Favourite Channel

You might not have heard of T.E. Brown, unless you’re from the Isle of Man, where he is honoured as Manx National Poet. But as Brown’s biographer Derek Winterbottom explains, he lived and worked in Bristol for most of his life, and regularly took inspiration from Clevedon and the Bristol Channel.

CARDIFF, Newport, Weston and Bristol are all well within range of Clevedon pier, where, treading sedately, poet, priest and teacher T.E. Brown mused that the God of most people is money, though he wished that they would look for consolation in nature.

PER OAINIA DEUS

What moves at Cardiff, how a man

At Newport ends the day as he began,

At Weston what adventure may befall,

What Bristol dreams, or if she dream at all,

Upon the pier, with step sedate, I meditate—

Poor souls! whose God is Mammon —

Meanwhile, from Ocean’s gate, Keen for the foaming spate,

The true God rushes in the salmon.

Clevedon pier opened in 1869 so the poem must have been written after that date.

Thomas Edward Brown was born in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, in May 1830, the son of the Revd Robert Brown, a clergyman and schoolmaster in the town who later became vicar of the ancient parish of Braddan, a few miles outside Douglas.

Brown was educated by his father and at a local school before moving at sixteen to King William’s College, a boarding school for boys in Castletown, on the Island.

There he astonished his teachers with his learning and intelligence and he won a scholarship to Oxford’s grandest college, Christ Church, where he read two academic courses concurrently, one in classics and one in history with law, achieving first classes in both, a very rare distinction.

He was then, in 1854, elected a fellow of Oriel College, which had a very high reputation at the time and he took holy orders. So we are dealing here with a man of outstanding intellect.

As a person he was burly and manly with bright blue eyes and a rollicking sense of humour and he had a remarkable gift for mimicry.

Brown ould have stayed at Oxford and risen in academic and church circles but he returned to the Isle of Man because he was offered at a very young age the senior position of vice-principal at King William’s College and also because he was in love with his Manx cousin Amelia Stowell, whom he married in 1857.

Their first daughter died soon after birth but in due course they had three more daughters and three sons.

In 1861 Brown became headmaster of the Crypt School, an ancient grammar school in Gloucester and in 1863 he was lured from there to the newly founded Clifton College in Bristol by its brilliant young headmaster, John Percival, who offered Brown the lucrative posts of deputy head, head of the modern side (that is all subjects except classics) and a boarding housemaster.

He retained all these posts at Clifton for 29 years during which time the school grew in numbers from about 70 boys to nearly 700 and established itself as one of the great Victorian public schools, renowned for scholarship and for producing outstanding leaders: Percival was headmaster for sixteen years and no less than 50 of his pupils were later knighted for public service.

So one side of Brown was a very busy schoolmaster who played a key part in the establishment of a great school and impressed hundreds of his pupils with his forceful character and brilliant intellect.

In later life many of them became influential in literary and media circles and they did much to promote Brown as a major poet. They included W.E. Henley, a pupil in Gloucester and author of the famous poem ‘Invictus,’ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor of English at Cambridge, Sir Henry Newbolt, poet, novelist and historian, and many others.

Brown wrote his poems as an escape from the hurly-burly of school life and it seems that, once written, they were put into the back of a drawer in a desk in his study and not published until much later.

Moreover, he wrote two distinct types of poem, some in English and some in Manx dialect. The English poems were often short and followed accepted norms of poetic composition but the Manx poems were lengthy tales, often of unrequited

T.E. Brown as a young man

love and personal tragedy, told by a seafarer to his shipmates in moments of leisure at sea.

They were written in Manx dialect and need to be read by someone able to understand and reproduce this accent, which unfortunately has restricted Brown’s audience drastically.

His first major book of poems was entitled ‘Fo’c’s’le Yarns,’ published by Macmillan in 1881 and it contains his most famous long Manx poem, ‘Betsy Lee’ as well as many others. Further volumes were published in 1887, 1889 and 1893.

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Extract from ‘Betsy Lee,’ capturing a Manx summer’s day in childhood:

Now the beauty of the thing when childher plays is

The terrible wonderful length the days is.

Up you jumps, and out in the sun, And you fancy the day will never be done ;

And you’re chasin’ the bumbees humin’ so cross

In the hot sweet air among the goss, Or gath’rin’ bluebells, or lookin’ for eggs,

Or peltin’ the ducks with their yalla legs,

Or a climbin’ and nearly breakin’ your skulls,

Or a shoutin’ for divilment after the gulls,

Or a thinkin’ of nothin,’ but down at the tide

Singin’ out for the happy you feel inside.

That’s the way with the kids, you know,

And the years do come and the years do go,

And when you look back it’s all like a puff,

Happy and over and short enough.

* * * * * *

In 1892 Brown retired from Clifton College and moved back to the Isle of Man, where he was offered but refused the archdeaconry of the Island. He wrote more Manx and English poems and also a great number of letters, many to his former Clifton colleagues, who begged him to come back and visit them.

Ironically he did do this in 1897, but had a fatal stroke while addressing a group of boys, as a result of which he was buried in Redland Chapel, with his wife and young son Braddan.

His letters are outstanding examples of the genre and were published in two volumes in 1900, the same year that saw a collected edition of his poems published by Macmillan in a series that included

Tennyson, Coleridge, Hardy and Wordsworth.

In 1930 Brown was formally declared to be the Manx National Poet with a room dedicated to him in the Manx Museum and his photograph hung for decades in pride of place in all Manx schools. A fine portrait of him by Sir William Richmond RA hangs in Clifton College and there is a bust of him in the Manx Museum and a recent statue in one of the main thoroughfares of Douglas.

Brown loved walking and apart from the Isle of Man, where he set up the coastal paths, he walked a lot in the Lake District, North Wales and also along the Clifton Gorge. He arrived at Clifton in 1863 at a time when Clevedon was developing into a Victorian sea-side resort, with a pier that opened in 1869. It was accessible from Bristol by train via Yatton but it would not surprise me if Brown did not sometimes walk there.

* * * * * *

Brown’s images can be fanciful, and fewer more fanciful than seeing in the Bristol Channel a waterspaniel for King Knut!

The Bristol Channel

The sulky old gray brute! But when the sunset strokes him,