhaps because he can see no future in their passionate embraces, yet his nights are disturbed by thoughts of being with his heart’s desire, and ‘sometimes as I sleepless moan and sigh, / will you return to cheer my aching sight? / To kiss my lips, my falling tears to dry / within the night?’ The pain of loving someone and keeping the relationship secret takes its toll on the poet and in the poem, A Tragedy (pp. 48-50), the strain upon the lovers begins to unravel their bond – ‘we loved, and all around seemed gay / to our enchanted eyes, though cold / and keen the chilling winds would play / with autumn’s leaves, so dead, so old, / for us the air with song was filled, / though song and songbird now were stilled.’ The poem continues in similar measures of despair:

 

Through the long nights we two would sit
To tell our love, the well-worn tale,
Watching the fickle shadows flit,
O’er warm red walls and ceiling pale,
Your hand within my hands was prest,
Your head lay pillowed on my breast.
 
And yet you say I never knew
Nor cared to know your inmost soul,
I never looked you through and through
Nor all your secret fancies stole,
I knew your lips, your eyes, your hair,
But not the shy soul lurking there.
 
So you drift from me, O my sweet,
Still colder grows your glance each day,
Love flies us on his winged feet,
I plead, and yet he will not stay;
With tear-dimmed eyes I watch his flight
Till daylight falters into night.
 
But sometimes with reluctant voice
We whisper the old words again,
Feigning the long hours to rejoice
In pleasures that have turned to pain,
And ghosts of our dead joys arise
And mock us with their weeping eyes.

The poem ‘Two Rispetti’ (pp. 51-52) seems to suggest that the lovers are parted (the autumnal break-up of A Tragedy, and winter has passed) and the poet now in the spring, residing in the North, is dreaming of the South, the ‘city of the lilies’, (Oxford); the scent of those lilies ‘fills the darkened room, / the Angelus rings out, a crimson glow / of southern sunshine floods the northern gloom.’ The final verse conjures before the sleepless poet the voice and form of his lover: ‘I hear a well-known voice, I touch a hand / with love I roam along the pleasant land, / we pause and kiss, where flowers spring to out feet / “a kiss in dreamland yet a kiss most sweet.”’ In the final poem, Love’s Song, our poet declares his love, saying ‘I hold your hands and look into your eyes / and mark the violet glories sleeping there, / I bend and touch the splendour of your hair, / my joy grows manifold and never dies; / we are as one, O God, let never care / as some wild discord, marring all, arise / in Life’s sweet song.’ (p. 53)

Throughout the volume is a thread of a story being told, somewhat mysteriously perhaps due to the nature of that relationship, but it is being whispered in song – in At Evening the poet asks: ‘have I not waited long for this - / that you should turn to me?’ Well, yes he has, two long years apparently. And it goes on to suggest this love was hard won – ‘And you are silent, love, this hour / this last flushed hour of day - / is it because my love’s strong power / has drawn your soul away? / Do you regret your love of me? / Does your soul struggle to be free / flutter and fail always?’ (pp. 1-2) That this love was furtive and secret we are told in Love in Autumn (p. 7) where ‘the low wind moans a lullaby, / my loved one comes with gentle tread’, suggesting a secret tryst beneath the boughs of some secluded place in or around Oxford. This is further emphasised in The Old Story (pp. 8-9) in which ‘no sound unto my ears was sweet / as the soft echo of your feet.’ But a love played out in shadows and secrets is hard to sustain and we must remember that if this is a love between two undergraduates at Oxford, then we are on the threshold of the Wilde scandal and the plight of reputations and careers ruined; unfortunately, unlike the poet, society will not view it as a beautiful thing. The love proves not as strong in the end and seems to disperse upon the breeze as the poet rather naively asks: ‘was it because we loved too well, / we tired and broke the fervid spell?’ He concludes and has to accept the reality of his lover denying even their friendship – ‘I know not, and I do not fret, / because I hear that you forget / even that we have ever met.’ (p. 9) That ‘heard’ suggests a third-party has informed the poet and that the lovers are no longer on speaking terms, at least not publicly… secrecy and discretion, in these matters, were of the greatest importance – ‘you shall not hear me even breathe your name…’ (George G. S. Gillett. ‘To W. J. M.’ The Artist. April 1890. p. 113). The relationship was probably irretrievably lost at the time of the volume’s publication and the poet, although at a loss as to why the relationship has broken down, seems gracious and does not ‘fret’ for he knows that such unions are short lived; as he says in the poem At Evening which opens the volume (p. 3): ‘The nightingale in yonder grove, / lifts up his voice in praise, / he knows and chants our Lyric-love, / the love that never stays. / He sings “This moment is supreme / yet fleeting as a flitful gleam, / nor comes in after days.”’

Reviews of the volume were not altogether favourable and many dismissed it as poor poetry. One of the earliest reviews in The Scotsman (November 1894) had this to say about it: ‘The Love Lyrics of Mr. Alan Stanley are readable, and probably sincere; but they are so passionless that they can hardly be accorded any prominent place among poems of their class. It is pleasant, doubtless, to consider how the fancy unites associations derived from a contemplation of the beauties of nature with the thoughts and feelings inspired by the love of woman; and this part of the poetical business the present book performed with some success, although even in this branch of the subject it seeks distinctions where distinctions there are none, since, after all, Love at Hinksey is essentially much the same thing as Love at Bournemouth. But this is a serious subject, and demands some severity in the poet or he will be carried over the line, as the writer of the present volume is in several instances, in which trying to be passionate he succeeds only in being mawkish and sentimental in a sickly way. The book is only a small one, but it takes more talent than appears in it to sustain an interest through some thirty pieces all of which are based more or less exclusively on kisses and claspings, and golden curls, and yearnings and thrills, and all that sort of thing.’ (10) I beg to differ for there are moments of great passion as in this from The Dawn of Love (p. 42): ‘… fiercer grows / the passion that so long has in me burned, / Oh! How your falling raiment doth disclose / your neck’s fine curvings to my ardent gaze, / and lo I falter as my hot mouth strays / in trembling kisses o’er your throat upturned.’ Or this from Love’s Song (p. 53): ‘For as your lips seek mine in tender kiss / our two mouths grow together as one flower, / and naught to us the passing of the hour, / for each hour brings renewal of our bliss / in life’s sweet song.’

One of the better reviews appeared in The Academy, of December 1894, which said that the ‘fault in this tiny volume seems to be youth and inexperience, which will therefore work their own cure. Mr. Stanley manages some difficult metres very deftly, he expresses his thoughts felicitously, and shows genuine poetical feeling. He should beware of too prodigal a use of epithets, and not weary us with frequent a display of “gold” and “ivory”. But he has skill and taste.’ (11) The Bookseller of January the following year said ‘Mr. Stanley is a very “loving” person, if we are to take these rhymed confessions of his seriously. Everywhere he “loves”, he “loves”: Marseilles, Bournemouth, Florence, Hinksey, Monte Carlo, it is the same tale.’ (12) Also of January is this example from the Gentlewoman (Thursday 3^rd January 1895, p. 54) which positively gushes over the volume, saying that a ‘young poet, timorously giving the world his first volume of verses has rarely had so little reason to fear the result as Alan Stanley. Love Lyrics (Gay & Bird) are the poems of a young man – a very young man – but the only sign of his youth is their freshness, their spontaneity, their beautiful love of love. Passion in the hands of poets too often touches upon morbidity, love of form too often upon mere carnality. Passion of the highest shines like a purple flower in the greater number of the lyrics, but it is healthy, vigorous. “White lilies”, “golden hair”, and “crimson mouth”, are well-worn poetic similes, but with Mr. Stanley they lose all sense of staleness, all feeling of commonplace, becoming frankly ingenuous, the only metaphor that fits his fancy. An indescribable charm, a softness and grace, lurk in the more amorous of the poems, a true vein of poetry in the descriptive lyrics. Now dies the sun is very charming, as a singer of love songs breathing exalted passion, Mr. Stanley has touched heights of expression which are but seldom attained at the first striking of the lyre.’ And the Literary World (February 1895) gave a most unfavourable review, saying that ‘Mr. Stanley sings of love: a very laudable and likely thing to do in the years between twenty and forty, but in not a few instances he does not do his subject honour, for his artistic education has not been enough prolonged to teach him when to pause, or when to use suggestion in the place of sentiment. All of Mr. Stanley’s faults are not those of youth, however, for he sins against good taste occasionally in a manner that it will not please him to remember when he has added a score to the present tally of his years.’ The article goes on to say that the poet is ‘devoid of originality. He is a derivative verse-maker, who has the knack of assimilating the vices of his models without being helped by their virtues. He uses some Swinburnian tags; he takes the worst of Mr. Arthur Symons, and thus equipped thinks to charm us with his piping.’ Suffice to say, the reviewer does not ‘conscientiously recommend it.’ (13) But perhaps the worst of the reviews in my opinion comes from the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art in January 1895 under the heading: ‘Wanton Verse’ in which the reviewer brings God and Mrs. Grundy into the fight against ‘decadent’ and indecent poetry and literature. It starts by assuring us that ‘the book [Love Lyrics by Alan Stanley] which we take as an example of wanton verse has no importance in itself, but it is a convenient specimen of an affectation which is coming into vogue among the younger men.’ The review condemns such poetry and the ‘Decadent school, which has never existed, and will never exist, in England, and which has never existed in any definite or definable way even in France.’ The poor misguided fool goes on to say that ‘almost all French verse, for the matter of that, would distress that lady [Mrs. Grundy] if she could understand it.’ He singles out Stanley, saying that the poet was ‘in Marseilles, with some one who looked at him “o’er the half-filled glass of your absinthe dim.” This was in the late afternoon. By evening the absinthe had proved so effective that “your flower-like head sunk down on my breast”; but whether this, too, happened on the Cannebidre, and whether the neighbours imputed or to absinthe, or, as Mr. Alan Stanley does, to love, we are not told. Further, Mr. Alan Stanley addresses these incoherent remarks to a boy bathing: - King of the Sea, triumphant boy, Nature itself made thrall to God’s White work without alloy On whom no stain doth fall. Gaze on him, slender, fair, and tall, And on the yearning sea…’ His basic argument, after invoking Verlaine and Rimbaud, is that poetry should be firstly ‘sincere’ and secondly ‘good’, neither of which does this Lord upon High at the Saturday Review believe Love Lyrics and other poetry volumes like it,  contains, for there is ‘no sincerity, no real feeling; and we certainly cannot commend them as works of art. They impress one merely as a feeble attempt to live up to a ridiculous ideal. Certain people, who happened to be somewhat morbid and unbalanced, had written successfully about the sensations which they had really had; therefore, it appears, we must all try to be as morbid as we can, and write flounderingly about the sensations which we have not had.’ (14) And finally from the reviews, this nonsense from the National Observer of Saturday 20^th April 1895 (p. 29) – ‘Mr. Alan Stanley is a “sad bad mad” fellow, and is determined that his readers shall know it. His verse is full of “crimson lips” and “flower-like heads” and “warm kisses”; while his modesty may be measured by the subjoined quotation from what he is pleased to call Wreckage: “I looked into my glass last night To trace my beauty there, How wan I seemed by candlelight I who had been so fair.” The waste-paper basket is the proper receptacle for such unwholesome rubbish as this, which makes one positively blush for its progenitor.’ 

The integrity of the poems depends on whether one believes they are real or imaginary. If indeed the experiences in Love Lyrics are poetically factual and Stanley’s wondrous desires and yearnings were fulfilled and the two lovers parted amicably or were forced to part, then it may be a factor in Stanley’s future. Allow me the indulgence of throwing in a theory as to the identity of G___. We can assume he, and I believe it is a male, was a younger undergraduate at Oxford. The relationship between them has been ongoing for two years, over which it has intensified from an infatuation and blossomed into what the poet believes is love, to which the younger has succumbed. I believe the poem, To a Poet (pp. 31-32) is addressed to the same person of his affection and that the undergraduate also writes verse, and is the greater poet – Stanley admits his verses are ‘weak’ and that the poet sings a ‘chant more true’ his ‘passionate sweet song’. Stanley asks the ‘true songster’ to ‘smile but if you will / at this my praise, / yet keep your well-loved friendship for me still, / through life’s long after days.’ If Stanley were addressing a well-known poet he would have said so and not been mysterious, or at least applied initials so that the poet could accept the praise and perhaps return his thanks. It is a poet addressing a fellow poet, a ‘friend’ who must remain unidentified and only the poet addressed would know, which tells me it is the same person who inspired the volume – the lover. I would suggest that the poet addressed has also had undergraduate verses published either in The Spirit Lamp or in Oxford Verses; the latter has an obvious poet named G___ with similar romantic ideals as Addleshaw, and ‘born of ways torturous to the soul’: Gabriel Gillett. Addleshaw’s Love Lyrics was published in November 1894 around the same time as Oxford Verses which may have appeared soon after as the editor, Rosslyn Bruce’s ‘Acknowledgement’ (p. viii) is dated November, 1894. Gillett’s ‘Love Songs’ (pp. 28-32) appeared in the same volume of Oxford Verses (1894) as Addleshaw’s ‘A Tragedy’ (pp. 56-57), ‘An Old Picture’ (p. 58) and ‘Love at Hinksey’ (p. 59) and it is easily noticeable that Gillett is the better poet. (15) To continue on a similar thread, d’Arch Smith tells us in his hugely informative Love in Earnest (1970) that another poet, ‘A. R. Bayley, a friend of Gillett’s, who already contributed [to The Spirit Lamp] a harmless article on Peer Gynt, sent in a story which was too dangerous even for [Lord Alfred] Douglas to handle.’ (p. 53) Douglas published ‘a note in the editor’s “Answers to Correspondents” section’ which ‘apologised to an A. R. Bayley, who had sent in a story and two poems: “I like your story very much,” wrote Douglas, “but I dare not publish it.”’ (16) Bayley was, like the younger Stanley Addleshaw, an undergraduate of Pembroke College (17) and may have been an intermediary between Addleshaw and Gillett. George Gabriel Scott Gillett, coincidently, shared the same birthday as Stanley Addleshaw, 1^st December, although Gillett was two years younger, born in Hawley, Hampshire in 1873. He was educated at Westminster School where he was a member of the Debating Society and the Literary Society; in the latter he showed some talent as a performer, particularly in the role of Shakespearean ladies, perhaps because of his slender beauty [see The Elizabethan, for the Literary Society performances, volume 6, numbers 7-12, 1889] and gained a History Scholarship in May 1892 to Keble College, Oxford, where he matriculated on 15^th October that year, aged 18, two years before Love Lyrics was published. Gillett’s poem, ‘To W. J. M.’ which appeared in The Artist (1^st April 1890, p. 113) shows Gillett’s unrequited infatuation for another who may feel ‘disgust at passion you deem vile’. The poem ends with almost Houseman-like reserve – ‘Mine by the punishment as mine the blame / and though in hopeless fear my heart is numb / and its renunciation, yet still dumb / you shall not hear me even breathe your name.’ In Gillett’s poem ‘In Memoriam E. B. F.’ in The Spirit Lamp (volume III, number III, March 1893, pp. 72-73) and dated 10^th January of that year, the poet recalls his ‘friend and more than friend’ who has drowned – ‘Brave boy with the bright blue eyes, / faithful and fair and strong! / dead now – when the short day died / like a broken song, / and the night comes dark and long.’ Timothy d’Arch Smith tells us in Love in Earnest (p. 53) that according to fellow uranian poet and scholar of Exeter College, Oxford, Reverend Samuel Elsworth Cottam (1863-1943) the initials were fictitious.

 

‘Yet to him that giveth Love as a thing due,
Worship as a free will, Beauty lends the clue;
Whereby out of old things, Art makes all things new.’

 [To Kalon. Gillett. The Artist, 1^st December 1891, p. 355]

 

In Addleshaw’s poem, From North to South, (pp. 21-23) which in itself has an undercurrent of sexual meaning, the poet (Stanley) writing as Sappho, is residing in the ‘bleak’ North (Manchester, the home of the Addleshaw family) while his love with the ‘golden hair’ lies in the ‘fair’ South (Oxford or Hampshire perhaps) and ‘wine-red is his red red mouth’. He makes the distinction clear for he longs for ‘my lover’s mouth, / that kissing him I might lose my care’ –‘And my body yearns to follow my soul, / and my lips his lips to seek’… the poem ends with a tone of despair – ‘Nor does he know my fretting care, / as he wanders blithe and debonaire. / But O, how I long and yearn to be there, / for the North is bleak and the South is fair.’ Gillett can be just as mysterious and passionate: ‘Or, best of all, when the world lies sleeping, / your arms twin’d round me,your lips to mine, / Love shields us both with his pinions steeping / our souls in music and fore and wine.’ [Oxford Verses. Love Songs III, p. 31]

Later, like Addleshaw, Gillett entered the Church, he was ordained deacon in 1898 and priest the following year. This of course is mere supposition and a tantalising if very delicate thread. In the same year as Love Lyrics was published, Stanley and Percy Addleshaw’s literary friend, Roden Noel, died in Germany on 26^th May (1894); publishers, Elkin Mathews announced in September 1895 that two works would  be published: ‘My Sea and Other Posthumous Poems’ by the late Hon. Roden Noel with an Introduction by Stanley Addleshaw (published in January 1896), and ‘Selected Poems from the Works of the Hon. Roden Noel’ with a biography and critical essay by Percy Addleshaw (published in October 1897) – later, in 1902, came ‘The Collected Poems of Roden Noel’ by publishers Kegan Paul (London) with an Introduction by the late John Addington Symonds.

The following year after the publication of Love Lyrics, in 1895 Addleshaw entered the Clerical School at Leeds and was ordained deacon the following year and priest at Ely in 1897. Like Houseman, who threw his soul into scholarly solitude and study, following love’s disappointment, Stanley, perhaps threw his soul before God. But it is unwise to speculate without firm evidence, but we do know that Reverend Stanley Addleshaw had his article on Walter Pater published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in March 1897; it is an interesting theory by Addleshaw which compares two works by Walter Pater (1839-1894), who had a profound influence on the young undergraduates, including Wilde, on attitudes to art and aesthetics, which was not altogether wholesome. The two works: ‘Studies in the History of the Renaissance’ (1873) and ‘Marius the Epicurean’ (1885) by Pater, show, according to Addleshaw, a marked development between the Greek and Roman hedonism of the former, and the Christian, noble sense of duty and chastity of the latter; the pagan and the divine in art. Addleshaw grasps Pater’s concepts well, saying let ‘life be filled with sensation. Remember that no moment can return; let it then, be as exquisite as possible.’ One can almost hear Wilde in his phrases which contrast the individualistic and even narcissistic approach to art and beauty; the sense that art should not be condemned or judged for the sake of its moral or immoral influences, but purely on its aesthetic level which answers – does this work of art give me pleasure? (18).

Stanley Addleshaw became curate at Downham from 1896-1905 and Diocesan Missioner in the Diocese of Ely from 1901-05. He was vicar at Gorsefield from 1905-1915 and it was while he was vicar at Gorsefield that Stanley Addleshaw married the only daughter of Reverend Canon Elgood George Punchard (1844-1917): Rose Elgood Punchard (1880-1960) at St. Mary’s Church, Ely, Cambridgeshire, on Tuesday 13^th June 1905. Their first child, George William Outram Addleshaw was born on Saturday 1^st December (like his father), 1906 at Gorefield Vicarage, Wisbech, (19) and a daughter, Mary Rachel Addleshaw was born on Sunday 19^th September 1909, (Mary never married and she died in 1983). Reverend Stanley Addleshaw spends the following years at Gorefield busy and well-liked within the parish. In 1911, 39 year old Stanley, clergyman ‘established church’ and his wife Rose, 31, are living in Gorefield, Leverington, Cambridgeshire with their two children George, aged 4, and May [Mary] aged 1. They have two domestic servants living with them: Elizabeth Russell, 45 (born 1866 in Hillson, Cambridgeshire) who is the cook, and Dora Pentelow, 17 (born 1894 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire) who is the housemaid (20).

On Monday 7^th February 1916, Reverend Stanley Addleshaw attended the inquest on his older brother, Percy Addleshaw at Hove Town Hall; his barrister brother, Harold Addleshaw was also there. Mr. Alfred Sams, who was the proprietor of the Clayton Park Hotel, Hassocks said he had nursed Percy for eight years, five years at the Hill Side Hotel and three years at the Clayton Park Hotel; on Wednesday 29^th December 1915, Alfred went to Percy’s room at 9 p.m. and at 10 p.m. and found him both times writing a letter, on checking on him later, he found Percy on the floor. Percy had slipped climbing the stair and broken his right arm and was attended to by Dr. William Halley Eggar, of Hassock’s Lodge. (21) The burial took place that day on Monday 7^th February at Brighton and Preston Cemetery. The Mid Sussex Times of Tuesday 8^th February 1916 (J. P.’s Fatal Fall. p. 8) said that following the accident Percy was ‘conveyed to a seaside nursing home, but succumbed to dropsy, accentuated by the mishap’ and died on Friday 4^th February. In the following article, on the same page, ‘Percy Addleshaw: A Friend’s Tribute’ said that ‘very few of those to whom the figure of the badly crippled gentleman was so familiar realised how many well-known people were interested in Hassocks simply because Mr. Addleshaw lived there. Fewer still realised how he towered over us intellectually. He was a great bookman, perhaps almost too much of a bookman. One could wish he had devoted less time to other men’s books and more to his own.’ The article goes on to say that he had a ‘curiously speculative mind combined with an enthusiastic love of the beautiful in nature and art. As a poet he was very good indeed, and occasionally great…’ ‘He was a devoted pupil and disciple of the late P. York Powell, the great Regius Professor of History at Oxford and the influence of The Yorker, as he used to call him, was a very marked feature in Mr. Addleshaw’s life. Among his other friends were Roden Noel, Lionel Johnson, J. Addington Symonds and other members of that brilliant literary circle which flourished in the nineties – the days of Aubrey Beardsley and the Yellow Book.’ A friend of Percy’s, the Anglican clergyman, poet and antiquary, Reverend Walter Harold Yeandle (1895-1952) wrote a fitting tributary poem, which was published in the Mid Sussex Times (Tuesday 15^th February 1916, p. 5) – ‘In Memoriam: Percy Addleshaw’:

 

‘And now you’ve gained that “cool and quiet inn”
For which you hoped; the “Sign o’ the Grave” swings high
Above the door; its walls will hush the cry
Of war, the roar of storm, for you. ‘Tis sin
To wish to bear you company from within,
So I instead must be content to sigh
And trust you’ll find your rest complete, close by
Those souls in gentle temperament your kin.
 
You taught me many things – friend, critic, guide.
Though you pass from me, still must there abide ere long
Some other voice may carry on the song,
Though you’re not here to censure or to praise,
Kindled by you, fresh beacons yet may blaze!

Harold Yeandle. B.E.F., France. Feb. 10^th 1916.’

 

Stanley became vicar of St. Mary’s, Ely and chaplain of Ely Cathedral from 1915-29 and Honorary Canon of Ely from 1925; Deacon of Fincham from 1932-35; Rector of All Souls with St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, Huntingdon in the Diocese of Ely from 1935; Rector of All Saints, Huntingdon from 1935-45 (and Rural Dean of Huntingdon from 1937-44). Reverend Canon Stanley Addleshaw, who was also treasurer of York Minster, died following a long illness at the age of 79 on Thursday 25^th January 1951 at his home, Green Leas, The Walk, Huntingdon. The funeral took place at All Saint’s Church, Huntingdon at 2.30 p.m. on Monday 29^th January (22).

 

‘Your wreath falls down, well, let the blossoms fade,
They matter not, the rose of love is sweet;
The morning birds sing out in the far glade
Raising a nuptial-song, for we are one,
And for our marriage-torch there comes the sun
Flaming through heaven, with swift ardent feet.’

 [The Dawn of Love. p. 42]

 

 

NOTES:

 

1. John William Addleshaw was the sixth child born to John Addleshaw, born 1799, and Maria Mundy (1800-1866) who were married on 9^th July 1821. Other children of John and Maria were: Thomas Mundy Addleshaw (1823), Elizabeth Mary Addleshaw (1824), Alfred Addleshaw (1826-1886), Ann Addleshaw (1831), Maria Addleshaw (1833), and after John William’s birth in 1836, came Mary Jane Addleshaw (1839). John William Addleshaw married Rachel Ann Heyes Hemingway, the daughter of Reuben and Martha Hemingway, on 16^th November 1865. John became a successful solicitor in the firm of Addleshaw and Warburton & Co. who had their offices at 67, King Street, Manchester, circa 1876, which later moved, around 1879, to 15, Norfolk Street, Manchester. They also had a London agent, Addleshaw, Warburton and Trenan, from around 1890, operating from 7, Newcourt, Carey Street, London, W.C. John William Addleshaw married again after Rachel’s death in 1873, to Laura Parkinson (1869-1941) in Manchester in April 1908. John William Addleshaw died on 10^th January 1924 and he was buried two days later on 12^th January at Bowdon, in the Metropolitan Borough of Trafford, Manchester.
2. William Percy Addleshaw died on 4^th February 1916 and is buried in Brighton, East Sussex.
3. In the Preface to Percy’s book, Sir Philip Sidney (London, Methuen & Co.) of October 1909, the author says ‘I wish to mention my beloved master, York Powell. He urged me often to write. In writing, though I realised he would at times have controverted the views I have put forward, I have regarded my task as a sacred duty owed to him. I like to think he is still, as he always was, my kindest critic.’ (pp. vii-viii).
4. Harold Pope Addleshaw married Mary Gertrude Shore (born 1872) in West Derby, Lancashire on 2^nd July 1895. They had three children: Harold Leslie Addleshaw born 1^st August 1896 (and dying in Aberconwy in 1982), and twins: John Lawrence Addleshaw, born 30^th October 1902 (and dying in Macclesfield in 1989) and Derrek (or Derek) Hemingway Addleshaw born 30^th October 1902 (and dying in Trafford in 1986). Harold Pope Addleshaw died on 8^th March 1943 and was buried in Bowdon, Manchester.
5. The Pageant, by Charles Shannon (1863-1937) and Gleeson White. London, Henry & Co. 1896 [150 copies. a second edition was published in 1897]. The four quatrains by Percy Hemingway (none of which are included in The Happy Wanderer) begin: ‘Ye cannot cheat the Master of your fate!’, ‘Why weep for days irrevocably dead,’, ‘To-night old poets through the city go,’ and ‘The future lies before us rich with gold’ (p. 130).
6. John William Heywood Addleshaw married Martha Lillian McDonnell (born 1868) in Fairfield, Derbyshire on 18^th May 1893. They had two children: John Hemingway Addleshaw born 27^th August 1895 (and dying in Wells in 1971) and Rachel Beatrice Addleshaw, born 23^rd April1905 (and dying, unmarried in Honiton in 1990). John William Heywood Addleshaw died on 18^th May 1931 and was buried on 21^st May at Torquay Cemetery, Hele, Devon.
7. Lt.-Col. Edward Fairbrother Strange, CBE., born in Worcester on 8^th October 1862, he attended Worcester Cathedral School and Kidderminster Grammar School before entering the Civil Service in 1881. He was a museum curator; assistant keeper of woodwork at the Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington (1889) and at the National Art Library (1891). He was an authority on etchings, engraving and Japanese colour prints and published several books: Palissy in Prison and Other Verses (privately printed, 1892), Alphabets: A Handbook of Lettering (1895), Japanese Illustrations (1897), Japanese Colour Prints (1903) and Chinese Lacquer (1926). He died on 14^th April 1929.
8. The Buxton Herald and Gazette of Fashion. Wednesday 15^th April 1891, p. 2 [Visitors]. In other years at Buxton we can see: 1892: John, Harold and Stanley with Miss McDonnell and Miss Mary Shore (who later married Harold) from 6^th -20^th April; 1893: Harold and Miss Shore, with John and Stanley from 19^th April – 10^th May; 1894: John and wife, Mary, Stanley, and Harold and Miss Mary Shore, from 28^th March – 7^th April; 1896: John and Wife Mary from 23^rd May – 6^th June; 1897: John and wife Mary, Harold and wife Mary, 19^th – 26^th June; 1898: John and wife Mary, 11^th May – 13^th July; 1899: John and wife Mary, 27^th September – 27^th December. Other holidays include: Stanley and Harold at the Imperial Hotel, Denbigshire, North Wales from 21^st August 1890, and Percy, Stanley and Miss Mary McDonnell staying at Kinmel Terrace, Pensarn from 30^th July – 17^th September 1892.
9. Three of the poems appeared in ‘Oxford Verses’ (1894) edited by Rosslyn Bruce under his real name: A Tragedy (pp. 56-57), An Old Picture (p. 58) and Love at Hinksey (pp. 59-61) so making the connection between Alan Stanley and Stanley Addleshaw was not a difficult process to a fellow admirer of such verse; in the same volume of Oxford Verses was another like-minded poet, Gabriel Gillett and his poems, Love Songs (pp. 28-32). Oxford Verses was reviewed in the Pall Mall Gazette, Wednesday 27^th February 1895, p. 4, which mentioned Stanley Addleshaw, along with other poets.
10. The Scotsman. Wednesday 28^th November 1894, p. 10.
11. The Academy, number 1181, 22^nd December 1894, p. 530.
12. The Bookseller. 9^th January 1895, p. 20.
13. The Literary World. 22^nd February 1895, p. 168.
14. The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art [Supplement]. London. Saturday 19^th January 1895, pp. 71-72.
15. Gillett had already had several ‘uranian’ poems published previously: ‘Triolet’ in The Artist, December 1889, volume x, p. 367; ‘To W. J. M.’ in The Artist, 1^st April 1890, p. 113, and ‘To Kalon’ in The Artist, 1^st December 1891 [Gillett’s 18^th birthday and Stanley Addleshaw’s 20^th birthday], p. 355.
16. Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. New York. Hyperion. 2000. p. 43.
17. Arthur Rutter Bayley, born 27^th April 1868, Brixton, Surrey. The son of Rev. W. R. Bayley, Arthur was educated at Harrow School (leaving in December 1885) and went up to Pembroke College, Oxford on 28^th October 1886, aged 18. B.A. 1890. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Bayley had several works published: Peer Gynt, The Spirit Lamp, vol II, number IV, 6^th December 1892, pp. 98-100; in the same volume appeared Addleshaw’s A Short Note Upon a New Volume, pp. 117-118. In the Louvre: A Sonnet, The Spirit Lamp, vol III, number III, 10^th March 1893, p. 60; in the same volume is Gillett’s In Memoriam E B F (dated 10^th January 1893), pp. 72-73, and Charles Kains Jackson’s Impressions, p. 55. The Defence of Poesy, (pp. 71-78) and the poem, In Lyonesse (p. 86), The Spirit Lamp, vol IV, number II, 6^th June 1893. Bayley’s poem, Sunday Afternoon at Iffley, appeared in William Angus Kight’s The Glamour of Oxford, (Oxford. B. H. Blackwell. 1911. p. 240). He also compiled ‘A Catalogue of Portraits in the Possession og Pembroke College’ (May 1895) and Bayley’s book, The Great Civil War in Dorset, 1642-1660, appeared in 1910. A. R. Bayley seems to have the same ‘uranian’ desires as Stanley Addleshaw and Gabriel Gillett – upon Bayley’s death in 1948, the 80 year old bachelor left £20,000, his 20-roomed mansion, two cars and other personal effects to his secretary-chauffeur, (companion) Reginald Arthur George Surridge (born 1914), who Bayley, of Graham Road, Malvern, Wiltshire, had met when Surridge (now 34) was a nine year old choir boy: ‘I was only nine, Mr. Surridge said yesterday, when I first knew Mr. Bayley . He was a governor at the grammar school I attended, and when I was in Malvern Priory choir he often asked me to tea. On leaving school I started work for him.’ [the gross estate was worth £70,000] (The People. ‘Choir Boy Grew Rich’. Sunday 3^rd October 1948.p. 1).
18. Walter Pater. Reverend Stanley Addleshaw. The Gentleman’s Magazine, volume 58, March 1897, pp. 127-251.
19. George William Outram Addleshaw, M.A., B.D., F.S.A. (1906-1982), was educated at Bromsgrove School before going up to Trinity College, Oxford to study Modern History, B.A. 1929, M.A. 1932, B.D. 1935. he went on to study Theology at Cuddesdon College in 1929 before being ordained deacon in 1930 and priest in 1931 at Winchester. He was curate at Portswood, Southampton from 1930-37, before moving to Basingstoke. He was Vice Principle of St. Chad’s College, Durham from 1939-46, Examiner Chaplain to Archbishop York in 1942 and the Bishop of Chester in 1951; he was also Chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II from 1957-64. Dean of Chester Cathedral from 1963-77 and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society from 1949. He published several books: The High Church Tradition: A Study in the Liturgical Thought of the Seventeenth Century (1941), The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship [with R. A. Etchells] (1948), The Beginnings of the Parochial System (1953), Rectors, Vicars and Patrons in Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Century Canon Law (1956) and Chester Cathedral (1967). He died on 14^th June 1982, aged 75.
20. 1911 Census for England and Wales. RG14, schedule type: 33, piece/folio: 65, p. 1, household identifier: 92850065.
21. Brighton Gazette. Wednesday 9^th February 1916. p. 1.
22. Death notice: Peterborough Evening Telegraph. Friday 26^th January 1951. p. 6. According to Canon Addleshaw’s will, he left £22209, 1s. 9d. gross £22081 12s. 6d. net value paid £3321. ‘He left £20 to his chauffeur Albert Howes, £50 cook Ellen E. Prigg, to parlourmaid Grace Cox if respectively still in service and not under notice, £25 to Ely Diocesan Association for Moral Welfare, effects to his wife and the residue upon trust for life remainder to his children. Probate has been granted to his son Canon George W. O. Addleshaw of 10, Precentor’s Court, York, and to his nephew, Harold L. Addleshaw, solicitor of 15, Norfolk Street, Manchester.’ [Saffron Waldon Weekly News. Friday 1^st June 1951, p. 9]

NIGHT WINDS OF ARABY

 

ARTHUR JOHN EARDLEY DAWSON:

SENSUALIST AND SOLDIER

BY

BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

 

‘A glance of tenderness from two brown eyes

That carries in its laughing wake

The darling pains of Paradise,

Bruising the heart until it seems ‘twould break.’

[Temptation. Night Winds of Araby. p. 38]

 

The soldier-poet, A. J. E. Dawson is a lost figure, belonging to an age of gentility ruptured by war; he left no memoirs except for his poetry and scenes scattered within his three published novels under the mysterious name – ‘Rajput’. The origins of his poetry go back to the pastoral verse in the age of uncertainty just before the outbreak of war, the juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the horror and savagery of battle; the gallantry of duty and comradeship which forms between men fighting together. Dawson was exposing his feelings at a time when the manly perception of soldiering and warfare were not altogether acceptable, that sort of thing was left to scholars in dim college halls who waved youth off cheerfully to the Front. Yet, through the passage of time, Dawson’s poetry has the ability to speak to us today as we look upon the past in a different, more understanding light.

Arthur John Eardley Dawson’s father, Arthur John Frederick Dawson, J.P. was born in Ticehurst, Sussex on 3^rd November 1865; the younger son of the Rev. John Dawson (1825-1913), Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Weston-Super-Mare, and Mary Le Mesurier (1825-1912), daughter of the naval Captain Peter Collas of Guernsey, who were married on 27^th December 1848 (1). Arthur J. F. Dawson, who later became a member of the Badminton Club, Piccadilly, was educated at Weymouth College (1880-82) before going up to Edinburgh University. He emigrated to Ceylon in 1886 and became a tea and rubber planter and married Flora Cecilia Eardley Wilmot (1869-1907) in Tunbridge Wells, Kent on Thursday 25^th November 1897. Flora was the daughter of Vice Admiral Arthur Parry Eardley-Wilmot, CB, RN, (1815-1886) and Charlotte Louisa Mackenzie Wright (1837-1870) who were married on 28^th July 1868; Flora is also the niece of the politician, Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot (1810-1892), Bart.

Arthur John Eardley Dawson was born in Kandy, Ceylon, on Tuesday 3^rd January 1899.

 

In April 1911 we can find 12 year old Arthur living with his Aunt Edith Mary Walton Gilbert, nee Dawson (born 1855) and her husband, the Reverend Charles Robert Gilbert (1854-1919) at the Rectory in Seagrove, Loughborough in Leicestershire. (2) Reverend Gilbert, born 12^th July 1851 in Oxford, was educated at Rugby School and went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge in May of 1870 where he studied mathematics and took the Moral Sciences Tripos, (B.A. 1874, M.A. 1877). He was ordained deacon in Lichfield in 1875 and priest the following year; from 1875-78 he was the mathematical master at Derby Grammar School; Headmaster at Weymouth College, Dorset from 1879-1885; senior mathematical master at St. Peter’s School, York from 1885-90 and then Headmaster of King Henry VIII School, Coventry from 1890-1905 when he retired and went to Seagrove where he was Rector from 1906 until his death there on 17^th December 1919. I do not believe that Arthur was merely visiting his Aunt in Seagrove that April and it is perhaps the case that when Arthur’s mother, Flora died in 1907, young Arthur was sent to England to be cared for by his Aunt Edith and Uncle Charles in preparation for entering a good school and perhaps university. It is also very likely that the charged Christian atmosphere at the Rectory may have become quite intolerable to the young sensitive poet and he could have been thinking of his Uncle, Reverend Gilbert when he wrote: ‘Upon a battlefield far far away, / no matter where, so far away was it, / where no one tried to ram God down men’s throats / and make them take Him as a bitter pill.’ [The Difference II, Night Winds of Araby, p. 41]

Young Arthur Dawson entered Cheltenham College in January 1913, (3) boarding there at Boyne House; he was a member of the Football XV (1914-15) and he began writing poetry. His first published volume of poetry, ‘Poems by a Cheltonian’ was written whilst at Cheltenham College – it was published in March 1919 with a foreword by the College’s Principle, Reverend Reginald Waterfield (1867-1967) who could not help but praise the young poet under the ‘protecting wing’ of his dear College with lines that spoke of a son’s devotion to a parental institution – ‘content to worship at thy shrine, / for thou to all thy children art the same, / a mother worthy to be loved divine;’ (Cheltenham College I. Poems by a Cheltonian.) The sense of maternal longing is understandable when we realise that Arthur was only eight years old when on Friday 29^th March 1907, his mother, Flora died in Ceylon. The loss must have been great upon the sensitive child and we can only assume that his father, typical for a man of his time and standing, with various administration work to attend to, had great difficulty showing affection and became quite distant towards his son, sent to England to be educated. In fact, it was while young Arthur was at Cheltenham College that his father, Arthur John Frederick Dawson died at Rayigam, Padukka, Ceylon on Friday 10^th July 1914, yet another great blow to an already over-sensitive boy. Young Dawson held Cheltenham College dear to his heart and as an old boy he was a member of the Cheltonian Society. In July 1926 the Cheltonian Society held their Annual Dinner at London’s Trocadero Restaurant and Dawson was in attendance along with the retiring President, Mr. Ernest de S. H. Browne (1855-1946) and President elect, Sir Samuel Guise Guise-Moore (1863-1942), also the Headmaster of Cheltenham College, Mr. Henry Harrison Hardy (1882-1958) and Dawson’s old Principle, the Reverend Reginald Waterfield, now the Dean of Hereford. (4)

Dawson left Cheltenham College in April 1916 and on Tuesday 13^th June he travelled to Bombay, India; he joined the Cadet College at Quetta in Baluchistan, training for a commission in the British and Indian armies. He was commissioned the following year as a 2^nd Lieutenant on Tuesday 30^th January 1917 while in India and he joined the 2^nd Q.V.O. [Queen Victoria’s Own] Rajput Light Infantry of the Indian Army on Friday 9^th February 1917 and took part in various campaigns: Mesopotamia, 1918; Salonika, 1918; he was attached to the Army of the Black Sea, 1918-20; and Waziristan, 1921-22.

Dawson rose through the ranks in the 2^nd Rajputs, becoming a Lieutenant on Wednesday 30^th January 1918, Captain on Sunday 30^th January 1921 in the 7^th D.C.O. [Duke of Connaught’s Own] Rajput Regiment, and a Major on Wednesday 30^th January 1935. He was finally released from the army on Thursday 18^th September 1947, having reached the rank of Temporary Lieutenant Colonel. (5)

But life as a soldier had not diminished his light for writing poetry. His second published volume, ‘Night Winds of Araby’ of 1920 shows much promise in his verse, although I would suggest that there is much which could be considered ‘juvenilia’ and there are glaringly awkward and clumsy lines such as ‘for man is man, and no anaemic cry / will place him weathercock on high church spires’ in the poem ‘Lust’ (p. 25).

 

It is this book Night Winds of Araby, the name alone conjures up mystical desert scenes and tents glowing in the dunes beneath the moonlight that I wish to concentrate my attention on. The book contains thirty-three poems of various lengths, several of which are devotional love-lyrics, mostly drawn from his experiences in India. He describes quite vividly the ‘crowded thoroughfares and narrow streets’, the sounds and smells of the bazaar where we find a ‘fat old steamy merchant’ who ‘squats among / his laid-out foods…/ waving his hand to check the million flies / that puke their guts out on the melted sweets’; he then takes us from the filth of the vendors in their shop to the sordid delights of the wooden balconies above them, where ‘women of pleasure hold their sway and try / with many a wile to lure the passer by.’ [Bazaar Impression, p. 20] And in the poem Baghdad (p. 12) he conjures up the city for us, ‘like some pale lady wrapt in dreams / of subtle issue, magic charms; a stately, yet a ghostly sight.’ Around this most exotic lady, ‘minarets rise, / while all around a thousand palms / gaze in the Tigris as it gleams, / held captive in its snake-like arms.’ Dawson was certainly held captive by the ‘perfumed soul of night’, the city of Baghdad, strange and other-worldly to non-natives. India then, as it does now, had a mystical and magical quality about her, a ‘rugged silent land / of happenings strange, of rumours wild, suppressed.’ [Night on the Indian Frontier, p. 21] The poem, Night in Mesopotamia (p. 15) has some truly beautiful lines:

 

‘A quiver in the hot and breathless air

Like the faint frou-frou of a woman’s dress.

The restless sleepers turn, their bodies bare

To this babe spirit of the wilderness,

Whose frail, yet welcome hands damp brows caress,

Bringer of blessed sleep, dispelling care,

Until the pipings of the dawn express

Another day of blistering heat and glare.

 

There, now, beneath the open starlit dome

Come dreams that bloom and fade like fragile flowers;

To some the simple cries of hearth and home,

To others memories of gilded hours,

Maybe the fragrance of some Beauty’s bowers,

Far out of reach to wandering souls who roam.

 

There are the usual offerings a young poet makes in laying his heart bare in his declaration of love, even at the price of Death:

 

‘I sometimes think that Life would be sweet

If it would only grant me Death,

And let me sob my failing breath

While raining kisses on my lover’s feet;

For the Death’s honeyed pain would seem to me

Of all life’s gifts, the richest ecstasy.’

[Love, p. 11]

 

And depictions of the horrors of war which Dawson would have witnessed, as this scene in The Difference II (p. 41):

 

‘The Sepoy carried in his dusky arms

A mangled something that had once been Man,

A mangled something that had once been loved

And was loved now, as bitter anguish tears

Upon the rescuer’s face full testified.’

 

Dawson, who was only twenty-one when the book was published, sings of the joy of youth and its beauty – ‘Youth laughed aloud, and with his burning kiss / left broken hearts strewn out in wild array, / his longed-for love to mourn, his sweets to miss. / What mattered it? For youth will have its day.’ [Contrast, p. 28] The poem celebrates the care-free and immortal magnificence of being young, indulging his wild passions with death much too far away for concern; but life on the battlefield brought Death very near and ever-present. The poem also shows Dawson’s fascination with those youthful flowers of boyhood; in the poem Araby (p. 37) he sings of his ‘Dear little desert flower’ and remembers the ‘fragrance of a perfect hour’ and although he is a ‘wanderer in a far-off wild,’ he shall remember, and ‘sip once more / the joys that pour / like honey from thy petals, Child.’ In fact, there are undertones of the homoerotic in much of his verse, most of it quite obviously discernible, as in this, The Pathan (p. 17):

 

‘On Afgan’s frontier, once I saw a child

Still in his teens. His clear-cut face

Was beautiful, so were his eyes

That flashed, and seemed to hypnotize

The will and brain whene’er he smiled.

 

Then heard I that this creature of the wild

Belonged to man, his lawful prize.

By man, and man alone, defiled

He lives to ease the passion sighs

And longings of a sensual race.’ (6)

 

Dawson would have been quite familiar with the ‘longings of a sensual race’ and many of the poems show Dawson instinctively displaying a ‘fatherly’ protection towards the young soldiers – ‘Fain would I blend my thoughts with thine, / and join these widely separate fires, / tasting the nature of thy wine, / the secrets of thy youth’s desires.’ [To a Sepoy. p. 13] The next verse begins rather tellingly – ‘Mine is the power to command, / thine is the mission to obey.’ This dominant and submissive nature infused with delirious pain is invoked in the poem ‘Longing’ (p. 24)

 

‘Sweetheart! Link thy youth with mine,

Help me ease this fevered blood

Coursing through the veins like wine,

Bubbling in tumultuous flood.

Hurt me, Lover, with tiny kisses,

Drown me in delirious blisses.

 

See! An Eastern moon is nigh,

Climbing over yonder palms;

Angel! Take me, let me lie

Wildly happy in thine arms;

Dark-eyed Darling of my madness

Drink with me the Cup of Gladness!’

 

This ‘madness’ seems to creep over Dawson and arises again in the poem Lust (p. 25) in which he says ‘sometimes a madness breaks beneath the crust / of self respect and we no longer trust / the firmness of the ice about the brink / of human strength; nor is there time to think / of moral codes buried in heirloomed must.’ The poem goes on to say that the ‘fevered blood’ courses in this madness to ‘beat wildly to the honeyed stabs of lust.’ He then goes on to justify such, to others’ eyes, immoral behaviour of the ‘perfumed hour’, saying ‘who dare deny / fulfilment of the ever-smouldering fires; / ready to burst in flame should one apply / combustibles of man’s supreme desires?’ It is hard to believe that Dawson’s ‘supreme desires’ would need much combusting for he seems to fall at the feet of every handsome face he encounters – ‘Come once again / to me my sweet! / Don’t make me plead in vain. / Come, let me kiss those tiny hands and feet, / come, let us sip of love’s delirious pain;’ (Supplication. p. 23). And again in the poem, Jawan Hindoo (p. 43) which begins: ‘Fresh youth was his. No garden rose / E’er bloomed more sweetly. Strength and grace / bred in a country where the lotus grows / glowed in his limbs and handsome face.’ The poem continues in almost sadistic pleasure as he bids farewell to his ‘poor rose’, the young body of the Hindoo, placed upon a bonfire, ‘prone and inert’ in which the ‘flames increasing in desire / licked round his limbs and joined in ghastly play’. 

A similar justification for his desires can be found in the poem Femina (p. 31):

 

‘The world protests, my love, and I am glad,

For you are more than this vain world to me.

Just you and I. I would not have you clad

In shining garments of hypocrisy.

Why should I, when beneath the brink I see

The cool pure springs, and yet withal, so sad;

Condemned, because, some fools who think they’re free

Dare to decide ‘twixt what is good and bad.

 

If when, upon our beds, we weakening lie

Fair Conscience to the soul can give its rest,

What matters, then, the world? If, when we die

We feel that we have lived and done our best,

The soul according to its conscience cry

Will find, or fail to find, its Father’s breast.’

 

In The Price of Genius (pp. 44-46) he feels ‘night’s virgin breath / now fanning softly up against my cheek. / Come on, thou moon! I feel my heart strings beat / beneath the magic of thy master hand.’ (p. 45) surely the moon would have a ‘maiden hand’! In the same poem he equates ‘madness’, whether of the mind or of the body yearning towards an unfulfilled desire, with religious ecstasy – ‘let him live up to his temperament / so near he is to madness. Even I / then cannot hope to bind the bleeding soul / nor help to bear the awful crown of thorns, / brought on because the longings of his soul / are not in talliance with this cultured age.’ (p. 46) This spiritual ecstasy and ache in which nature only dulls and fails to soothe – ‘all is so beautiful, and I alone / am miserable in this bright-coloured world’… ‘my heart is like a wound / that I have borne about from place to place’ (p. 45) seems an echo from the first poem in the volume, The Voice (p. 9) in which the poet, believing he is alone in the brilliance of nature about him, suddenly hears ‘the melancholy of a native’s voice, / uplifted to the skies in wild appeal. / It seemed as if the yearnings of his soul / lay naked in these passionate utterances, / not meant for fellow listeners to hear / save Nature and the sombre-looking palms / who gazed on him, and bent their stately heads / to acquiesce in his barbaric song.’ The sense of intrusion upon something divine, no matter how ‘barbaric’, is something Dawson comes back to.

I find there are certain similarities in Dawson’s poetry with another soldier-poet, the Devonian, Raymond Heywood, who also took part in the Mesopotamia and Salonika campaigns and published two volumes of poetry – Roses, Pearls and Tears (London. Erskine Macdonald. 1918) and The Greater Love (London. Elkin Mathews. 1919). The mysterious Heywood, like Dawson, has a lyrical quality to his verse which resonates with a sense of longing, in Heywood’s case for the beauty of the Devon landscape – ‘tell me – do the roses blow / in the lanes down Devon way…’ (from The Greater Love), and in Dawson’s a desire for love, a desire that also becomes despair but both poets show a great passion in their paternal love for their fellow soldiers, as in this from Heywood:

 

‘O Boy o’ Mine, beneath the rose-hued skies,

Of other days I see your face again;

Life only leaves me tender memories,

And dear dead dreams that fill my heart with pain.

 

O boy o’ mine, how could I let you go,-

All that I held so dear: Nothing can tell

Of all you were to me – I only know

That when you went the evening shadows fell.

 

O boy o’ mine, the joy was only lent,

And you have nobly played a hero’s part,

Thro’ the dark night to your dear grave is sent

A Mother’s love, from my poor aching heart.’

 

[My Boy. Roses, Pearls and Tears. p. 36]

 

 

And this poem, ‘Selfishness’ (p. 26) of Dawson’s:

 

‘Yes, let me die. I ask no more than this,

While swooning mad with pleasure on thy breast.

Come, Death, and strike. The darling hour of bliss

Atones for any wrong in my behest.

 

An Eastern night of stars, of lofty palms;

Forgotten are the worries of to-day.

My youthful lover! Fold me in thine arms,

Dear heart-sick hours. Alas! Too sweet to stay.

 

Yes, let me die. I ask no more than this.

For as my soul wings upwards into space,

Enshrined will live the petals of a kiss,

The burning imprint of my Dream Child’s face.’

 

There is a darker element within Dawson’s poems which remain below the surface, a secret that he wishes to keep hidden – ‘If, one day longing trips me, and I tell / all that is in my heart, the growing fire / of Love consuming in unquenched desire, / would Life be then to me, a Heaven, or Hell?’ [Query, p. 29] whereas Heywood wears his romantic sentiments quite freely – ‘I scarce can think ‘twas yesterday / those laughing lads could laugh and sing, / for now their dead boy lips are grey, / and Devon has made her offering.’ An offering that will ‘make a music in my brain, / and haunt my heart for evermore.’ [Before Battle, The Greater Love] Both poets seem to have the same fascination with death and regret – ‘Perhaps the night wind in its gentle wake / leaves kisses on that rudely heaped-up mound.’ [The Enemy, p. 14, Dawson] and ‘The moonlight softly fell upon your bed, / (O God, I scarce can think that you are dead!) / And all my heart, and all the dreams I knew / I dreamed I saw a little cross of white, / a little lonely mound, so still and grey - / I only heard the sighing poplars sway.’ [By Sanctuary Wood. Roses, Pearls and Tears. p. 27] and again in Heywood’s ‘A Man’s Man’ from Roses, Pearls and Tears (p. 14) –

 

‘He was a man… I linger where his cross

Shines white among the shadows, and I know

My very soul is strengthened by my loss.

My comrade still in death – I loved him so.’

 

In Dawson’s Night March in Mesopotamia, (p. 10) we get a sense of that bond of comradeship as the soldiers march in an early morning mystical silence and the poet implores: ‘Let us live this hour, / wrapped up in loveliness. Just you and I / who understand, and marching, feel the boon / of Nature’s sweetness, hear her quivering sigh / ere we attack at dawn, and brave men die.’

 

When not writing poetry or pursuing the pleasures of the East, Dawson enjoyed the sport of lawn tennis and became quite an accomplished player, taking part in Army championships – in February 1927 he took part in the singles and doubles Army Lawn Tennis Championship held in Lahore, Pakistan. He was also quite prominent in civilian tennis tournaments too: in August-September 1922 ‘Captain A. J. E. Dawson and Miss F. Player beat L. A. Roper and Mrs. D. S. F. Jones, 6-1, 7-5,’ in the third round of the Open Mixed Doubles lawn tennis at Hastings (7). Also in September that year he partook in the Bexhill Lawn Tennis Club’s ninth Tournament in the Gentlemen’s Open Doubles, the Men’s Open Singles and the Open Mixed Doubles (8). He also played in the Felixstowe Autumn Lawn Tennis Tournament which began on Monday 27^th September 1926 in the singles and doubles rounds (9). A few years later, in the 18^th Annual Hastings and St. Leonard’s Lawn Tennis Tournament, held at the Central Cricket Ground, in August 1929, ‘Captain A. J. E. Dawson, who recently returned from India, had a hard fight with D. H. Raebura, winning in three sets, 6-2, 2-6, 2-6.’ in the first round of the Gentlemen’s Singles. (10)

 

Dawson’s third and final volume of poetry, ‘Children of Circumstance’ appeared in 1921 which contains a lyrical expression to soldierly feelings of English patriotism and love much on the same lines as Araby dating from Anatolia, Constantinople and India in 1920; Dawson reflects on the various common features of East and West religions and draws upon his own experiences in Persia and Mesopotamia in the form of lullabies and love songs. The Bookman of October 1921 (p. 40) said that Dawson was a ‘poet grafted on to a man of facts, who is candid about himself’. The article goes on to say that ‘cruelty, just, disease, filth, the sorcery of the East, the whips of starving sensuality, impassion him as spectator or experiencer. He does not minutely describe, but one feels that there is a cave in his memory, which is a museum of horrors, while there is another cave too delightful for words.’ The review is rather mixed though perhaps fairly accurate and ends with the strangely vague – ‘his book tingles with emotional life and creates a kind of remorse if one lingers long at its weak passages.’ Surely these are the defects we encounter in a minor poet and in many instances can be forgiven. Whether or not the poor reviews had their effect, ‘Children of Circumstance’ was Dawson’s final volume of poetry and he turned his hand to novel writing under the pseudonym, ‘Rajput’; his first novel, ‘Khyber Calling!’ (1938) was published seventeen years after the disappointing appearance of Children of Circumstance, and it tells the intimate story of an Indian Frontier soldier, a Company Commander who had served for many years in India, and the political conditions and adventures of the British Army in the region of the Khyber Pass. Lt-Colonel Dawson – ‘Rajput’ had been stationed at Banna, Waziristan at the time of publication and he drew on his experiences of the perimeter camps with their stone walls and barbed wire fences; the many night alarms and the building of roads through hostile territory, the ambushes and the monotonous boredom of these inter-war camps. The story opens with the murder of an unarmed Ghurkha mule-driver killed by pathans and the column of men sent out to deal with it. Dawson depicts his characters well, such as the Colonel of the battalion and Suleiman Khan, his Subadar [Indian officer], and Firoze Din, his orderly and he brings to life the feelings and conversations of those soldiers serving in the North-West Frontier. Dawson’s next novel was ‘Indian River’ the following year in 1939 while Dawson was at Bexhill-on-Sea; the novel tells of the struggle against the Caste system and its importance to the people of India. His final novel was ‘The Advancing Years’ in 1941 which is the story of an Indian Regiment interwoven by romance. They were hardly ever going to be his lasting legacy and there is no doubt that there are some significant passages within them which would appeal to a certain readership. After the novels, Dawson simply fades away, there is very little information concerning the poet – there is a record of him travelling with Thomas Cook & Sons on the S.S. Lurline to Los Angeles, California from San Pedro for a short time to visit a cousin in April 1936 when he was 37 years old; the record gives his last address as Secunderabad, India and his nearest relative or friend as Bryan Phillips, 7^th Rajput, Secunderabad (11) and then he leaves the Indian Army on Thursday 18^th September 1947 and then silence.

Arthur John Eardley Dawson died in Hastings, East Sussex, in the spring of 1981, and although he is almost now forgotten, belonging to a bygone age, permit me to cast a small stone into the still water and see if the ripples touch anyone gently enough to pursue his minor, yet sensitive, poetic gift.

 

‘Let me walk

Tip-toe adown the paths of long ago

To where, now faded in the curtained gloom

Lies a fair picture that was once so bright

Of Love and Youth transfigured in their Hopes:

Now, Love is dead, and as we take a flower

Of curious mien, and place it in a book,

So I have carried it against my heart

Up the long staircase of the winding years.

And youth is dying as the ripening bud

Bursts forth in flower in the waiting world.

All that remains is Hope’s young flame, and she

Grows stranger as the weakening days grow old,

For Life is Hope, and when Hope fails, we die.

 

Play on, great Bard! Nor check thy passion yet;

Like scorched fields browned by summer’s blazing heat

We ope our stalks to thy refreshing dews

And drink their sweetness with out thankful hearts.’

[Effect of Music, Night Winds of Araby. pp. 34-35]

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

Poems By A Cheltonian. [poems] Written whilst at Cheltenham College, with a foreword by the Rev. R. Waterfield. London. C. W. Daniel. March 1919. pp. 43.

 

Night Winds Of Araby. [poems] London. Grant Richards. April 1920. Printed by William Brendon and Son, Ltd. Plymouth. 8vo. pp. 46.

 

Children Of Circumstance. [poems] London. Grant Richards. August 1921. 8vo. pp. 93.

 

Khyber Calling! An Account of Military Life on the North-West Frontier of India. [novel] by Rajput [pseudonym of A. J. E. Dawson]. London. Hurst & Blackett. September 1938. 8vo. pp. 268.

 

Indian River. [novel] by Rajput [pseudonym of A. J. E. Dawson]. London. Hurst & Blackett. October 1939. C8. pp. 288.

 

The Advancing Years. [novel] by Rajput [pseudonym of A. J. E. Dawson]. London. Hurst & Blackett. May 1941. 8vo. pp. 256.

 

 

NOTES:

 

1. John and Mary Dawson had the following children: (a) Rev. Canon Edwin Collas Dawson, M.A. born 28^th November 1849 in Esher, Surrey and educated at Tonbridge School and St Mary’s Hall, Oxford in 1868, B.A. 1871, M.A. 1876; he was ordained in Newport, Isle of Wight in 1873 and went to Edinburgh in 1878. He was the author of several books, including a Life of Hannington (1887) and Rector of St. Thomas’s Church, Edinburgh in 1883; Rector of St. Peter’s Church, Lutton, Northamptonshire and later Canon of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh. He married Lucy Mackinley Munro Wyllie (1854-1917) in Elham, Kent on 17^th March 1877 and they had two children: Reverend Robert (Roy) Basil Dawson 1877-1940, and the celebrated Scottish artist, Mabel Dawson 1878-1965 who studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and was a member of the Society of Scottish Artists (1907) and the Royal Scottish Water Colour Society (1917). Canon Edwin Collas Dawson died in Edinburgh on 17^th March 1925, aged 75. (b) Julia Neville Dawson, born in Hertfordshire on 3^rd July 1851; she married French-born Reverend Ludovic Charles Andre Mouton (1846-1895) of Wadham College, Oxford (1868) who was Rector of Bonchurch, Isle of Wight. They had seven children and Julia died in St. Leonard’s on 14^th October 1899. (c) Edith Mary Walton Dawson, born in Surrey in 1855; she married Reverend Charles Robert Gilbert (1854-1919) who was the mathematical master at Derby Grammar School at the time, at St Peter’s Church, Clifton by her brother, Reverend E. C. Dawson and her brother-in-law, Reverend L. C. Manton. They had several children (Marion Edith Gilbert 1879, Ethel C. Gilbert 1880, Muriel A. B. Gilbert 1881) and Edith died in Battle, Sussex in 1936 aged 80. (d) Alice Emma Dawson, born in Ticehurst, Sussex in 1859; Alice never married and she was the author of several articles on art – ‘Meditations in National Gallery’ in the Illustrated Berwick Journal (Thursday 12^th, 19^th and 26^th June 1924, p. 2) and she died in Battle, Sussex, in 1945 aged 86. (e) Harriette Anne de Venoix Dawson born in Sussex in 1862, she married the widow Reverend William Henry Wayne (1832-1920) in Axbridge, Somerset in 1893; William’s previous marriage to Eliza Foskett occurred in November 1856 (before his bride, Harriette, was born) and several of his children were older and of similar age to Harriette Dawson. Reverend Wayne was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (1852-56) and ordained in 1856; he had an interest in art and collected old silver, china (English) and pictures and died at Willey Rectory on 17^th July 1920 [A Shropshire Vicar, Memoir of Rev. W. H. Wayne. Shrewsbury Chronicle. Friday 30^th July 1920. p. 5]. Harriette wrote books for children under the name Aimee de V Dawson: The Happy Childhood of Two Little Girls (1888), Dorothy’s Clock (1888), A Peep into Cat-Land (1890), How Daisy Became a Sunbeam (1893), Grandmother’s Forget-Me-Nots: A Story for Girls (1893), Nobody’s Pet: A Story of Brother and Sister (1894) and He, She, and It: A Story for Young Children (1894). Harriette died on 12^th January 1949 in Sussex aged 87. (f) Then of course, Arthur John Frederick Dawson was born in 1865.

2. 1911 Census for England and Wales taken on Sunday 2^nd April 1911. RG14, Schedule Type: 17, Piece/Folio: 33, Page 1.

3. Cheltenham College Register, 1841-1927, edited by Edward Scot Skirving. 1928. p. 658.

4. The Cheltonian Society Annual Dinner took place on Tuesday 6^th July 1926. Cheltenham Chronicle. Saturday 10^th July 1926. p. 2.

5. British Library: Asian and African Studies, 1918-47. Dawson, Arthur John Eardley, Indian Army Number: I.A. 959. Reference: 10R/L/MIL/14/94.

6. Also found in Love in Earnest (London. Routledge & K. Paul. 1970) by Timothy D’Arch Smith. p. 143.

7. Westminster Gazette. Friday 1^st September 1922. p. 10.

8. The 9^th Bexhill Lawn Tennis Tournament commenced on Monday 4^th September 1922 and in the first round of the Gentlemen’s Open Doubles, Captain A. J. E. Dawson and C. W. Moore beat M. K. Jackson and W. D. Jackson, 6-0, 6-1. In the second round Dawson and Moore beat P. W. B. Butcher and C. Simmons, 6-2, 6-3; in the 3^rd round A. T. Hill and F. H. Jarvis beat Dawson and Moore, 5-7, 6-4, 6-0. In the Men’s Open Singles in the 2^nd round, A. T. Hill beat Captain Dawson, 6-0, 6-2. In the Open Mixed Doubles, 1^st round, C. G. Jenner and Mrs. Bates beat Captain Dawson and Miss R. Taunton, 6-3, 2-6, 6-4. Dawson also took part in the Gentlemen’s Singles Handicap (class A), 1^st round: Captain A. J. E. Dawson beat Captain E. S. R. Milton, 6-4, 8-6; in the 2^nd round Captain  W. M. Sherring beat Captain Dawson, 6-2, 6-4. Bexhill-on-Sea Chronicle. Saturday 9^th September 1922. p. 7.

9. Felixstowe Autumn Lawn Tennis Tournament, beginning Monday 27^th September 1926. In the 1^st round of the Men’s Level Singles played on Monday 27^th, Captain A. J. E. Dawson beat R. Pretty, 6-4, 6-3. In the 2^nd round the following day, G. Thompson beat Captain Dawson, 6-4, 6-3. In the 1^st round of the Men’s Level Doubles (Wednesday 29^th), Captain A. J. E. Dawson and W. R. B. Cuthbertson beat F. Lt. H. M. Massey and H. A. C. Williams, 6-3, 2-6, 6-3. In the 2^nd round, Captain Dawson and Cuthbertson beat A. B. Learmouth and E. B. Greenwall, 6-0, 6-0. In the 3^rd round, L. A. Godfrey and E. A. Dearman beat Captain Dawson and Cuthbertson, 6-1, 6-3. he also took part in the Ladies Mixed Doubles and in the 2^nd round, G. R. O. Crole-Rees and Mrs. M. Watson beat Captain Dawson and Miss E. M. Aitken, 6-1, 6-3. Felixstowe Times. Saturday 2^nd October 1926. p. 7.

10. The 18^th Annual Hastings and St. Leonard’s Lawn Tennis Tournament began on Monday 26^th August 1929 at midday. Hastings and St. Leonard’s Observer. Saturday 31^st August 1929. p. 11.

11. Passenger Lists, 1907-1948. Index to passenger lists of vessels arriving at San Pedro/Wilmington/Los Angeles, California. Affiliate Film Number: Roll 2; Affiliate Publication Number: M1763; Digital Folder Number: 007721657; Image Number: 7599.