NAUTILUS P01 OCTOBER 2010.qxd - Nautilus International

October 2010 | nautilusint.org | telegraph | 31
MARITIME HISTORY
their ways and his first glimpse of
the four-masted barque Wanderer
became branded on his memory.
Amidst the general turmoil of
settling in, to his joy and amazement
Masefield was invited to
‘spin some ghost yarns’. He also
discovered a talent for making
sketches and drawings of
ships which he kept in dedicated
albums. It was to become a lifelong
hobby.
The second year on Conway
was a happy time. Masefield had
adapted to the ways of shipboard
life. In class, under a sympathetic
master, he was able to concentrate
on history and English — subjects
which really interested him.
Devoted to reading books from
the ship’s library, they were to
imbue him with a deeply romantic
attitude towards the sea and
ships.
In his final summer as a cadet
he won an essay prize — a magnificent
telescope. Still not yet 16,
Masefield left Conway in 1894. He
had been a senior petty officer for
a term, and recognised as a youth
who could take responsibility — a
definite leader in his age group.
Yet he was younger than most
who were taken on as apprentices
by the sailing ship companies.
F
Masefield’s first ship
was the Gilcruix, a fourmasted
barque belonging
to White Star Line. He joined
her in Cardiff, as she prepared for
a voyage to Chile, which meant
facing Cape Horn and being out
of touch with land for several
months. One of his duties was
to keep a daily journal, which
he did conscientiously until the
ship reached Cape Horn. He later
recalled climbing to the top of
the masts: ‘I lay out on the yard,
and the sail hit me in the face and
knocked my cap away. It beat me
and banged me, and blew from
my hands. The wind pinned me
flat against the yards; and seemed
to be blowing all my clothes to
shreds. I felt like a king, like an
emperor.’
He also recalled: ‘We got caught
in the ice off the Horn and had our
bows stove in, and had 32 days of
such storm and cold I hope never
to see again.’
The Gilcruix eventually
reached her destination of
Iquique some 13 weeks after leaving
Cardiff. At Iquique Masefield
climbed alone into the steep
hinterland behind the town: ‘It
was a beautiful sight that anchorage
with the ships lying there so
lovely, all their troubles at an end.
But I knew that aboard each ship
there were young men going to
the devil, and mature men wasted,
and old men wrecked; and I wondered
at the misery and sin which
went to make each ship so perfect
an image of beauty.’
John Masefield became seriously
ill in Chile — to the extent
that he was classified as a Distressed
British Seaman, which
assured him a passage back to
England by steamship. Convalescing
during this leisurely voyage,
he resolved not to finish his
apprenticeship and abandon all
ideas of pursuing a sea career.
In hindsight he acknowledged:
‘I shall always be glad of my short
sea time. It was real, naked life...
At sea you got manhood knocked
bare, and it is a fine thing, a splendid
thing.’
F
Masefield held to his
earlier aspirations to be
a writer, but his guardians
scorned this determination.
Arrangements were made for him
to join another sailing ship, this
time in America. Once there he
felt free to obey his own impulses:
‘I deserted my ship in New York,
and cut myself adrift from her,
and from my home. I was going to
be a writer, come what might.’
At the age of 17 John Masefield
became a homeless vagrant,
like innumerable others at this
time of acute depression. It was
to give him a lifelong sympathy
with drifters, menials and the
unemployed. Half-starved and
unkempt, he later declared that
he was also ‘marvellously happy’.
Eventually finding work in a hotel,
he then secured a job at a carpet
mill. He was soon on friendly
terms with his fellow workers
in the cutting shop. Calling him
‘Masey’, they good-humouredly
teased him and mocked his English
accent.
One of his greatest joys in that
two-year period was the time
he had to read books. They were
then so cheap he built up his own
library. Acquiring a book by Chaucer,
and knowing only that he was
evidently considered the father
of English poetry, Masefield was
transfixed by what he read. In
the language of Chaucer’s Middle
English, he found validation of his
own most treasured intuitions;
that ‘life is very brief, and that the
use of life is to discover the law of
one’s being, and to follow that law,
at whatever cost, to the utmost’.
For Masefield, it was to be a poet.
Practical realities tempered his
ideals, but with sharpened resolve
he returned to Britain, working his
passage as a steerage steward on a
steamer bound for Liverpool.
F
In his Conway days Liverpool’s
Walker Art Gallery
had been an enchanted
place, mainly for its paintings
of ships. Returning home with a
maturity well beyond his years,
Masefield had strong views on
how sea life should be presented:
‘It will be a good thing for England
when painters and poets leave off
painting and ranting about fishing
smacks and pirates and “the
dark blue sea”, and take to showing
with their best ability the real
life of the poor fellows who bring
them not only their luxuries but
their very food.’
Over the next several years,
whilst holding a job as a bank
clerk in London, Masefield experimented
with verse, children’s
books, plays, naval histories, novels,
and literary criticism. At the
time of his 21st birthday, he had
his first publishing success with a
sea poem, now known as The Turn
of the Tide.
He also discovered the poetry
of WB Yeats, describing the Irishman
as ‘the only living poet whose
heart has not got the moneygrubs
and who writes from sheer
joy much as a lark might sing’.
Masefield and Yeats were to forge
a close and lasting friendship,
through which the sphere of new
acquaintances admitted him into
an intellectual circle that nurtured
his talent and aspirations.
F
At the age of 23 he decided
to sacrifice the security
of a regular job and to
embark on the uncertain life of a
freelance writer. To his eventual
successes in publications such as
Tatler and Pall Mall Magazine he
enthused: ‘My ballads are being
taken as fast as I can write them.’
I must go down to the seas again,
to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s
song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face,
and a grey dawn breaking.
from Sea Fever by John Masefield
He was becoming known to a
widening circle. Of his first published
book of verse he level-headedly
remarked: ‘Genius I’m not,
but I’m pretty sure that I’ve kept
my talents unrusted under pretty
tough circumstances... I think the
book deserves the recognition of a
maritime people. It is something
new said newly.’ Entitled Salt-
Water Ballads, it attracted immediate
attention, and included Sea-
Fever, later to become his most
widely-known poem.
Masefield married Constance
Crommelin, who was 11 years his
senior. A gifted teacher, she took
a sincere and enabling interest in
his writing. Intensifying his freelance
journalism, his book reviews
were praised as ‘the shortest and
most incisive we had. He could
pack an extraordinary amount of
criticism into a small paragraph’
and as a playwright he received
the annoying compliment of having
his work plagiarised.
By 1913, Masefield’s contribution
to English literature meant
that he had become a public figure.
Shortly before the outbreak
of the First World War his verse
play Philip the King unusually
depicted the defeat of the Armada
as if seen through Spanish eyes.
Such perspective proved a precursor
to his unique interpretation
of the Dardanelles campaign, and
later of Dunkirk. His poem August
1914 caught the anguish of the
reality of war and set a sombre
stage for the varied roles he was
to play during forthcoming years,
in England, France, the Mediterranean,
and America.
F
Too old for the army,
Masefield worked as an
orderly for the British
Red Cross at a hospital in France
and was invited by the organisation
to lead an expedition to the
Dardanelles. An appeal for reinforcements
had been made
by the motor boat ambulance
service, which carried wounded
from the battle areas to a distant
hospital on the island of Lemnos.
Masefield secured funds,
purchased launches and a barge
and made passage from England.
They arrived only to witness the
final annihilation of Allied hopes
on the Gallipoli peninsula.
In early 1916 Masefield visited
America on a lecture tour which
was also an intelligence mission.
In the German-dominated areas
of the Mid-West, he was persistently
questioned about the failure
of the Dardanelles campaign.
To counter such calculated negativity
Masefield wrote his book
Gallipoli, and its success led to
him being invited by the British
Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas
Haig, to observe and chronicle
the unfolding of the Battle of the
Somme.
Masefield came to believe that
the Somme battle was the ‘biggest
thing’ that England had ever
been engaged in, that it must be
a ‘possession of the English mind
for ever’. He was thus aware of the
John Masefield at home with his sister, Norah, and the telescope he won as
an essay prize whilst training as a cadet onboard HMS Conway
privilege of being its chronicler.
Yet because of bureaucracy and
politics he was hamstrung in his
endeavour, to the probable detriment
of recorded history.
In 1918 Masefield was summoned
for a second American lecture
tour. He spoke impromptu,
with great success, to vast audiences
of enlisted men who would
soon be fighting in Europe.
F
Always a countryman
at heart, Masefield settled
back into rural
surroundings after the war. Like
John Masefield was recognised as a potential leader during his time onboard the school ship HMS Conway
so many others, he and his wife
shared the urge to create a ‘better
England’. Active once more in
the promotion and recognition of
poetry in Britain, famed on both
sides of the Atlantic for his affinity
with the common man, he was
appointed Poet Laureate by King
George V.
For the rest of his life he brought
dedication and dignity to that
office. He was to write with boyish
enthusiasm on the launching of
what became the great Cunarder
Queen Mary: ‘…Parting the seas
in sunder in a surge/Treading a
trackway like a mile of snow…’
In the second world war, Masefield’s
son Lewis — a conscientious
objector — enlisted in the
Royal Army Medical Corps and
was killed by artillery fire in the
African desert.
John Masefield produced a
book about the evacuation of
Dunkirk, but for security reasons
it was not published in full until
1973, as The Twenty Five Days.
Masefield’s wife died in 1960,
after which he became increasingly
solitary. He remained an
elder beloved for his courtesy and
kindness, who faced up to the burdens
of being in the public limelight,
and to the end was ‘a devotee
of beauty in all its forms, and a
searcher for ultimate truths’.
He passed away in 1967; his
remains lie in Poets’ Corner at
Westminster Abbey.
Of his two most celebrated
poems — Sea-Fever, and Cargoes
— written at the start of his
literary career, no less an authority
than John Betjeman has suggested
that they would be ‘remembered
as long as the language lasts’…
i The author kindly
acknowledges the material
assistance of Constance
Babington Smith and Philip
Errington.