Literary slant runs far beyond annual festival
CHELTENHAM is one of the only towns that can boast being home to a brace of poet laureates.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson arrived with his mother and sisters in 1833.
First the family settled at 6 Belle Vue Place in High Street, moving the following year to 10 St James’s Square where they remained until 1849.
While in town Tennyson wrote part of In Memoriam, although the poem took him 17 years to complete so obviously he wrote parts of it in various places.
Which brings to mind a quip by Frank Muir made at the Cheltenham Literature Festival some years ago when he said: “I’ve been in the West Indies for the past six months finishing a book. I’m a very slow reader”.
But back to the plot. In 1930, Cecil Day-lewis came to the town when he took a teaching post at Cheltenham College where he was considered Bohemian for wearing corduroy trousers and horror of horrors - suede shoes.
Cecil’s first home was 96 Bath Road but after the war he moved to Box Cottage in Bafford Lane, Charlton Kings and stayed there for seven years.
Box Cottage brought out a different side of Cecil’s talents.
Urgent repairs were needed to cure a leaking Cotswold tile roof, so to pay for them he wrote thriller A Question of Proof under the nom de plume Nicho
las Blake.
It was a great success and the first in a lucrative series of novels.
Think of literary figures associated with Tewkesbury and perhaps the first who come to mind are John Moore, Francis Brett Young and Mrs Craik.
But in 2001 when the American Modern Library announced its list of the hundred best novels published in the English language, a novel titled Loving by Henry Green was among them and the author came from Tewkesbury.
Born in 1905 Henry Vincent Yorke (Green was a non de plume) was the son of a wealthy industrialist from the West Midlands.
He was educated at Eton, then published his first novel in 1926 when a student at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Green left Oxford before graduating because he did not see eye to eye with his tutor C S Lewis (who was educated at Malvern College, as was John Moore).
Never a full-time writer, Henry Green worked for his father’s engineering firm in Birmingham and eventually became managing director.
He published nine novels, the last in 1952, which are regarded as carefully crafted and were much admired by such literary luminaries as W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood and John Updike.
A modest man and unwilling to be photographed, he purposely chose his writing name for being unremarkable.
Like other authors from privileged backgrounds, such as George Orwell, Green’s books are scathing about the class system and have working class heroes. He died in 1973.
Gloucester also spawned an author who was the son of a wealthy industrialist.
Paul Trent enjoyed wide popularity in the 1920s and ’30s. His real name was Edward Platt and his father - James Platt - was cofounder of the city engineering firm Fielding & Platt.
Paul Trent published 85 novels and died in Hammersmith in 1946.
More enduring a literary figure perhaps is Frederick William Harvey, who was born in Hartpury on March 26, 1888.
In the early, jingoistic fervour of the First World War, Harvey volunteered and joined the 5th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment.
He was sent to the trenches in 1915 where he was promoted to corporal and won a decoration for gallantry in the field.
Shortly after receiving his commission to lieutenant, Harvey was captured and spent the rest of the conflict in a German prisoner of war camp.
F W Harvey died in 1957 and a memorial tablet to him can be found in the south transept of Gloucester Cathedral.