Francis Brett Young was born at Hales Owen on June 29th 1884. He first saw the light in a pleasant red brick house in Laurel Lane where his father, Thomas Brett Young, was a much-loved and greatly respected general practitioner of the old school. The family on his father's side originated in the Mendip country where the menfolk had been miners for some generations, while his maternal grandfather was a doctor in the hunting area of Leicestershire. Francis was the Brett Youngs' eldest son and was christened in Hales Owen Church, a building which he describes fondly in his early novel "The Young Physician" and in the unfinished "Wistanslow".
"Even apart from my pride in escorting my mother, and flaunting my possession of such a paragon, I always enjoyed 'morning service' at Halesby. Its great church, once an adjunct of the ruined Premonstratensian abbey, was the most romantic feature in all our landscape, not merely venerable to me in its ancientry but also impressive as a work of art, a transcription, in terms of stone, of the more sublime passages in my mother's music. Though she had already cunningly tried to infect me with her own love of poetry which, when she read it aloud at my bedside, enthralled me, even when I did not understand or attempt to grasp its content of thought, being sufficiently moved and enraptured by the sequence of sounds and the pattern of unfamiliar words. Our isolated life had so far denied me the enjoyment (or even the sight) of any creations of plastic art. I had never yet seen a painting, statue or building with any pretensions to greatness. And this huge parish church, which I had heard spoken of, as 'our little cathedral', impressed us, both by its size, and by the grandeur of the aspiration which had made its spire pierce the sky, and launched the nave's Gothic arches into the vault. The air which one breathed within it resembled no other. It even smelt different; its odours being compounded of dank, slowly-crumbling stone, dust, worm-eaten wood and mouldy books of devotion. Nor was colour lacking; for when silvery light flooded the clerestory or sun shone through the sixteenth-century glass of aisles and chancel, the dust-laden air was shot with a rainbow brilliance of ruby and topaz, sapphire and cobalt, which dyed the grey stones, beneath which the builders slept. And when the organ played, imposing a reverent stillness on the hushed air, my ears seemed to be filled with a kind of music, nobler than the familiar tinkle of my mother piano, as huge waves of sound released by the open diapason went rolling away into the remotest recesses of that echoing, complicated cavern of stone, making the benches beneath us tremble with slow reverberations, or, released like birds into the dizzy vault, seemed to hover there, suspended in bodyless flight, as though they had reached some celestial region which they were loath to leave until their last vibrations were spent."
As you well know, two rounded hills lie in isolation just outside Hales Owen - Clent and Walton, "Penn Beacon" and "Uffdown" of the novels and it was on the summits of these hills that many happy hours of Brett Young's childhood were spent, where he dreamt his childish dreams and from which he surveyed the country he was years later to make so peculiarly his own.
"In my childhood Hales Owen (or Halesby as I have called it) seemed a most romantic place. It was given over to the manufacture, in hundreds of backyard workshops, of hard-wrought nails. Each cottage - and I visited hundreds - had its own little nailhouse built on to it. There were coal-mines; some like Fatherless Bairn - which stands North of Wassel Grove (the scene of my book "Cold Harbour") on a prominent ridge. There was, also, the great integrated concern which dealt in coal, iron, bricks, forgings, etc. - called the New British Ironworks, of which my step-grandfather was managing director. This enormous concern crashed when I was a boy. It owned Hawne Colliery (the "Great Mawne" of my books); and old Hawne Hall (Mawne Hall) where that step-grandfather lived in considerable state. There was also the Leasowes, one-time home of the poet William Shenstone. It was from Shenstone's works that I saturated myself in the eighteenth century; an influence which I never quite overcame. Then there was, of course, Hales Owen's ruined Premonstratensian Abbey.At the age of seven Francis was sent to a small, private school called Iona at Sutton Coldfield, which was kept by maiden ladies named Cutts, and he recalled that on being asked there what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered unhesitatingly "a poet". Even at this early age his obsession with hydraulics, watercourses and dams (to figure so largely in many of his books) was manifesting itself. Writing to one of the Miss Cutts many years later, he said, "My private sanctuary of which no other soul knew, was the bank of a little stream at the end of the Tamworth Road. Here, unknown to anybody, I indulged my passion for running water, constructing in sand and mud enormous works of hydraulic enginering, staged naval battles, wrecks and tempests, alone and utterly happy". It was at this time that he discovered the works of that other literary figure - poet and landscape gardener Hales Owen produced - William Shenstone - of which an amusing account may be found in the early pages of that unfinished novel which was published after his death "Wistanslow", and in his biography written by his widow Jessica.South East of us lay the Clents. Clent Hill I wrote about as Pen Beacon and Walton Hill as Uffdown. From their summits I could look out on all my literary territory right down to the Black Mountain (Ben Savaddan of my novel "Undergrowth") and the valey of the Dulas Fechan whose real name is Grwyne. In the book "The Dark Tower" the Black Mountain is all pervading and the abbey is Llanthony where the poet Walter Savage Lander tried to live.
At the base of the Clents on the other side I invented Sir Joseph Hingston's mansion - more or less on the site of Lord Cobham's Hagley Hall. In "Portrait of Clare", Clare's house was put in the valley below Shut Mill at Romsley and the Sling fishponds (now, alas, slowly silting up). Wychbury is more or less Clent and Stourton, Stourbridge, while Chaddesbourne D'Abitot (first mentioned in my "Black Diamond") is a portrait of Chaddesley Corbett.
All the Westward places of "Black Diamond" and succeeding books are strung along the Elan Valley to Birmingham pipe line. Lesswardine is not Leintwardine, but something between it and Knighton, under Clun Forest and though the story of "The House Under the Water" is that of Rhayader; that massif is much less terrible than my Forest Fawr. The Trewern of "Jim Redlake" lies under Radnor Forest. As to Jim Redlake's villages, they all lie in what hunting men call 'High Leicestershire'. Thorpe Folville of the novel is Somerby where my real grandfather practised medicine and hunted amid a Pleiades of villages connected by roads running through pasture - I have opened and shut fifty gates for him in a day...........Dr. Weston, of Jim Redlake by the way, is one of my rare portraits, and so is Mr. Furnival of "Cold Harbour" but the less said of that the better...
Some of my topographical details are terribly indefinite. The Wednesford of "My Brother Jonathan", for example, is a composite Black Country town, and Wolverbury isn't quite Wolverhampton. Indeed if you try to tie me down, I must generally fail you. My terrain is really a dream landscape, absorbed and pondered in boyhood from the gorsy summit of Walton Hill. Nothing that has happened in my English Books took place outside the limits of that superb vista. Those little hills were the navel of my life and always will be................"
"I had just discovered the poems of William Shenstone and learned that he, like myself, had been born and bred in Hales Owen, the only "great name" that my birth place had ever produced in its thousand years of history. Yet his only memorials, so far as I could discover, were a small marble urn in the church; a dilapidated tomb in the churchyard, and a public house in the Stourbridge Road where our coachman, Tom Hadley, unaware of the poet's existence, consumed his Saturday evening pint.One afternoon the Rector, Mr. Darnay, came to tea, teased me about my liking for Shenstone's verse and asked if I could remember anything he had written.
"Of course I can, heaps. Some of it is magnificent".
"Magnificent?" Mr. Darnay's smile was treacherous. "I wonder if you could oblige us with a short recitation. We live and learn, and I'm ready to be converted."
"Go on, darling", my mother said. Even she, in her innocence had forsaken me. As usual Mr. Darnay had been too clever for me. I knew I was caught. He made me feel like a small child put up to recite at a village concert; but since I couldn't get out of the horrid situation without embarrassing her, and my father added his persuasions to hers, I complied with ill grace, declaiming a passage of turgid blank verse from Shenstone's "Lines on a distant Prospect of Halesby Abbey", in which the poet (with feelings as anti-clerical as were mine at that moment) rejoiced in its dissolution. The climax of his indictment of monkish morals was reached in a line that had so deeply impressed me by its sound and fury that I had not troubled to fathom its significance. I declaimed it passionately:
....the luxurious priest
Crawled from his bedded strumpet, muttering how
an ineffectual curse.................My mother held her silver teapot suspended in mid-air.
"His what" Mr. Darnay said.
"His bedded strumpet", I confidently repeated.My father, who had been listening with an amused smile, laughed out loud. I could not imagine why. The word ' strumpet' meant nothing to me; but it had a fine brazen sound, derived perhaps from its resemblance to 'trumpet'.
"Well...........Well..........." Mr. Darnay sighed; and my mother immediately and tactfully intervened.
"You do take cream and sugar, don't you, Mr. Darnay?", she asked; and then, without pausing, changed the subject.When the tea party was over, my mother commanded, "Take Mr. Darnay to the gate, Dick". I obeyed reluctantly. When I returned, I saw that she and my father were still smiling, as though they had been ejoying some private joke.
"Have you any idea what a 'bedded strumpet' is, darling?" she asked me softly.
I was forced to confess that I didn't. Anyway, I liked the sound of it. It was, I imagined, something that they had in abbeys, a carved bed-post, or something of that kind.
"A piece of monastic bedroom furniture", my father laughed. "Let's leave it at that."
My mother, too, laughed as she put her arm round me and kissed me."
He loved during childhood to listen to his mother, a gifted and artistic woman, playing Mendelssohn and Beethoven and his absorption in music continued throughout his life. Indeed his first published work was not literature but music; settings of some of Robert Bridges' lyrics.
One might have expected that following his preparatory school years he would, like other middle-class Hales Owen boys, have been sent as a fee-paying pupil to Hales Owen Grammar School, a school to whose headmaster of the time he gave a somewhat dubious immortality in his novel "The Iron Age", but his father was anxious that he should enter the medical profession and so Francis won a scholarship to a school with special endowments for Doctors' sons, Epson College. Thither he went in 1895 when he was eleven. In 1898 when he was fourteen occurred the great tragedy of his life - the death of his mother. I am reminded that another great local poet, A. E. Housman, suffered a similar boyhood bereavement, and the effects of these traumatic experiences can be seen in the work of both men. The story of Francis's mother's death is told in a touching and frankly autobiographical episode in "The Young Physican", as is that of the cycling holiday Edwin Ingleby and his father took in the Mendip country to try to overcome their grief. There it was that an old aunt, Lydia Hare, forecast that his father would marry again.
Francis wanted desperately to go to Balliol College at Oxford University, but his father had other ideas, and so in 1901 on the strength of a Sands Cox scholarship he entered the medical school of Birmingham University, then housed in most unsuitable and cramped premises in the centre of Birmingham. His father did marry again in 1901, following which Francis never fully entered into the life of his father's new family.
In 1904 he met Jessica Hankinson who was to become his wife. A member of an old Cheshire family, Jessica had lived in childhood at the farm which was demolished to provide a site for Barnsley Hall Hospital near Bromsgrove and at the time of their meeting her parents lived at High House, Alvechurch. She was training at the Anstey College of Physical Education, then housed in the building on the Leasowes, Hales Owen, which was erected on the site of William Shenstone's birthplace and which is now the Clubhouse of Hales Owen Golf Course. It was at the Leasowes on June 15th 1905 that Francis proposed to her, but it was decided a formal engagement must await his graduation. He has recalled the occasion in one of his poems:-
"And you, my lovely one,
What can I leave to you, who, having eft,
Am utterly bereft?
What in my store of visionary dowers
Is not already yours?
What silences, what hours
of peace passing all understanding; days
Made lyric by your beauty and its praise;
Years neither time can tarnish, nor death mar,
Wherein you shined as steadfast as a star
In my bleak night, heedless of the cloud-wreck
Scudding in torn fleeces black
Of my dark moods, as those who rule the far
Star-haunted pleasurances of heaven are?
So think but lightly of that afternoon
With white cloude climbing a blue sky in June
When a boy worshipped under dreaming trees,
Who touched your hand, and sought your eyes................."
He was at this time living in "digs" in Edgbaston at Mrs. Gertrude Dale's, No. 105 Harborne Road. In 1906 he was awarded his M.B. degree and he and Jessica became officially engaged. Of his relations with his father at this time he wrote, many years later, in a letter to the dramatist St. John Ervine, "While I certainly was not the victim of a mother fixation, I had no real feeling for my father - I mean personal feeling - and could never achieve - or even want - intimacy with him after his second marriage."
Early in 1907 he took a temporary post as ship's surgeon on the S.S. Kintuck, a Holt Line steamer, of 4,000 tons, on which he made a trip to the Far East - an experience he was to put to good use much later in his 1925 novel "Sea Horses". Back in England he and Jessica were married very quietly indeed secretively, on December 28 1908 at the parish church of the old family home at Rowberrow in Somerset. A brief honeymoon at Skelwith Bridge in Westmorland is commemorated in his poem "Testament".
"Those nights when icy Brathay thundered
Under his bridges, and ghostly mountains wondered
at the white blossoming of a Christmas rose
More stainless than their snows."
Then the newlyweds went to live at Cleveland House, Brixham, where he had bought a medical practice. In spite of being very much occupied with medicine he managed to find some time for writing, but alas his efforts at this time did not achieve publication despite encouraging noises from, among others, Eden Philpote and Robertson Nichol. His first novel to be published was written in collaboration with his younger brother, Eric, with whom he also collaborated in study of the poetry of Robert Bridges. The novel was called "Undergrowth" and not surprisingly described the building of a dam in a Welsh valley, a theme he was to use again many years later in the much more accomplished work "The House Under the Water". Shortly before war broke out in 1914 Francis had taken a partner into his practice and had moved from Cleveland House to the old Garden House on Berrow Road, Brixham and when hostilities commenced he volunteered immediately for active service in the R.A.M.C. Most of his war service was spent in Africa where his terrible experiences in German East affected his health for the rest of his life. The story of that campaign is brilliantly told in his book "Marching on Tanga". At this time was born his love for South Africa and things South African, and the history of South Africa was used as a backcloth in later years for several novels. Because of his poor health and his literary aspirations it was inevitable that the end of the war should see the end of his medical career and the making of his firm decision to devote his life to literature. From the war years had come the book "The Deep Sea" which was centred on Brixham; "The Dark Tower" (with a Llanthony Abbey locale); "Five Degrees South", a slender book of verse which contains to my mind one of the best modern sonnets "Bete Humaine".
"Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,He also wrote at the time a novel with a Hales Owen background called "The Iron Age" for which he sets the scene thus:
I saw the world awake; and as the ray
Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,
Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,
With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
I aimed at one and struck it, and it lay
Broken and lifeless, with fast fading dyes..........
Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
And horror at my own careless cruelty,
That where all things are cruel I had slain
A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
Like beasts that prey with bloody claw.........
Nay, they
Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?"
"Beyond a rolling country, thickly curtained by what is left of the Mercian Forest, rose gently to a pair of summits: Uffdown, a wide dome, shaking the woods from its knees and the pointed dome of Penn Beacon, trailing a fleece of fir trees."
In 1919 came the first of what I would call his Mercian novels, "The Young Physician", much of which is frankly autobiographical. In 1920 the Brett Youngs went to live in Capri, then a "nest of singing birds" so far as the arts were concerned. Here he became friendly with such famous literary figures as Compton McKenzie, D. H. Lawrence and Axel Munthe, and ten years were to elapse before he returned to live (for part of the year at any rate) in England. The 'Capri period' if I may so term it, produced, among others, the following books, "The Black Diamond", really a companion piece to "The Young Physician" with its action taking place along the track of Birmingham's Elan Valley aqueduct, "The Tragic Bride", the theme of which predated by some years Van Druten's "Young Woodley" with its theme of the schoolboy falling in love with his Headmaster's wife, "The Red Knight", "Pilgrim's Rest" (the first of the South African novels), "Wood Smoke", "Cold Harbour" that 'spooky' book with a setting at Wassall Grove, Hales Owen, "Sea Horses" and that wonderful novel of the green fringe of the Black Country "Portrait of Clare". This, his first big success, won the James Tait Black Literary Prize and it is for me the finest of all his novels.
"Every morning, early through the misty air of Spring, she walked over the fields to St. Chad's. There was no danger of discovery; the life of Pen House took its hours from the feebleness of her grandfather, who often fell into a doze at the time when other people were waking. The path to St. Chad's was familiar and beloved: past the mill, where Ellen's sweetheart worked, through flats of mare's-tail and king-cup, steeped in moist, marshy odours. At this early hour the mill-pool lay tranced as in the quiet of evening. On its glassy flats the roach rose lazily with sucking dimples that spread to rings. Sometimes the burning blue of a kingfisher that haunted the willow-roots passed with a flash that brought her heart into her mouth. Above the pool a field of cowslips. The low sun raked their pale clusters with a keener fire; their gusty vinous odour mounted to her brain. Then the edge of the larchwood, piercingly green, younger than anything on earth. Within its curved shadow dew lay late; the cropped turf was bloomed with it; and there, unconscious of her coming, crouched the little huddled shapes of rabbits nibbling against time. It was almost as if they should hear her smile. Suddenly the nibbling ceased; the warm bodies lay like scattered stones. One drummed with his feet, and all vanished with a clumsy, unhurried reluctance. They did not seem very much afraid of her. She was sorry that they mis-trusted her at all. Couldn't they see, the silly things, that she loved them?........ The little church took shelter under the hillside on a shelf of red soil bastioned by pagan yews. It cowered there, that fortress of an earlier faith, retired in timelessness as removed from the tides of life that set southward down Severn, or northward toward the iron magnet of North Bromwich, as the standing stones on the summit of Pen Beacon. Nobody from the outside world visited it but a few archaeologists who stopped to stare at the Saint's grotesque image above the southern porch."
The Capri period ends with the publication of "Key of Life" and "My Brother Jonathan". In 1929 the Brett Youngs returned to England to a rented house on the shores of Estwaite Water in the Lake District. At Esthwaite Lodge, as the house was called, Francis had as near neighbour at Brackenburn another novelist of the period, Hugh Walpole. The Esthwaite Lodge period produced "Black Roses", "Jim Redlake", the early part of which was set in the Leicestershire hunting country, and that novel of lower middle class life in a Birmingham suburb (Quinton, thinly described as Tilton) "Mr. and Mrs. Pennington". Even when he had returned to England and appeared to have settled down in the Lake District, there came to Francis a deep desire to put down some roots in his native Worcestershire. His friends, the Holland-Martins of Overbury Court, had told him of a semi-derelict Adam mansion built in 1791 called Craycombe House near to the village of Fladbury, not far from Evesham. When he went to view the property, he saw that in spite of dilapidations it was, as he said, "a jewel of a house" and he decided to buy it. This was in 1932 and after extensive renovations (which didn't drag on in those days as they would now) the Brett Youngs moved in just before Christmas. The Craycombe House years were to be fruitful ones. With several successes behind him Francis had overcome the financial trouble which had bedevilled his early years as a writer. The Worcestershire countryside was at once a relaxation and an inspiration. Best sellers literally poured from his pen and he moved among the Worcestershire aristocracy, the Cobhams, the Beauchamps, the Baldwins, the Holland Martins, as will be seen from some of his books' dedications.
In 1934 came "This Little World" as exact a picture of the village of Chaddesley Corbett as you are likely to find, and with something of a self-portrait (musically at any rate) of the village doctor - Dr. Selby -"Dr. Selby was not a good pianist; his fingers were clumsy, for this passion had come to him at a time of life when they had lost youth's flexibility. Yet, to balance this lack of skill he was fortunate in possessing a faculty (more aesthetic than mathematical) for extracting, almost at a glance, the essence of the music he tried to play. His tastes were not easily classified. In the days of his early enthusiasm they had been frankly romantic; he had been sweetly ravished by the songs of Schumann; ensnared in the silken threads, like dew-drenched gossamer, out of which Debussy delicately wove his tissue of crepuscular sound, carried clean off his feet, exhilarated (though half-protesting), by the full flood of Wagner - impetuous, irresistible as the surge of the Rhine-music sweeping through Siegfried's Journey in Gotterdammerung. Since the war his liking for sentimental heroics had waned. He suspected that sentiment and cruelty might be the poles of the same emotion; he had seen the bright Nordic panoply of Siegfried, the pomp of Valhalla, uncomfortably translated into cold steel or high explosives; and his mind, which now craved for an expression less chaotic, less volatile, had discovered it in the pellucid profundities of Bach, the ripe wisdom of Brahms; in the vast serenity of his first love Beethoven; in Hugo Wolf's poignancy; in the peculiarly intimate quality - as native to his soul as "Piers Plowman" or Wordsworth's "Prelude" - which he found in the later work of Worcestershire's Edward Elgar.
In the following year came that novel about a Worcestershire stately home - "White Ladies". This book ends with the burning down of the house, a use, one feels, of the details of an actual country house fire, that at Hagley Hall, which happened early in 1925. 1936 saw the publication of "Far Forest", and a year later came "They Seek a Country" a novel which a historical background and great breadth of canvas which embraced the Worcestershire countryside, the Enclosure Acts, the Penal system of a hundred years or more ago, and the great South African trek of the Boers. Towards the end of 1937 appeared that mellow account of rural England, "Portrait of a Village". You may imagine that the "Monks' Norton" of the book is only a mile or two down the road from "Chaddesbourne D'Abitot" of "This Little World". During these years the Brett Youngs had spent their winters abroad, principally because of Francis's poor health and his need to avoid the English winters, but Capri was not so inviting as it had been because the spread of Fascism in Italy had poisoned its atmosphere for him, and so in 1937 we find him writing to a friend, "We are not going to Capri this winter as I decline to live in a country whose Press is encouraged to vilify England; so I have blued all the spare money I have in buying Jessica a cottage on the coast of Cornwall between Looe and Polperro with a private cove of its own." A strange coincidence here - Talland House, which was the house he bought, overlooks Talland Bay and is only about five minutes' walk from a cottage called "Cobbles" where Hugh Walpole wrote several of his early novels. Another sad coincidence - 1938 was the year in which "Dr. Bradley Remembers" was published. It is a complete picture, "warts and all", of a Black Country practitioner and is very much a portrait of his father, who died in that very same year at the age of 84. In 1939 World War II broke out and that same year saw the publication of another of Francis Brett Young's South African novels, this time "City of Gold". The book carries on the story of John and Lisbet Grafton from "They Seek a Country" and tells of the birth and growth of that pulsating South African city of Johannesburg, founded as it was, on the discovery of gold. Craycombe House meanwhile had been turned over to the Red Cross as a convalescent home for troops, and the Brett Youngs relegated themselves to the Orangery and to the four-roomed gardener's cottage. In these rather unsettling surroundings he wrote what the times demanded - a novel of escape - called "Mr. Lucton's Freedom". I particularly remember this book because my wife (then my wife to be) bought me a copy of the first edition in the year of our marriage, 1940. In the book Mr. Lucton escapes from the vulgarity and artificiality of existence in the North Bromwich suburb of Alvaston (Edgbaston) to the Welsh Marches. He goes by very easy stages from Alvaston through Tilton, Halesby and Worcester.
"He was still in the heart of the Severn Valley: the hills that embraced it were still in evidence: The dome of Bredon, from whose front he had fled overnight, now sunk in the distance and before him the line of the Malverns, no longer inkily threatening, but enormous shapes soft with the bloom of smooth turf or swathed in the piercing green of young bracken."
His odyssey takes him through Malvern, Leintwardine and Llanthony and ends up at Chapel Green: "It was a hamlet of five or six buildings including the Inn and the Wesleyan Chapel from which he supposed it took its name: grouped about a few level acres of common land scattered with flaming gorse bushes and two flocks of geese."
Late in the 1940s "Cotswold Honey", a collection of Brett Young's short storoies was published, and then, after a year with nothing coming from his pen appeared "A Man About the House" and this, a best-seller with five quick reprints, although of course, he did not know it, was to be the last of his novels to be published in his lifetime.
In 1944 Craycombe House was sold to Lord Cobham (the grandfather of the present peer) for use as a Dower House to Hagley Hall. Charles Lyttelton (the late Viscount) lived there soon after his marriage, and when he succeeded to the title and went to live at Hagley, his mother, the Dowager Viscountess, retired there. Eventually the house became a Country Club, but has now reverted to private use. That same year saw the publication of a work which I regard to Brett Young's crowning achievement, the epic poem called "The Island", the vast theme of which was to tell the whole history of England in terms of flesh and blood, soil and foliage, sun and wind and rain, from its prehistoric emergence to the climax of the battle of Britain. There is much in "The Island" which derived from his previous prose descriptions of the Midlands and the Welsh Marches. I recommend you particularly to "Song of the Dead Men of Bredon", "The Ballad of St. Kenelm", "Song of the Three Rivers", "Pastoral Symphony", "Many Coloured Isle" and to those stirring words from "The Winged Victory".
"And this I know full well:
Our anguished world would show a sorrier scene
If England had not been,
Or if, perchance, she fell.
And this again I claim:
In all my story there has been no page
Brighter than this: we have lived in a
great age;
The ancient glory fades not from our name
And goodly is our Island heritage........"
I remember being tremendously excited about this book, particularly as my copy was specially autographed for me by the author. When she sent the book to me Jessica Brett Young was elated by its success. In a postscript to the covering letter, she wrote "The whole first edition of 23,500 copies was sold out instantly and is reprinting"
The writing of "The Island" proved to be a very great strain on the author's failing halth and a serious heart attack in the October of 1944 brought a permanent deterioration in his condition. He and his wife decided that if he were to have any chance of surviving they must leave England permanently and, because of his great love for that country, they chose South Africa for his semi-retirement. They left England in July 1945 and after a brief stay at Leighton House, St. James, near the Cape, they settled in a bungalow in the village of Montague in the Lesser Karoo. Meanwhile, Francis had completed for the South African Tourist Board a descriptive book on the country called "In South Africa". It was to be his last finished work.
In a mood of nostalgia for the scenes of his boyhood, he began in 1948 a novel called "Wistanslow", but it had to be abandoned. Depressed by his state of health he said to his wife one day in that year, "I know I can never write any more." She asked him why, and he replied that the excitement and emotion of writing were now too much for him. She comments "We were sad beyond words. To me it seemed like a death in the house." The books he had projected to round off his literary career - a third volume to make a South African trilogy and which was to be a sequel to "They Seek a Country" and "City of Gold" and his autobiography - were never written. He died in the early hours of March 28th 1954; his last words to Jessica being "Let me go now darling, let me go. I can't go on suffering like this." A great novelist, an even greater poet, a patriot, a soldier and a real English gentleman had passed on. On July 3rd 1954 the novelist's ashes were interred in Worcester Cathedral. Let me end with the prophetic words from the poem about King John, from the book which sets the seal on Francis Brett Young's greatness - "The Island".
"And when they asked him where he would lie he bethought him of our church of St. Mary in Worcester saying "I commend my body and soul to God and to St. Wulstan. So here we buried him."
The Romsley and Hunnington History Society has kindly supplied this article from its extensive collection of Joe Hunt's work, which encompasses literary, humourous and dramatic work, especially on North Worcestershire and Birmingham. You can email the Society on EJHumphreys@compuserve.com
Can you create more words or pictures for this or another page? You don't have to be an expert. Borrow a book from the library to get the basics of your subject , but write in your own words and add a little something to make it special. 100-300 words would be enough for your first piece: this short note is more than 100. You can always add more later! Any photo you took or has been in your family for years is a possibility. Is there something distinctively local about it - not necessarily the place, but perhaps the people, what they are wearing or doing? Send it by email to whe@freeuk.com, or by post to Worcester Writers' Circle c/o Worcester Library, Foregate Street, Worcester WR1 1DT.