Norman Nicholson

Norman Cornthwaite Nicholson, OBE (8 January 1914 – 30 May 1987), was an English poet, known for his association with the Cumbrian town of Millom. His poetry is noted for its local concerns, straightforwardness of language, and inclusion of elements of common speech. Although chiefly known for poetry, he also wrote many works in other forms: novels, plays, essays, topography and criticism.

Life

Nicholson was born in 14 St George's Terrace, a Victorian terraced house and shop in the small industrial town of Millom on the edge of the Lake District, the son of Joseph Nicholson, a gentleman's outfitter, and his wife Edith Cornthwaite (died 1919). He lived in the same house for most of his life. Nicholson was educated at Holborn Hill School and Millom Secondary School, but his education was interrupted when he needed treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis aged 16, being away for two years in a Linford, Hampshire sanatorium. He was influenced by the social and religious community around the local Wesleyan Methodist chapel, to which belonged Rosetta Sobey, who became his stepmother in 1922. He was confirmed in 1940 into the Church of England.

He was married in 1956 to Yvonne Edith Gardner (died 1982), a teacher who had consulted him about a school production of his play The Old Man of the Mountains, and they began to travel extensively in Northern England, Scotland and Norway. They had no children.[1]

His writing career stretched from the 1930s up until his death in 1987. He was published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. His works include Rock Face (1948) and the later Sea to the West (1981). He was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1945. He received altogether five honorary degrees from British universities, the Queen's Award for Poetry in 1977, and the OBE in 1981.

He died on 30 May 1987 in Whitehaven and is buried in St George's Churchyard, Millom.[2]

Work

The work of Norman Nicholson is characterised by the simplicity and directness of his language. He attempted to write in the vernacular of the common people in his native town. Much of his work concerned mining, quarrying and ironworks — the dominant industries in his area. Religion and faith were another aspect of his work. His poetry also abounds with direct quotations from everyday life, skilfully woven into the body of the poem. The opening of "Old Man at a Cricket Match" is typical:

  'It's mending worse,' he said,
  Bending west his head...

One important feature of Nicholson's work is a conscious adoption of provincialism coupled with a conscious rejection of the value judgements associated with it: "the smug, the narrow, the short-sighted... a bad copy of the life of the capital," as he called them. To him a provincial was one who lives in the place his parents, friends and relations live, where there is a shared culture, not "an enormous heterogeneous collection of people gathered from all corners of the country and deposited like silt at the delta of a great river." It is in a contained provincial community, "in our intense concern with what is close to us, that we most resemble the people of other countries and other times" and gain awareness of "that which is enduring in life and society."[3]

Another important feature is Nicholson's Christianity. The religious poems in Five Rivers foreshadow verse plays of his – The Old Man of the Mountains (1946), A Match for the Devil (1955) and Birth by Drowning (1960) – placing the Bible in a distinctly Cumbrian setting. A fourth, Prophesy to the Wind (1947) is about survival after nuclear disaster.[4]

As a poet Nicholson is not generally associated with any of the movements of the 20th century. Rather, like Charles Causley, he seems to be considered more of an isolated figure, working on his poetry outside of the mainstream of poetic trends. Nonetheless, he acknowledged a debt to W. H. Auden and the way he had "turned to the industrial scene." His descriptive poetry can be remarkably vivid:

Above the collar of crags,
The granite pate breaks bare to the sky
Through a tonsure of bracken and bilberry.
(From "Eskdale Granite")

Nicholson's Lake District is not the Lake District of the Tourist Board, not Hawkshead and Windermere, but the industrial coastal towns of Millom, Egremont, Whitehaven, Bootle and Askam.[5] His admirers included T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, who wrote in a poem of tribute:

...those Cumbrian phonetics
cracked like a plaited whip
until the slack, nostalgic
ambler in me trotted

on the paved margin
of my own black pool —
Dublin black pool, dubh linn
...that is yours and mine as well[1]

  1. ^ Between Comets. For Norman Nicholson at 70, ed. William Scammel (Durham, UK: Taxvs, 1984). ISBN 1850190119.

Other aspects of Nicholson include his social awareness as a champion of the working class. (He worked as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association.) His poem "Windscale" about a 1957 nuclear accident has become something of an environmentalists' anthem.[6]


Windscale


The toadstool towers infest the shore:

Stink-horns that propagate and spore

Wherever the wind blows.

Scafell looks down from the bracken band

And sees hell in a grain of sand,

And feels the canker itch between his toes.


This is a land where the dirt is clean

And poison pasture, quick and green,

And storm sky, bright and bare;

Where sewers flow with milk, and meat

is carved up for the fire to eat,

And children suffocate in God's fresh air.


Nicholson was the subject of a South Bank Show broadcast in the United Kingdom on 4 November 1984.

Partial bibliography

  • Man and Literature (lectures, 1943)
  • Five Rivers (verses, 1944)
  • The Fire of the Lord (novel, 1944)
  • Old Man of the Mountains (verse drama, 1945)
  • The Green Shore (novel, 1947)
  • Prophesy to the Wind (verse drama, 1947)
  • Rock Face (verses, 1948)
  • Cumberland and Westmorland (topography, 1949)
  • H. G. Wells (biography, 1950)
  • William Cowper (biography, 1951)
  • The Pot Geranium (verses, 1954)
  • A Match for the Devil (verse drama, 1955)
  • The Lakers (topography, 1955)
  • Provincial Pleasures (1959)
  • Birth by Drowning (verse drama, 1960)
  • Portrait of the Lakes (topography, 1963)
  • A Local Habitation (verses, 1972)
  • Stitch and Stone (1975)
  • Wednesday Early Closing (memoirs, 1975)
  • The Lake District (anthology, 1978)
  • Sea to the West (verses, 1981)
  • Collected Poems (ed. Neil Curry) (1994)
  • Off to Outer Space Tomorrow Morning

Legacy

Millom Library and the John Rylands University Library, Manchester have bronze busts of Nicholson by Joan Palmer. A memorial stained glass window created by Christine Boyce can be found in St George's Church, Millom.

Archive

Nicholson's papers are in the John Rylands University Library, Manchester.[7]

Exhibition

Millom Heritage Museum And Visitor Centre houses information about Norman Nicholson.

Library

Nicholson's personal collection of published poetry was acquired by the John Rylands University Library, Manchester from his family.[8]

Residence

Norman Nicholson's home at 14 St George's Terrace is now a food shop and café with a blue plaque on the front of the property, commemorating Nicholson.

Norman Nicholson Society

The Norman Nicholson Society was inaugurated in Millom, Cumbria, on 31 March 2006 with the intention of celebrating and promoting the work of this distinguished writer as widely as possible. Melvyn Bragg is the Honorary President. The Society aims to be a focal point for appreciation and research and intends to encourage the publication of any Nicholson's works which are currently out of print. Talks and events are arranged throughout the year and a newsletter, Comet, is published and distributed free to members. Comet contains articles on Nicholson's life and work, information about events and original material from members. Contributors to Comet have included David Cooper, Neil Curry, U. A. Fanthorpe, Harry Whalley and Matt Simpson. Contributions relevant to Nicholson's life and work are invited by the editor, Antoinette Fawcett.[9]

References

  1. ↑ Archives Hub: Retrieved 7 May 2012; entry by Antony Thwaite in the ODNB: Retrieved 7 May 2012. Pay-walled.
  2. ↑ There is a photograph of the gravestone here: Retrieved 7 May 2012.
  3. ↑ "On Being a Provincial", broadcast in 1945. Quoted in Neil Curry's introduction to Norman Nicholson, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2008 [1994]), pp. xv-xvi. ISBN 978 0 571 24328 0.
  4. ↑ Entry for Norman Nicholson in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2000). Retrieved 8 May 2012.
  5. ↑ Neil Curry..., p. xviii.
  6. ↑ "'Verse Rooted Like a Tree'. The Cumbrian Poetry of Norman Nicholson" by David Boyd. Retrieved 7 May 2012.
  7. ↑ "Norman Nicholson Archive". University of Manchester. Retrieved 4 December 2009.
  8. ↑ "Nicholson Book Collection". University of Manchester. Retrieved 4 December 2009.
  9. ↑ Society website: Retrieved 7 May 2012.

Sources

  • Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet, a biography by Royal Literary Fund Fellow Kathleen Jones, The Book Mill, 2013, ISBN 9780957433243

External links

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