A. S. T. FISHER

 

ARTHUR STANLEY THEODORE FISHER:

POET AND PRIEST

 

BY

BARRY VAN-ASTEN

 

‘My old nurse scared me with such tales and I,

Inured like Pharoah to much punishment,

Acquired the habit of the hardened heart.

I’ll not be frightened into being good.’

 

[The Prodigal Son. A.S.T. Fisher]

 

 

 

 

Arthur Stanley Theodore Fisher was the second child born to the Rev. Arthur Bryan Fisher (1870-1955) and Ruth Alice Hurditch (1875-1959) who were married in Toro, Uganda on 11^th March 1902. Arthur B. Fisher who was born in Ireland on 20^th October 1867, worked for the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1897 when he was 24 years old and two years later he was ordained deacon (1899) in Africa and priest the following year in Uganda. He had met Ruth Hurditch who was born in Hampstead in 1875 ad was also working for the CMS at Kabarole before they were working together at Toro, Uganda, in 1900 until after their marriage when they moved to Bunyoro in 1903. There is a fine portrait of Ruth in her first published volume – ‘On the Borders of Pygmy-Land’ published around 1905 in which she tells of her missionary work through her journals and how ‘a devoted couple whose hearts are filled with a longing to win souls for the Saviour can face dangers, and cut themselves off from the common comforts of home, not only with patience but with cheerfulness.’ [Preface, p. vi]

The first child born to the Reverend Fisher and his wife was George Pilkington Fisher born in Hoima, Uganda on 4^th September 1903 (1), then Arthur Stanley Theodore Fisher, born in Entebbe, Uganda on 10^th January 1906. A year later, their first daughter, Geraldine Mary Fisher was born in Hoima, Uganda on 29^th March 1907 (2) and another daughter, Ruth Shelagh Patricia Fisher, (3) also born in Hoima, Uganda on 23^rd March 1908, both in Uganda. After several years and after Ruth published her second volume of travel and reminiscences, ‘Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda’ in 1911, the Fisher family continued their work at Gulu from 1913 to the following year and another daughter was born in Uganda, Lorna Larema Dorothy Fisher, (4) on 3^rd August 1913 and finally a son, Douglas Russell Bryan Fisher, (5) in Leeds, on 26^th May 1916.

Arthur, who usually went by the name of Stanley, [he was named after his godfather, Sir Henry Stanley (1841-1904), who famously ‘found David Livingstone’ and who, in 1875 sent a letter to the Daily Telegraph imploring that more missionaries be sent to Uganda] attended Northcliffe day school with his sister Geraldine in 1914 when he was eight years old which only had one other boy at the school. From there he went to Leeds Grammar School with his older brother George, on 26^th April 1916.

In her charming memoir, ‘Grandmother’s Tracks’ (2010), Stanley’s daughter, Margaret Surie says that Reverend Arthur Bryan Fisher was offered the living of either Bournemouth or Leeds during the New Year of 1916, and he chose the latter. And so the Fisher family moved into All Hallow’s vicarage, Regent Terrace, Leeds and Reverend Fisher began his ecclesiastical duties. Both George and Stanley were shocked by the industrial northern city and its Grammar School, George soon recovered from his initial disapproval and fitted in well, but ‘Stanley hid in the bushes every break time and cried himself to sleep at night. He was bullied by the other boys, mocked for his southern accent, and was desperately miserable.’ (6) Poor Stanley, he was always a serious and meticulous boy who had been a rather delicate child; he suffered a nervous breakdown two years later before contracting diphtheria. The Fisher family remained in Leeds at All Hallow’s vicarage until 1923 when Reverend Fisher took over the living of St Philip’s Church in Norbury. In June 1924 Stanley, who as a boy had always been interested in flora and fauna and spent much time with his microscope, was awarded the Abbott Scholarship in Biology to go to Oxford.

 

 

OXFORD AND AUDEN

 

‘The alders clinching in the sunken court’

 

[Note on a Mental Specialist. Selected Poems. A. S. T. Fisher. p. 13]

 

 

In October 1924 Fisher went up to Christ Church, Oxford as an Abbott Scholar (Biology). [BA 1927, MA 1931] and joined his brother George there who went up in 1922 from Repton School. Stanley had rooms at Meadow Building, Christ Church, (staircase 1) and in his second year at Oxford, Stanley would meet a fellow poet who was also studying Biology [Stanley later changed to reading English] and would reside in the attic rooms on staircase 1 at Meadow Building – Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973). Auden had boarded at St. Edmund’s prep school in Hindhead, Surrey during the autumn of 1915 until 1920, when he went to Gresham’s public school in Holt, North Norfolk. Humphrey Carpenter, in his delightful biography of Auden (1981) tells us of their first meeting when on the evening before term began, Stanley was waiting for his friend who had rooms in Meadow Building, Sidney Newman (1906-1971), the College organ scholar from 1924-28, when suddenly Auden burst into the room, ‘an explosion of legs and, with an upward jerk of the head and a flourish of pipe in hand’, wanted to put his name down for membership of the Musical Union. Stanley explained the mistake and said that he would give Newman, the college secretary his name. After introducing himself, Stanley said that there was a piano in his rooms but he did not play himself and that Auden was welcome to play – from that moment on they became firm friends and Auden was often in Fisher’s room playing the piano and smoking endless cigarettes. Another undergraduate at Meadow Building (staircase 1) was David Ayerst (1904-1992) who was reading History at Christ Church and who would later, in 1936, marry Stanley’s sister, Lorna Larema Fisher. David and Auden also established a friendship and between his friends, Stanley and David, Auden would not be bashful about his sexuality and his ‘adventures’ after dark, especially his preference for fellatio.

An early poem by Fisher written around the time he met Auden, to whom he may have shown it in manuscript, is ‘November Mist’; Fisher wrote the poem in Christ Church Meadows during November 1925 and it shows a romantic influence of Georgian poetry:

 

NOVEMBER MIST
 
It’s pleasant walking in the mist alone,
For all the world contracts into a ring,
A little room that hangs about my feet,
A changing kingdom for a strolling king.
 
Over my head the beech-tree stretches out
Her slender fingers from the cloudy sleeves,
Offering to a wind that will not blow
The last bare handful of her shrivelled leaves.
 
Their bearded boles leaning this way and that,
The topless elms in solemn pantomime
Loom up portentously and then slink off,
Like bad old men detected in a crime.
 
Some people pass, remote as in a dream,
Breathing a little fog around their eyes,
And a bewildered dog looks up to see
Its God transfigured, commercing with the skies.
 
[Selected Poems. A.S.T. Fisher. p. 1]

 

 

When the Christmas vacation drew near, Auden asked Stanley if he may stay with him for part of it with his family at St. Philip’s Vicarage, Pollard’s Hill North, Norbury, S.W. 16, and so, Christmas 1925, Auden spent part of his vacation with Stanley Fisher.

‘A couple of days after Auden had arrived, Stanley Fisher was telephoned by Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), who had been at school at Repton with his brother [George Fisher]. Isherwood lived not very far away, in Kensington, and said he would be glad if Fisher would come and have tea with him. Fisher answered that he had a friend named Auden staying with him. The name brought an instant response: could this, asked Isherwood, be the same Auden whom he had been at prep school? A few questions confirmed that it was. The invitation was immediately extended to them both.’ (7)

On 16^th December Stanley and Auden went to visit Christopher Isherwood, who had known Stanley’s brother, George at Repton, for tea at his family home, 36, St. Mary Abbot’s Terrace, near Holland Park. Stanley, who was almost 20 years old and Christopher, who was 21 and had left Cambridge during the summer of 1924, fell deep into discussion while Auden sat quietly smoking and examining Isherwood’s books but the moment Stanley left for another engagement, leaving Auden and Isherwood together, they soon re-established the friendship they had had at their prep school, St. Edmunds.

When the Easter vacation came along the following year, Auden sent a letter to Stanley to ask if he would stay at their family home in Harborne, Birmingham, saying ‘Look here. Can you come week after Easter week. Family relations have been tres difficile and you are the only man who can put things right, because you understand my little failings and peculiarities so well.’ In a postscript Auden added: ‘Vacation chastity is very trying.’ [Carpenter. p. 50]

And so, during the April, Easter vacation of 1926, Stanley stayed with Auden at his family home 42, Lordswood Road, in Harborne, Birmingham where he witnessed explosive arguments between mother and son; Auden’s mother, Constance, could not accept her son’s sexuality and on many occasions brought the young poet to tears. Following his stay with the Audens, Stanley wrote a letter to Constance Auden, trying to explain her son’s ways, saying ‘Genius is always a little difficult to manage and there is no doubt that he has a very large share of it. The fact that he is naturally more self-sufficient than most people explains why he finds so little need for a personal God – or for a Mother – but that does not make things easier for you!’. (8) Mrs. Auden  responded by a letter to Stanley, dated 20^th April 1926, saying that ‘You gauge Wystan wonderfully well for so short an acquaintance, but we mothers know more of the actual tendencies for good and evil in our sons’ characters than anyone else can possible know.’ She goes on, condemning the soul of the young poet and ‘how much danger lies ahead.’ She then lists some of his good and bad, or weak, points, such as his ‘way of eating food whenever he sees it’ which is ‘indicative of much’. She discusses the relationship between mother and son, she seems to resent the fact that Auden is becoming independent but can’t help deflating his soaring spirit when she says – ‘He probably did not tell you that the morning when he burst into tears he very soon took the opportunity I gave him of saying how sorry he was for being so unutterably rude’. She also hints at Auden’s difficult sexuality, saying: ‘I do not know how much you know of his past life, but there has been much to cause his father and me real anxiety’. (9) Some of this past ‘anxiety’ may have been due to Auden’s friendship and ‘romantic’ literary correspondence with 26 year old Michael Davidson (1897-1975) when Auden was just sixteen. Auden was introduced to Davidson (who at the time was living in Norwich) at Gresham school by the school’s music teacher, Walter Greatorex (1877-1949) in his rooms; Greatorex, like Auden, was attracted to young men. Davidson encouraged Auden’s poetic gift and helped him into publication. In fact, Auden would recite many of his poems to his friends, such as Stanley, who in turn would write them down and collect his early verse which he later gave to the Christ Church library. Stanley recalls how he also met Davidson: ‘I happened to meet [Michael] Davidson in 1927 when he was working for the O.U.P. at Oxford and he invited me to tea to see his collection of Auden’s poems. When I arrived I found a note of apology – he had gone to Berlin – ; but he left such typescript copies of Wystan’s poems as he possessed, and one autographed poem…’ (10)

Auden went through several phases of inspiration during the formation of his poetic style, discovering such poets as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman in the summer of 1923 and Edward Thomas in the autumn of 1924; Auden’s poem ‘To Edward Thomas’ written about 1925 and transcribed by Fisher, shows the young Oxford poet’s deep affection for Thomas who died in Arras in April 1917:

 

To E. T.
 
These thick walls never shake beneath the rumbling wheel
No scratch of mole nor lisping worm you feel
So surely do these windows seal.
 
But here and there your music and your words are read
And savage learns what elm and badger said
To you who loved them and are dead.
 
So when the blackbird tries his cadences anew
There kindle still in eyes you never knew
The light that would have shone in you.

 

 

In Auden’s poem, ‘The Road’s Your Place’ which he wrote in May 1925, there is an almost Hardyesque sense of melancholy as the poet is dwarfed in the wilderness. Fisher transcribed the poem and adds a note upon the manuscript – ‘Recited to me in Meadow Building, 1925’:

 

The stream I think persuaded me at first
A tarn lay somewhere at the end of it
I felt quite positive; perhaps it was
The crunch of stones I tired of, anyhow
I left the road and struck up by the burn
Along a track which heaved and plunged and leapt
From side to side to gratify the whim
Of some once famous leader of the sheep
To-day scarcely a name to mountain-lambs.
In front the burn turned quickly to the left
I hurried on, eager and out of breath
And soon had turned the corner, all at once
Three crags rose up and overshadowed me
‘What are you doing here, the road’s your place’ –
Between their bodies I could see my tarn –
What could I do but shift my feet awhile
Mutter and turn back to the road again
Watched out of sight by three tall angry hills.

 

The three crags, which seem to appear to Auden like the three witches in Macbeth, recalls ‘Wordsworth’s description of the cliff which seemed to stride after him as he rowed his stolen boat across Lake Windermere in the  first book of The Prelude’. Auden, like Wordsworth and Edward Thomas, conjures the solitary sadness of a landscape, as if trespassing upon a scene which becomes transfigured into a mystical experience. In another of his early poems, The Tarn, written in September 1924, he begins with heightened mystery – ‘Some say the tarn is bottomless. / Dark rocks run sheerly downward on three sides / into dark waters…’ He goes on to say that he ‘often sat beside it, / noticing how the reeds grew where the stream / ran out, for it was shallow there and strewn / with boulders;’ He recalls a ‘lonely silent place, / until I climbed the rocky slopes behind / one July day. It looked so blue below, / as if a thousand April skies were caught / and lay imprisoned, yet were glad of it.’ One can imagine the poet’s somewhat guilty delight as he spied two boys who ‘were bathing there, splendid of limb, / ruddy and beautiful; while the sun seemed / as if it glowed within them. Always now / the place seems haunted by their laughing voices.’ (11) Fisher also seems to be touched gently by similar influences, and in his poem, ‘Apotheosis in Cray Ghyll’ (Selected Poems. p. 3), there is an element of the ‘Audenesque’, with its ‘limestone cratered pool, accessible / only to schoolboys wallowing thigh-deep,’ where the poet encounters the great god Pan in the form of a boy of eleven – ‘spray-blown and slim and browned, / lovely as leaf of bracken breaking found.’

Another poem transcribed by Fisher during 1925 was ‘Richard Jefferies’, which Auden wrote the same year. Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was a Wiltshire born nature writer whom Auden admired, he particularly liked reading his children’s novel, as a child, ‘Bevis: The Story of a Boy’ (1882) which he described as ‘the only tolerable book about boyhood’, (Edward Thomas had written a biography on Richard Jefferies in 1909).

 

RICHARD JEFFERIES
 
What of this Man? No striding Amos sent
Down from his native crags to thunder war,
No Shelley to light up the firmament
And plunge to darkness like a shattered star;
Rather winds found a pipe and blew thereon,
Sometimes with bubbling joy, now wild with griefs
But fresh as elder scent; his voice cries on
Among his Wiltshire downs; in strange beliefs
And rough slow-moving speech of village folk;
What more?  When dying he could praise the light
And watch larks trembling over fields of corn
Until the whole sky sang, with eyes as bright
As kestrel perched upon the splintered oak,
A sentinel, dark, motionless, at dawn. (12)

 

 

During Easter 1926 Fisher also transcribed Auden’s early poem ‘California’, written around March 1922, from the notebook Auden had given to his mother; Fisher assumed that California, was that small suburb of Birmingham, near where the Auden family lived, perhaps at Constance Auden’s suggestion, who also said it was his first poem, which is unlikely. The poem is quite delightful for a young boy of about fifteen and shows Auden’s poetic development:

 

CALIFORNIA
 
The twinkling lamps stream up the hill
Past the farm and past the mill
Right at the top of the road one sees
A round moon like a Stilton cheese
 
A man could walk along that track
Fetch the moon and bring it back
Or gather stars up in his hand
Like strawberries on English land.
 
‘But how should I, a poor man dare
To meet so close the full moon’s stare?’
For this I stopped and stood quite still
Then turned with quick steps down that hill.

 

 

Another poem Fisher transcribed is Auden’s ‘Chloe to Daphnis in Hyde Park’ written around April to May 1926 and published in The Oxford Outlook of June that year. The poem has some humorous aspects and possibly some influence of T. S. Eliot. The poem begins: ‘Stop fingering your tie; walk slower; / how quiet it is! A distant mower ‘is worrying a lawn, / where worms were slain at dawn.’ The fifth to seventh verses invoke Love – ‘Yonder a single cloak o’ercovers / the season’s pair of merry lovers, / who render Love their praise, / the sweetest thing these days. /…/ All journeys end in lovers meeting - / there’s none so sweet as my sweet sweeting - / Elizabethan tags / or conversation flags /…/ To motor-cars and sex. Addiction, / they say, can remedy Division, / but adding me to you / cannot make less than two.’ The final two verses bring forth a reverence for Love, in Auden’s case, a homosexual delight that was a forbidden love – ‘Stand so then up against the railing, / to watch spring through the iron paling, / your coat-sleeve touching mine, / and think our love divine! /…/ Easter and early resurrection / we grace to-day with our inspection, / delight in such and such, / though we may never touch.’ (13)

Stanley mentions some of these influences in his article on Auden and Housman for the 1974 Housman Society Journal, saying ‘It was the youthful Auden I knew best, the first-year undergraduate whose rooms were on the same staircase as mine at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1925-26. We shared an enthusiasm for Housman’s poetry, though he was a professed classic and I was always attacked as a romantic. Hardy was the first and strongest influence in Auden’s poetry. Both Hardy and Housman denied they were pessimists, but Housman accepted “pejorist” as a description of his philosophy and both believed that the quality of life was deteriorating. It was this tragic element in the work of the two poets that Auden admired, and he then shared their agnosticism.’ He ends his article with a postscript, saying that ‘By the summer of 1926 Auden’s apprentice days were over and Housman, along with the much stronger influences of Hardy and Edward Thomas, was laid aside; he was finding a voice of his own.’ (14)

 

In 1928 until June the following year Fisher was at Cuddesdon Theological College. At Cuddesdon, he became friends with Walter Alexander Meyjes (1905-1987) who was an actor in Repertory before he became an Anglican priest. Meyjes converted to Roman Catholicism in 1933 and became a chaplain in the Royal Navy; he was also curate at St. Mary’s Church, Graham Terrace, Pimlico and he organised a hostel for young men in Hampstead. Meyjes, who almost certainly indulged in Greek love, was co-author (with Charles P. Carr) of the religious play ‘Ecce Homo’ – the Westminster Passion Play and in 1951, he was co-producer [and narrator] (with Carr, who also played Jesus, and the German, Walter Rilla (1894-1980) who was also Director) of the silent film version, ‘Behold the Man’ which was showing in London’s West End. Meyjes died in Gibralter on 4^th October 1987.

Stanley had three of his poems published in Oxford Poetry (1928) along with one of Auden’s poems (15). Stanley’s poems are:

 

FROM A LETTER ABROAD
 
Laurence, were you in England now
You’d see the spring come tiding slow,
And leave, betraying she has been,
A lovely adolescent green
On faces of the fields and bushes.
From under heavy hedgerow lashes
Wetted by idle passing rains
Blink little curving country lanes,
And over all a haze there is
Suggestive of regenesis.
 
Weaned now are buds the winter nursed,
Bulbs, bubble-like, unfreeze and burst
In show more wanton than advised;
But spring was never canonized,
And country-parson notices
The rake’s progress of crocuses –
‘Gay, debonair, polished and piquant’
At their beginning, but too frequent
Indulgence with the dew doth pass
To gay debauchery in the grass.
How different are aconites,
In their green ruffs like acolytes,
So innocently leading in
The bulbous riot of scented sin! –
 
The snowdrop, crocus, daffodil,
Hyacinth, narcissus, and bluebell,
The tulip cold and cavernous,
So monocotyledonous
In its apparent chastity
And dark deeps of depravity!
 
In the old wall the queen wasp wakes,
Sleep from each spiracle she shakes
And heavy her abdomen hangs
With poison for a thousand pangs;
And in among the warming bricks
She chews to pulp dry splintered sticks
To paper all the monastery
Of cells for her striped progeny.
The Chaffinch tries his bit of song,
But, out of practice, gets it wrong,
Reiterating to improve
Its climax for the sake of love;
And serving-maids, each with their mate,
Lengthen adieus outside the gate.

 

 

AT THE FUNERAL OF THOMAS HARDY
WESTMINSTER ABBEY, JAN. 16
(For B. T. who could not be there.)
 
I
WAITING
 
Waiting an hour to honour sparkles
Ashes of him in his flame’s stead,
And hear the last word said,
There comes upon the silent starkness
From where the pillars leap to darkness
Noising of rainfall on the lead,
Like voices of the dead.
 
II
AFTERWARDS
 
Sightseer, priest, and mourner
Have left the dead alone,
And in the poet’s corner
Effigies, one by one –
Chilled to the marble bone –
Stir, ease cramped limbs and moan
‘All flesh to dust, and poets to stone.’

 

 

INVITATION TO DROWNING
 
Do but mistake this water for your breath,
And wide-armed dive into the deeps of death;
For never deeps of sea
Charge burial fee.
 
Would you have tapers burning, the long night?
Here phosphorescent fish go cabined with light;
Further! – the Seafan’s fire
Burns as a pyre.
 
To pay the last attentions to your flesh
Are ministers more curious and more fresh
Than priests with prayer-book terms
And churchyard worms:
 
Fish, gaping in perpetual surprise
Ooze-anchored polyps, creatures with stalked eyes,
Athene-born from skulls
Of china dolls.
 
Like gaudies shaken from a Christmas tree,
The endless Foraminifera rain shall be
For ocean-earth to cover
Your stilled bones over.

 

 

On 9^th November 1928, Stanley’s older brother George married Ethel Marjory ‘Tiggy’ Wheelwright (1906-1988) at St. John’s parish church in Rowkee in the Upper Punjab, India. After receiving his 2^nd class Honours degree in History, he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1925 and the following year went out to Rowkee as a joint magistrate; in January 1929, he was appointed acting-collector of Saharanpur.

In July 1929, Stanley went out to Darjeeling and intended to meet his brother George upon alighting from the boat at Bombay and stay with his brother and sister-in-law at Rowkee for a week before the trip to Darjeeling. Before Stanley arrived at Bombay, George’s wife sent a telegram to the Vicarage at St. Philip’s to say that George was ‘dangerously ill’. He had suffered a serious injury playing polo at Rowkee and died on the morning of Saturday 20^th July 1929. When Stanley arrived in Bombay and there was nobody to meet him he received the devastating news from a cable by George’s wife that George had died and had been buried and that he should continue to Darjeeling.

Announcements appeared in the press and a memorial service was held at St. Philip’s Church, Norbury on the evening of Sunday 28^th July by Canon E. S. Woods, Vicar of Croydon. In an article in the Croydon Times (17^th August 1929) it states that the family received nearly four-hundred letters of sympathy and the Vicar, Reverend Fisher wrote in the August edition of the St. Philip’s parish magazine that upon the sad news of their son’s death the plans for the Garden Fete were carried out and ‘gifts of flowers’ had ‘transformed our home from a house of mourning, to receive our children who could come to us. By the letters we have received you have shared with us our sorrow and given expression to our common belief in the Resurrection and the Life. On the Holy Table you placed your offerings of white flowers while at the foot of the cross was laid one sheaf of lilies with only one word – George.’ (16)

After spending two years in Darjeeling as a teacher at St. Paul’s School, he returned to England and was awarded his M.A. from Oxford in June 1931 and he was ordained deacon in 1932 and priest the same year on Trinity Sunday, 22^nd May, at Salisbury Cathedral.

 

‘I, all petals shed, charred disc remaining,
Have only smell of smoke to tell of tryst,
Still, O my Father, still
Swing me, a censor, at thy wrist.’
 
[The Comet. Selected Poems. p. 35]

 

 

MICHAEL TIPPETT

 

‘Hedges shake off the incubus of ice

And cream begins to thicken on the thorn’

 

[A Grace Before Another Spring. Selected Poems. p. 54]

 

 

From September 1931 Stanley was Chaplain and English Master at Bryanston School, Blandford, Dorset until February 1935. Auden, who also knew several other masters there, such as Wilfred Stephen Henry Cowley (1904-1965) who had been at Oxford and was a master at Bryanston from 1932-1952 and Eric Bramall (1904-1958) of St. John’s College, Oxford, had the opportunity of joining Fisher at Bryanston to teach but was rejected in his application. The former mentioned Wilfred Cowley, a friend of Fisher, married Stanley’s brother’s widow, Ethel Marjory Fisher (nee Wheelwright) at St. James Church, Bushey, Hertfordshire, on 2^nd April 1932.

During 1932-33 he was curate at the Church of St. John the Baptist, Rogerstone, Wales.

Stanley’s father, Reverend Arthur Fisher moved with his wife from Norbury to Uckfield when he took over the living at Holy Trinity Church, Chillies Lane, High Hurstwood, Buxted in 1934 where he remained as vicar for the next ten years.

In 1934, Stanley became Vicar-Priest of Wells Cathedral and tutor at the Theological College School.

From 1935-36, Stanley taught at Little Missenden Abbey School in Buckinghamshire.

Stanley Fisher’s volume of poetry, ‘The Reach of Words’ was published by Macmillan in 1935 and the Western Morning News of Saturday 25^th May (p. 8) said that the verses were ‘individual poetry’ which were ‘modern in sentiment, but never modernistic in form’ and ‘shows a careful choice of words.’ It goes on to say that ‘even when it touches the macabre there is nothing strained about it. Various in type; it is always characteristic. The mixture of sentiment and disillusion in some of these poems remind one faintly of Heine. One does not need the one or two references to Oxford to recognise the Oxford atmosphere these poems present throughout.’

In August 1935, the composer Michael Tippett (1905-1998) came to visit Stanley Fisher and the Fisher family at High Hurstwood in Sussex with Stanley’s old Oxford friend,

 David Ayerst; David introduced Michael to Stanley, Larema, Shelagh and Bryan. Ayerst was much taken by Larema and not long after they fell in love and were engaged, while Michael was much taken by the youngest Fisher – Bryan, who was ‘openly entranced by Michael and would soon follow him into various political movements and eventually into his bed, becoming an Oxford regular who adored spending weekend’ with the older composer. (17) Michael was also taken by Shelagh Fisher who had returned from Burma and during the rest of August Michael travelled the West Country with Stanley before heading off to North West Scotland with Bryan and Shelagh. The following year, Tippett proposed marriage to Larema who refused him.

In early 1936, Rev. Stanley Fisher married Rose Elizabeth Wright, in Oxford and they lived at Holwell Vicarage. Also that year Stanley became Principle of Brickwall School, Northiam, in Sussex until the following year, 1937, when a daughter was born in Leeds, named Margaret H. Fisher; a son was born on 24^th August 1939, at 9, Parkland Drive, Leeds, named Jeremy J. S. Fisher (18).

Before the outbreak of war in 1939, Tippett tells us that Bryan was a conscientious objector and that when war did eventually begin, he did agricultural work in Cambridge as an alternative to active service and that there was a younger boy named Edric Maynard who became romantically obsessed with Bryan who did not reciprocate the feelings.  Edric ‘developed psychological problems’ (schizophrenia) and Tippett slept with Edric and ‘let him do whatever he wanted, but afterwards made him sleep in the spare bedroom. Lying awake, I could hear him singing to the full moon shining outside and became desperately worried.’ (19)

Bryan qualified to be a conscientious objector in 1940 and his tribunal was set for May when Tippett appeared on his behalf but unfortunately Bryam was denied exemption from military service; he made another appeal in London in November in which Tippett spoke again on his behalf and he was successful and accepted agricultural work; having married Ruth Collins in 1940, early the following year Bryan was the warden of a hostel at Lilley Farm in Caldecote, Cambridgeshire. According to Tippett’s biographer, Oliver Soden, Bryan was unhappy in his marriage and fell in love with a young painter and conscientious objector friend of Tippett’s named Karl Hawker (1921-1984) (20) and had an ‘overwhelming homosexual affair’. After he married his second wife, Irene Jeffries in Cambridge in 1946 and they lived in Corsham, Uckfield. Tippett re-established a friendship with Bryan who had started a small school at his home, Parkside, in Corsham, Wiltshire. Bryan, Irene and their children, remained at their Georgian house, Parkside until 1960 when Tippett took over the house.

From 1937 until 1943 Rev. Stanley Fisher was an Assistant Master at Leeds Grammar School under the headmastership of Dr. Terry Thomas. In Fisher’s poem, ‘Leeds, March 13, 1941’ (Selected Poems. p. 28) Fisher recalls ‘crossing the cricket field in the break, my M.A. gown / ballooning after me, my barrage against the boys,’ and he thinks of his own time at the Grammar School as a boy and ‘of that morning when, in the other war, / I stood like Cortez here and looked down on the town, / a new boy, nine years old, fresh from the South and the country.’ After he departed Leeds Grammar School, Fisher became Assistant Master at De Aston School, Market Rasen in Lincolnshire and L. Pr. Dio. Lincoln from 1943-1946. In September 1946 he was Chaplain at Magdalen College School, Oxford under the headmaster J. F. Friend, MA, BSc., until 1960. A poem of his ‘Parson’s Pleasure’ written in Oxford in 1947, (Selected Poems. p. 31) portrays that secluded paradise where dons enjoyed nude bathing in the river Cherwell and lounged like Greek gods upon the shaded grass – ‘behind a hedge of yew is a crescent of grass / which cups a bend of the river Cherwell where / beneath a June-high sun a hundred men… now lie naked, sprawled / on back or belly like their first photographs.’ In another poem, ‘Touch’ (Selected Poems. p. 45-47), Fisher himself is lying naked in the Oxford meadow by the river and as he rolls onto his back, he notices his ‘belly, breast and thighs bear the stigmata / of the delicate grasses that have sealed me their. / Here’s a Sebastian whose body proffers / a target for the light artillery / of the summer rain or the great guns of the sea.’ The naked poet, in almost mystical tones of some divine ecstasy, realises that ‘we, like every earth-bound creature, crave / the shock, like thunder, of the meeting flesh, / the lightning flash from fingertip or lip / or across the curious cantilever bridge of masculinity.’

In early 1950, Rev. Stanley Fisher won the Oxford University Prize of £100 for the winning English poem on a sacred subject, the subject being – the Prodigal Son. His

volume, ‘The Prodigal Son’ was published the same year by Basil Blackwell. (21)

Stanley’s father, the Reverend Arthur Bryan Fisher, died on Thursday 3^rd November 1955, at 11, Caverly Road, Eastbourne. His mother, Alice Ruth Fisher, died a few years later in London on Saturday 14^th November 1959, aged 84. (22)

Stanley was then Rector of Westwell and vicar of Holwell in West Oxfordshire from 1961-1974; he was also Hon. Secretary of the Oxford Diocesan Committee for the Care of Churches. His address was 72, Rosamund Road, Wolvercote, Oxford, OX2 8NX.

Reverend Arthur Stanley Theodore Fisher died at his home, 72, Rosamund Road, Wolvercote, on Friday 22^nd September 1989 aged 83.

 

 

                        ‘We have outlived all defeats,
Triumphed in every but the final proof,
And now to the noon of passion there succeeds
The long and level afternoon of love.’
 

[Afternoon. Selected Poems. p. 22]

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

An Anthology of Prayers Compiled for use in School and Home. London. Longmans, Green & Co. 1934. 8vo. Red boards with gold lettering on the spine. pp. xivi, 144. [2^nd edition published 1935].

The Reach of Words: Poems. A. S. T. Fisher. London. Macmillan & Co. Ltd. [Macmillan’s Contemporary Poets Series]. 1935. 8vo. blue paper wraps with black lettering. pp. 57.

Five Poems. A. S. T. Fisher. (pamphlet) Leeds. 1942. pp. 8.

Voice and Verse: An Anthology in Three Parts for Community-Speaking in Schools, selected and edited by A. S. T. Fisher. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Part I: 1946. 12 MO. Blue cloth with black lettering on spine and front cover. pp. 79; Part II:  1946. 12 MO. Green cloth with black lettering on spine and front cover. pp. 86; Part III: 1946. 12 MO. Brown cloth with black lettering on spine and front cover. pp. 118.

The Comet and Earlier Poems. A. S. T. Fisher. London. Frederick Muller Ltd. 1948. 8vo. Green cloth with blue dust jacket with white lettering. pp. 60. [the first 30 poems are in chronological order from 1927-29]

The Prodigal Son [English Poem on a Sacred Subject] (pamphlet). AST Fisher. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1950. 8vo. pp. 6.

Happy Families: The Meaning of Sex for Young Teenagers. London (pamphlet). 1950. 8vo. pp. 28. [2^nd edition: 1961. London. De Lisle Ltd.]

Ambassador of Loss. (novel)  [by Michael Scarrott, pseudonym of A. S. T. Fisher. A story of love between boys during the 1930’s, based on English public school experiences]. London. The Fortune Press. 1955.  8vo. Illustrations (9 unnumbered pages and front cover) by Fisher’s son-in-law, Barry H. Surie. Red cloth boards with green dust jacket depicting two male heads by Surie. pp. 175.

Notes on Three Gospels and the Acts. A. S. T. Fisher. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1956. 8vo. pp. 32.

The Story of Life I: Growing & Moving. A. S. T. Fisher. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1957. 8vo. pp. 16. [illustrations by: Frederick T. W. Cook (1907-1982)]

The Story of Life II: Breathing. A. S. T. Fisher. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1957. 8vo. pp. 16. [illustrations by: F. T. W. Cook]

The Story of Life III: Feeding. A. S. T. Fisher. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1957. 8vo. pp. 16. [illustrations by: F. T. W. Cook]

The Story of Life IV: The Senses. A. S. T. Fisher. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1957. 8vo. pp. 16. [illustrations by: F. T. W. Cook]

50 Days to Easter: Devotional Readings for the Lenten Season. A. S. T. Fisher. London. A. R. Mowbray. 1964. 8vo. pp. ix, 33. [Readings based on addresses given to Magdalen College School, Oxford]

The History of Broadwell, Oxfordshire, with Filkins, Kelmscot and Holwell. A. S. T. Fisher. Privately Published. Holwell Vicarage, Burford, Oxon. 1968. [illustrations] folio. pp. iii, 122.

The History of Kencot, Oxfordshire. A. S. T. Fisher. Privately Published. Oxford. Burford. Bear Court Books. 1970. 23 cm. Green cloth with gold lettering. pp. 134.

Records of Christianity, Volume I: In the Roman Empire. A. S. T. Fisher & David Ayerst. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1971. 23 cm. 32 illustrations & maps. pp. xviii, 346.

The History of Westwell, Oxfordshire. A. S. T. Fisher. Privately Published. Oxford.

Burford. Bear Court Books. [Foreword by Sir Jim Sothern, Bart.] 1972. 23 cm. illustrations & maps. Orange cloth with gold lettering. pp. 133.

Records of Christianity, Volume II: Christendom (6^th-14^th century). A. S. T. Fisher * David Ayerst. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1977. 23 cm. pp. 329.

Selected Poems. A. S. T. Fisher. [42 poems] Privately Published by the author at 72, Rosamund Road, Oxford and dedicated to his wife, Elizabeth. Oxford. Seacourt Press Ltd. October 1978. [Distributed by Holdan Books Ltd., Oxford] 8vo. Pale blue wraps with black lettering featuring the distinctive single line drawn bird in flight. Printed in a facsimile of the author’s calligraphic handwriting. pp. 65.

 

ARTICLES:

 

Birds of Paradise. A. S. T. Fisher. Notes & Queries. 188, number 5. 1945. pp. 95-98.

The Source of Shakespeare’s Interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe: A Neglected Poem. A. S. T. Fisher. Notes & Queries. 194. 1949. pp. 376-379.

Auden’s Juvenilia. A. S. T. Fisher. Notes & Queries. (new series) 21, number 10. 1974. pp. 372-373.

Young Auden and Housman’s Poetry. A. S. T. Fisher. Housman Society Journal. Volume II. 1974. pp. 3-5.

 

 

NOTES:

 

1. George Pilkington ‘Jeremy’ Fisher. Born in Uganda on either 4^th or 5^th September 1903, he was educated at Edgborough Day School in Surrey, Repton School and Christ Church, Oxford, in 1922 (2^nd class History). He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1925 and married Ethel Marjory Wheelwright (1906-1988) at St. John’s Church, Roorkee in the Punjab, India on 9^th November 1928. george had gone to Roorkee in 1926 as a joint magistrate he was appointed acting-collector of Saharanpur in the Upper Punjab in January 1929, shortly before his death in a polo accident at Roorkee on 20^th July 1929, aged 25. 
2. Geraldine Mary Fisher. Geraldine was born on Good Friday, 29^th March 1907 in Uganda and she came to England with her parents around 1914; she was educated at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset and went on to Croydon Art School where she spent two years studying art, particularly embroidery. Following this she became Art Mistress at Glendower School, Cromwell Road, Kensington, London where she also taught scripture and she then spent time at St Andrew’s Theological College. In Norbury she taught at St. Philip’s Sunday School before leaving for Uganda in Africa in March 1935 to teach at Gayaza Girls’ School, becoming Headmistress there in 1937. In Uganda she met the Reverend Roger Holford Baines (1907-1999), the son of the Archdeacon of Halifax (from 1935-46), Rev. Albert Baines, of St. John’s College, Cambridge (died 1951). The couple returned to England in 1939 and were married in April 1940 in Uckfield, Sussex. Roger, who was educated at Charterhouse, became vicar of St. Peter’s Church, Harrogate from 1947-67 and they had three sons all born in Leeds: Richard P. Baines, born 1941, Martin H. Baines, born 1943, and Stephen C. Baines, born in 1946. Canon Roger Baines of Ripon Cathedral, who had spent 26 years in Yorkshire, resigned his living and moved to Ashford Bowdler in 1956. Geraldine Baines died in Ashford Bowdler on 25^th January 2006, aged 98. see the ‘Diary of a Shropshire Lass’ by Janet Baines. Loose Chippings Books. 2011. [Janet married Roger Baines’ brother, Guy Harrison Baines (1911-1984), MRCS, FRCS, BA Cambridge (1932), MA, LRCP]
3. Ruth Shelagh Patricia Fisher. Born in Uganda on 23^rd March 1908, she came to England around 1914 and was educated at Sherborne School for Girls. She married Major Raymond Hobbins, of St. John’s College, Oxford, and son of Lt.-Col. T. P. Hobbins CBE, of Headingly, Leeds, at High Hurstwood in Sussex in 1936. The ceremony was performed by the bride’s father, Rev. A. B. Fisher, and her brother, Rev. A. S. T. Fisher. Raymond later became a forestry officer in Southern Rhodesia.There is an article in the Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Chronicle of Friday 12^th February 1943 (p. 6) which says that ‘Mrs. Hobbins, wife of Capt. Ray Hobbins (stationed in India) and daughter of the Rev. A. B. Fisher, of High Hurstwood, writes home: I [Captain Hobbins] have just received a letter from the Governor congratulating me as my name appears in the London Gazette in recognition of gallant and distinguished service in Burma during the period December ’41, to May ’42.’
4. Lorna Larema Dorothy Fisher. Born in Uganda on 3^rd August 1913, she married David George Ogilvy Ayerst (1904-1992) on Tuesday 29^th December 1936 in Paddington, London. David, a friend of the poets Auden and Cecil Day Lewis, and the son of Rev. G. H. Ayerst of Canterbury, was educated at Haileybury School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with 1^st class Hons. In Modern History; from 1929-34 he was on the editorial staff of the Manchester Guardian. In 1934 he became senior History master at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon and in 1937, Headmaster of King Edward VII School, Lytham St. Annes. From 1964-1973, he was H.M. Inspector of Schools. He published several books: Understanding Schools (1967), The Manchester Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper (1971), The Guardian Omnibus 1821-1971 (1973), Burford Church and People: An Illustrated History (1975), Garvin of the Observer (1984); also (with Rev. AST Fisher), Records of Christianity, volumes I & II (1971 & 1977). David and Larema had several children: Janet L. Ayerst (1937-2012) who married Michael Rush in 1958; Barbara L. Ayerst, born 1939, she married Stuart Zelig Walters (1936-2022) in 1965 [divorced 1988]; Bridget M. L. Ayerst, born 1944, she married David Stafford Cripps (1940-1990), son of Sir John Stafford Cripps, in 1968 [divorced 1981]; John B. O. Ayerst, born 1946 and married Gabrielle M. C. Feeny in 1979; and Ruth C. F. Ayerst, born 1949 who married the composer, Timothy George Hodgkinson (born 1949) of Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1974. Lorna Larema Dorothy Ayerst died in Oxfordshire in October 2005, aged 92.
5. Douglas Russell Bryan Fisher. Born in Leeds on 26^th May 1916, he went to Edgborough preparatory school in Surrey and he married Ruth L. Collins, in Ampthill, Bedfordshire in 1940 and married again in 1946 – Irene Jeffries in Cambridge. Douglas drifted into the sphere of the composer, Michael Tippett, who shared similar political ideals before becoming lovers and sharing a bed. Douglas was a conscientious objector during the war. During the 1950’s he was bursar of Bath Academy of Art. He died in May 2001, in Taunton in Somerset, aged 85.
6. Grandmother’s Tracks: The Story of Ruth Alice Fisher, 1875-1959. Margaret Fisher. Nigel Fisher. 2010. p. 116. The book also contains several family photographs of the Fishers, including one of Stanley aged 18 and another of Stanley and his siblings standing according to their height in a line.
7. W. H. Auden: A Biography. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company. George Allen & Unwin Publishers Ltd. 1981. p. 46. Carpenter cites a typescript document in his research: ‘Up at Oxford with Poets’, an unpublished memoir by AST Fisher of his time at Christ Church and his friendship with Auden and other poets. See also: Isherwood. Peter Parker. Picador. 2004. p. 120.
8. ibid. Carpenter. p. 50. See also: Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928, edited by Katherine Bucknell. London. Faber & Faber. 1994. Introduction, p. xxxi.
9. ibid. Carpenter. pp. 50-51. See also: The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England. Nicholas Jenkins. Harvard University Press. 2024. pp. 158-159.
10. Auden’s Juvenilia. Notes and Queries, n.s. 21, number 10. October 1974. pp. 370-373. An interesting article in which Fisher cites the influence of Thomas Hardy upon the early poems of Auden. It seems Auden was unaware that Davidson had given some of these poems to Fisher and when Stanley wrote to Auden in the 1960’s asking if he may use the poems in his article on Auden’s Juvenilia, Auden was surprised that the poems were still in existence and that Stanley was given them by Davidson. Michael Davidson, who ‘exchanged almost daily letters’ about poetry with Auden, says in his ‘The World, The Flesh and Myself’ (1973) that he was ‘passionately’ planning on showing Auden’s poems to the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, but never managed to meet him. (p. 75)
11. The Road’s Your Place, see Auden’s Juvenilia. Fisher. p. 371; also see Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928. Katherine Bucknell. Princeton University Press. 2003. p. 95. The poem, The Tarn, see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, p. 62.
12. Richard Jefferies (poem), see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, p. 92.
13. To E. T. (poem), see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, p. 100; California (poem), Bucknell, p. 3; Chloe to Daphnis in Hyde Park (poem), Bucknell, pp. 134-135 [also published in The Oxford Outlook, volume 8, number 39. June 1926, pp. 209-210]
14. Young Auden and Housman’s Poetry by A. S. T. Fisher. Housman Society Journal, volume II, 1974. pp. 3-5. At the end of the article Fisher gives his address as being: 72, Rosamund Road, Wolvercote, Oxford. See also W H Auden, A Bibliography: The Early Years through 1955, by Barry Bloomfield (1964) in which the author gives a list of manuscript typescripts of poems in the Fisher Collection [c. 1923-1929], appendix II, pp. 124-125 and poems that A.S.T. Fisher transcribed: ‘To Edward Thomas’; ‘Chloe to Daphnis in Hyde Park’; ‘Dethroned’ which begins: ‘Man finds himself no more omnipotent…’; ‘California’ (Birmingham) and ‘Thomas Prologizes’ which begins: ‘They are all gone upstairs into a world…’; the poems can be found in Katherine Bucknell’s ‘Juvenilia: Poems, 1922-1928. Princeton University Press. 2003, on pages: 100, 134-135, 130, 3 and 136 respectively. There is also a series of six poems by Auden all dating from 1924 in the Fisher Collection which are all typed: The Pumping Engine, Cashwell, [‘It’s fifty years now…’] (1924) which Fisher included in a list of Auden’s poems in the style of Hardy in his ‘Auden’s Juvenilia’, p. 371; also see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, pp. 74-75; The Mail Train, Crewe [‘Under the hundred lamps whose flare…’] (1924), also influenced by Hardy according to Fisher, see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, pp. 76-77; Elegy [‘Why was it that you gave us no warning…’] (Sept 1924), in the style of Hardy, see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, pp. 57-58; ‘So I must go my way…’ (1924), in the style of Hardy, see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, p. 78; ‘Whenever I see for the first time…’ (1924), influenced by Hardy [‘Auden’s Juvenilia’, Fisher, p. 371], see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, pp. 75-76; He Revisits the Spot [‘Yes, this is the place…’] (1924), published in ‘Auden’s Juvenilia’, Fisher, p. 371, see ‘Juvenilia’, Bucknell, p. 78.
15. Oxford Poetry. Edited by Clere Parsons and B. B. Oxford. Basil Blackwell. 1928. Fisher’s poems: From a Letter Abroad pp. 21-22, The Funeral of Thomas Hardy, p. 23, and Invitation to Drowning, p. 24. Auden’s poem, In Due Season, is on p. 2. Fisher’s three poems were also published in his Selected Poems (1978): A Letter Abroad pp. 4-5, At the Funeral of Thomas Hardy p. 6, and Invitation to Drowning p. 15.
16. Norbury: Notes From St. Philip’s. Croydon Times. Saturday 17^th August 1929. p. 2. See also: Streatham News. Friday 26^th July 1929. p. 2, and Friday 2^nd August. p. 14. See also: Grandmother’s Tracks (2010) p. 144.
17. Michael Tippett: The Biography. Oliver Soden. Weidenfield and Nicolson. 2019. [also has photographic portraits of Bryan and Shelagh Fisher] Much of the information on Bryan Fisher comes from his privately printed, unpublished memoir, ‘An Adventure in Living’ (1998). In relation to David Ayerst, Soden tells us that: ‘In marrying a Fisher girl, David had succeeded where Michael had failed. On the day of the Ayerst’s wedding, Michael stubbornly refused to leave the couple alone in the bedroom while Larema changed out of her wedding dress.’ Soden also cites a privately printed memoir by Sheila Hobbins in three volumes: Dear, I’ve Been Thinking (1988).
18. Margaret H. Fisher, born in Hastings, Sussex in 1937, married Barry H. Surie (born in London in 1932), in Witney, Berkshire in 1964. Jeremy J. S. Fisher, born 24^th August 1939 in Leeds, married Judith Shaw in Uxbridge in 1962 and in 1984, he married Elaine Bevan in Hampshire.
19. Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography. Michael Tippett. London. Hutchinson. 1991. pp. 121-122. Tippett also says that Bryan did agricultural work at the smallholding in East Grinstead but Soden tells us that Bryan never actually worked at East Grinstead. The East Grinstead farm for conscientious objectors was established Tippett’s friend, Francesca Allinson (1902-1945) who was part of the Bloomsbury Group and a friend of the Woolfs; she took her own life by drowning in 1945. see: ‘Fresca: A Life in the Making’ by Helen Southworth. Liverpool University Press. 2017. [pp. 167-186]
20. Karl Hawker (1921-1984): following his marriage which ended after thirteen years, Hawker met Tippett again in 1957 and the two men had a turbulent relationship which lasted until 1974. Hawker committed suicide in Cyprus in 1984.
21. Stamford Mercury, Friday 17^th February 1950, p. 4, and the Lincolnshire Echo, Friday 24^th February 1950, p. 3.
22. Death of the Rev. Arthur Bryan Fisher: Wiltshire News, Friday 18^th November 1955, p. 10. Rev. Fisher was also a leader in the 1^st High Hurstwood Scout Group and was made Group Scoutmaster in Crowborough District in 1935. See also: The Rev. A. B. Fisher in Uganda: A Memoir, by H. B. Thomas. Uganda Journal, volume 21, number 1. 1957. His wife, Alice Ruth Fisher’s obituary can be found in The Times, Tuesday 17^th November 1959, p. 15.