UNTRAINED POETS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 25, 30 January 1930, Page 19

UNTRAINED POETS

LABOURING MEN'S GIFTS

There is plenty of artistic talent, genuine, if untrained, among men whose need to earn their daily bread in the sweat of their brow holds them to manual labour (wrote a "T.P.'s Weekly" reviewer).

A London shoemaker, known in his district as "The Cobbler Poet," is Mr. Henry Burns. He sold sixteen, thousand copies of his verses, "In Memoriam," on the death of Mario Lloyd, and two of his books of verse have been published. "The rhythm of my hammer taps and of the regular movements in sewing seemed to provide the lilt he has explained. He has composed a poem every week for twentyeight years.

"This boy.sings from a coal pit and sings fiercely,- demanding air and light. But he sings for those' who have ears to hear," wrote. Sir Arthur QuillerCouch of the young miuer-poct, Frederick Cecil Boden, whose 'Pit-head Poems' have been published. Son of a railway goods porter, he took up mining work at thirteen. "The suffering and ignorance I see about me makes my heart ache," he has declared. "I hope to ■be something of a comforter to people." The Right Rev. David Williams, Anglician Bishop of Ontario, whose eloquence with pen and tongue are well known in Canada, was a cobbler in a little Cardiganshire factory until he was twenty-two. A book of poignant verses has been published by Mr. W. Wright, Labour M.P. for Rutherglen, who worked in a mine for twenty-six years; and in the Kentish village of Ham Street is a farm labourer poet, William Higgins, one of whose songs is among the most widely known in the United States. David Calder Wilson, who wrote the novel, 'Chinese White,' was formerly a blacksmith. I was introduced, a couple of years ago, to a street-corner newsvendor, near the Bank of England, who had been composing songs and poems for several years. Another former blacksmith, Ted Warburton, who used to wield *the hammer on a colliery bank in the Black Country, is one of the most proismg youngs singers at Trinity College of Music, in London. A North Shields blacksmith, last of a line "of seven smiths, has writrsa a book of poems, which is to be published;-and a Hashlemere cobbler, Arthur Thompson, composes tunes and hums them to a musician, who notates them for publication.

Is it more than a coincidence, 1 wonder, that most of the -workmen poets, writers, and composers that one calls to mind ,are, : . or were, cobblers and blacksmiths? It was the same in the old days.. Eobert Bloomfield, author of 'Farmer's Boy,' was a cobbler, as were William GifEord (first editor of the London 'Quarterly Review,' and composer of the satirical poems, 'Baviad' and 'Maeviad'), Samuel Drew, and Thomas Cooper. Elihu Burritt yas famous in the Europe and America of mid-Victorian times as "The Learned Blacksmith." Ho was a pioneer platform advocate of the emancipation of America's slaves, the introduction of penny postage the world over, and of permanent peace among the nations.