The Delights of Bibliomania

The recent discovery of a small volume of verse, written by an Oxford tutor from nearly a century ago, set off a trail that led to T. S. Eliot, the Quarry Theatre in Mirfield, and a bombing raid on a V2 launch site in wartime France. 

Henry Vere Fitzroy Somerset was a history fellow at Worcester College Oxford during the inter-war period. Although he did not really excel as a published historian, he did produce a series of “Half a Hundred Epigrams”, published by Cobden Sanderson in 1928, reprinted in 1929. A typical product of a polished wit of the period, the epigrams including one:

“To a clergyman who kept his church locked on weekdays”:
I cannot think what you’re about,
Whose duty’s human souls to win;
For in the week you lock them out;
And then, on Sundays, take them in.
 

He presented a copy of this volume to Leslie William King, then serving as an Assistant Librarian at Worcester College Oxford, and that might well have been the end of the story but for the internet and the ease of google searches during the long weeks of pandemic  lockdown. The aristocratic Somerset name led to an afternoon in nearby Finstock church in late June 1927 when he acted as a sponsor to Thomas Stearns Eliot who was being baptised into the church by Rev. William Force Stead. This occasion was recalled in a sermon given in Worcester College by the College Chaplain Rev. Dr. Jonathan Arnold in 2013.

 

Eliot was a friend of Father Geoffrey Curtis at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield. Curtis was a student at University College Oxford in the early 1920’s, before training for ordination at Cuddesdon. He came to Mirfield in 1935, and made his profession as a monk in 1938. In 1932 he was serving as Vice Principal of Lichfield Theological College and sent copies of draft poems to Eliot at Faber asking for critical comment, and this was the start of a long correspondence between them, spanning several decades.   Many of these letters are now in the collections of Harvard University, with some material also in the Borthwick Institute at York. Some letters of theirs sold by the auctioneer Christie’s in 2010 for a five figure sum. Eliot came up to Mirfield to read his poetry in 1938, and one of the first performances of his play Murder in the Cathedral was staged in the Quarry Theatre there in 1936. A photograph of this featured in
the TLS in May 2019. There is even an Aberystwyth connection to CR Mirfield since Timothy Rees, one of the most prominent brethren of the time, a Cardiganshire man and Bishop of Llandaff in the 1930’s, was educated at Ardwyn School, before studying at Lampeter.

Bill King has rather fallen out of this story but comes back to notice when he volunteered for the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1939. He worked his way up through the ranks, became a Pilot Officer in 1943 and was awarded the DFC in October of that year. He became
a Flight Officer and was selected to join the “Dambuster” 617 Squadron when he came to the notice of Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire VC. Sadly he was killed during a raid on V2 rocket sites at Wizernes in France on 24 June 1944, giving his life in the cause of freedom in the fight against the Nazis. He is commemorated on the War Memorial in Worcester College and there is a brief account of his wartime career on the web.   

Bill Hines (whh@aber,ac,uk) February 2021 

• For Eliot’s reception into the church see http://worcesterchapel.org/sermons/t-s-eliot-sermon-by-the-chaplain-17th-february-2013/  
• The Eliot Curtis correspondence is covered in an excellent blog on the poetry of Curtis by Patrick Cornerford at http://www.patrickcomerford.com/2016/06/the-aspiring-poet-from-lichfield-who.html  
• Letters from Eliot’s wife and Curtis documents are held at the Borthwick Inst in York see https://www.york.ac.uk/borthwick/news/2020/fridayupdatenumberfourteen/  
• The Harvard collection see https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/3369  
• TLS reference to Quarry Theatre production https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/80978/page/5  
• For Timothy Rees see  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Rees  
• Worcester college memorial to Bill King see https://www.worc.ox.ac.uk/visiting/library/college-archives/worcester-college-and-second-world-war/college-members-who-died-3  under 1944 entries.