Dock-walloping with Cicely Fox-Smith
‘We’ve waited for a cargo and we’ve waited for a crew,
And last we’ve waited for a tide, and now the waiting’s through.
O don’t you hear the deep-sea wind and smell the deep-sea foam,
Out beyond the harbour on the long road home?’
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The Complete Poetry of Cicely Fox Smith edited by Charles Ipcar and James Saville |
I asked my friend, the artist, writer and musician, Claudia Myatt, what she knew of the poet Cicely Fox Smith (1882-1954). She was immediately able to point me to a recording of ‘Rosario’, sung by her own Quaynotes group in Suffolk. She had used this verse from ‘The Long Road’ (first published in Canada in December 1912) to preface their performance. But how many other people, outside the UK and US folk scenes, have heard of Cicely Fox-Smith today. It’s one of those questions where one hopes to be shouted down by an indignant roar; Of course I have, how can you have been so ignorant?
But, with the zeal of the convert, I’m going ahead anyway. I’ve had Charles Ipcar and James Saville’s fine edition of her complete poetry on my shelf for more years than I like to admit. I’m only just beginning to appreciate its contents. It's big – more than 600 poems from a writing life of more than fifty years. Her first poems were published when she was still a school girl in Manchester and her last years were spent writing children’s stories with her sister Madge. Her lasting achievement -- and the aspect that is currently giving me delight -- is as a poet of the sea, where she can be read comfortably alongside Kipling and Masefield. Whether Kipling and Masefield's sea poetry is much read today is a different question; we know they are there if we want them. But Cicely has been forgotten.
‘The Long Road Home’ was written at a crucial period in Cicely’s life. She, her mother and sister had been living in Victoria, British Columbia where Cicely worked as a typist in a law firm. It was so near the harbour that she could spend all her free time there, ‘dock-walloping’ as she called it, hanging around, watching the ships. She couldn’t go to sea herself, other than by ocean liner, but she could enter into the lives of those who had, learning from their stories and listening to the rhythms of their speech. She’d already written some sea poetry before this time; it was part of the stock in trade of imperial Britishness which fired her imagination as a young girl in Manchester, but it wasn’t very good.
Her first book of verse Songs of Greater Britain had been published in 1899 by Sherratt and Hughes when she was 17. Her first poems had begun appearing in national magazines from 1897 when she was still a schoolgirl. They’re intensely patriotic, naively expressing the over-confident atmosphere around Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the national arrogance which would soon be dented by the cost and casualties of the South African War (Second Boer War). Her productivity was undeniable, four volumes in print before she was 22. Though too many of her early poems seem scarcely readable today, it’s not impossible to sympathise with a longing for colour and adventure and wide-open spaces, which was denied to so many people leading conventional lives; doubly denied to a member of the English bourgeoisie who was also female:
‘I’m weary of the weary winds that mazed from off the main
Go gasping down the stifling street and up the wooded lane:
I’m longing for the smell and sound of sea and salt and spray
And the winds on the way my boys, the winds on the way.’
‘The Dust of the Way’ from Wings of the Morning (1904)
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| Cicely |
Cicely longed to explore Africa but Canada was where she went as one of her brothers had emigrated there. Eventually, in 1911, she, her mother and sister sailed from Liverpool to join him on the Alberta prairie. Then they moved to Victoria, at the tip of Vancouver Island where Cicely discovered the fascination of hanging around the harbour . This made the crucial difference to her poetry. Instead of starting Ipcar and Saville's complete collection at the beginning, one needs to begin reading after she discovered dock-walloping. ‘The Long Road Home’ was published in 1912 and already shows the strong swinging beat that makes her work so singable. Have a listen to Claudia speaking those lines before Quaynotes sing ‘Rosario’ (1920)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7cuHDNSK54
I have not been able to find an address for Cicely and her family once they returned to England in November 1913. (Even with the help of family-histry detective Eileen Bamford!).Some sources say it was Hampshire yet somehow she continued 'dock-walloping in Limehouse and Millwall docks in London. Clauda wonders how she managed this, given the ambiguous status of women in teh dockside world. The only photos of Cicely are formal and conventional. Was she as unobtrusive as a mass observation observer or did she have a personal charm that persuaded people to tell her their stories? A fragment quoted by Charles Ipcar from her collection Sailor Town Days (Methuen 1923) suggests she might have used fishing as a camouflage, when she had been soaking up the harbour atmosphere in Victoria.
‘You can sit on the edge of the Outer Wharf at Victoria and fish for black bass with a bit of cotton rag. And watch the great ships come in from the sea, with the wonder of the East in their holds. Over across the Straits of Juan de Fuca the summits of the ranges of the American mainland are flushed with faint rose, for it is only at sunset that the black bass bite.’ (quoted by Charles Ipcar in the foreword to The Complete Poetry)
From Victoria she had been looking across the Pacific. There wouldn’t have been a view like that available from Milwall or Limehouse Docks, yet the poem ‘Anchors’ (1921) suggests that even sea-clutter fired her imagination:
In the breakers yard by the Millwall Docks,
With its piled up litter of sheaveless blocks,
Stranded hawsers and links of cable,
Cabin lamp and a chartroom table.
Nail-sick timbers and heaps of metal,
Rusty and red as an old tin kettle,
Scraps that were ships in the years gone by
Fluke upon stock, the anchors lie.
[…]
Mouldy old mudhooks, there they lie!
Have they ever a dream as the days go by
Of the tug of the tides on coasts afar,
A Northern light and a Southern star,
The mud and sand of a score of seas
And the chuckling ebb of a hundred quays,
The harbour sites and the harbour smells,
The swarming junks and the temple bells?
But she’s back in London ‘Only the traffic’s rush and roar/ Seems a breaking wave on a
distant shore.’
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| Limehouse Reach by Phil Smith |
‘Anchors’ was published in Punch to which she was a regular contributor for almost 40 years. Her sense of rhythm and ear for speech served her well in the war poems she wrote between 1914-1918, expressing particularly the grim endurance of merchant seamen as they ran the U-boat blockade. She often chose ballad form, for instance in ‘The Ballad of the Resurrection Packet’ (Punch November 3 1915) or ‘The Boats of the Albacore’ (Punch Sept 11 1918), in which ‘Bristol Tim’ tells a grim tale of slow death in the five boats of a sunken steamer, ending
‘Seven men in an open boat, an’ the fifth day, dawning red –
When a drifter picked her up at last, due South o’ Lizard ’ead.
Seven men in an open boat, two livin’ an’ five dead.
An’ the two that was livin’, they’d signed again afore a month was through,
They’d signed and sailed for to take their chance as a seaman’s bound to do;
And one went West when the Runnymede was mined with all her crew…
An’ God help Fritz when we meet,’ says Tim. ‘For I was one of the two!’ P240
Her poems were usually signed with her initials, CFS, and as she so often wrote behind a male persona, many readers naturally assumed she was a man. She seems not to have gone out of her way either to confirm or deny this. The first edition of most of her published collections were by C. Fox Smith, but not all. They were often illustrated by her older brother Phil, once he had returned from the war. He had the direct experience, she had not. Yet she had teh passion and a power of expression which communicated powerfully to thousands of others. While Cicely's poems were being published in Punch, the magazine was selling 100,000 - 148,000 copies per issue. Was her listening and her imagination enough or must she always be slightly suspect because she never went to sea? Many other writers move us by their words alone. She certainly caught the mood of the time, fierceness, nostalgia, longing, endurance -- and the voice of a vanished world.
Reviewing her work for the Daily Mail in 1924 Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘In her I verily believe that the quintessence of the collective soul of the latter-day seaman has found its last resting place and a poignant voice before taking its flight forever from the earth.’
Here are The Young ’Uns also singing ‘Rosario’ (recommended by Claudia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW5uQPhBXms
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