Norman Power

Norman Power (b. Islington, London, 31 October 1916; d. reg. Birmingham, May 1993)

Norman Sandiford Power was the eldest son of Walter Sandiford Power, a clergyman, and his wife May, née Dixon. 

Power grew up in Newcastle-on-Tyne, where his father was vicar in a poverty-stricken parish.  The family moved to Birmingham in 1926. He went to Stanley House School, and then to St. John’s School, Leatherhead. Power studied history at Worcester College, Oxford (B.A. 1938; M.A. 1942), and theology at Ripon Hall, Oxford (B.A. 1940).  He was ordained a priest of the Anglican Church in 1940, and thereafter served in the Birmingham area, settling as the vicar of Ladywood in 1952, a position he held until his retirement in 1988. He was also the canon of Birmingham from 1965. Power married Jean Edwards on 17 April 1944; they one son and three daughters.

Power’s first publications were nonfiction, including The Technique of Hypnosis (1953) and The Forgotten People: A Challenge to a Caring Community (1965), the latter concerning the displacement of the poor and elderly in his district as properties were being destroyed by developers. Power also contributed a weekly column to The Birmingham Evening Mail, beginning in 1953, and wrote articles, stories, and verse (sometimes using the pseudonym Kratos) for various periodicals, including Argosy, Punch, The Observer, The Guardian and The Birmingham Post.  He published a volume of poetry, Ends of Verse (1971), with an introduction by Ruth Pitter, and two short books, In Bereavement–Hope and Son of Man–Son of God, both in 1979.

Power’s fiction grew out of stories he told to his children as bedtime stories.  He wrote three short novels about a north Atlantic island, the home in the fifth century of the kingdoms of Firland and Borea, the latter ruled by the evil magic of Queen Ivis.  In the first book, ten-year-old Richard learns he is the rightful king of the forbidden territory of Firland.  He is aided by the wizard Greylin, who goes forward in time to consult with Sherlock Holmes (with the permission of the publishers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories).  The first book was published in paperback (with cover and a map signed Clebak) as The Firland Saga (Kinver: Halmer, 1970), and reissued in a nice hardcover (illustrated by Michael Jackson) as The Forgotten Kingdom (London: Blackie, 1973). The second volume (also illustrated by Jackson) was Fear in Firland (London: Blackie, 1974). The first book was translated by Benedikt Benedikz into Icelandic in 1973, and both were translated into Danish in 1973 and 1974.  A third volume, Firland i Flammer [Firland in Flames] (1974) appeared only in Danish translation; it has never appeared in English.  In 1978, Power wrote:  “I thought, if Tolkien can create a world and Lewis a country, surely I could manage an island! In not too serious a mood, I mixed an element of Tolkien, a sampler of Lewis, a touch of T.H. White (The Sword in the Stone—which I also loved) and a dash of Asterix the Gaul—and plastered them on to a rough Malory background.  Hence Firland!”

Power’s association with J.R.R. Tolkien began in March 1938 when Tolkien was invited to speak at a meeting of the Lovelace Society at Worcester College.  Power already knew The Hobbit, published some months earlier in September 1937, and he sat at Tolkien’s feet as Tolkien read his then-unpublished fairy-story Farmer Giles of Ham. Years later, just before Tolkien died  in 1973, Power and Tolkien exchanged some letters and books, when Power lived near Tolkien’s boyhood home. After Tolkien’s death  Power wrote a handful of articles about their association, in Library Review, The Tablet, and various Tolkien-related publications.

One further Tolkien association comes via artist Pauline Baynes, who illustrated Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), among other Tolkien-related projects (in addition to illustrating C.S. Lewis's seven volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia).  Baynes also did an illustration of a scene from the first Firland book which appeared as the cover illustration for the Autumn 1980 issue of Mythlore (whole no. 25).

Cover art by Pauline Baynes for The Forgotten Kingdom

E.F.A. Geach

E. F. A. Geach (b. Essen, Germany, 24 May 1896; d. Cardiff, 10 August 1951)

Eleonora Frederika Adolphina Sgonina (her forenames were sometimes spelled as Eleonore, Frederyka, or Adolfina) was the oldest of four children of Adolf (sometimes Adolph) Sgonina (1870-1954) and his wife Eleonore (1874-1949), who were German-Polish and who were married in 1895.  Eleanora had three younger brothers.  Her father was a civil engineer, and just before the turn of the century the family settled in Cardiff, where Adolf became Managing Director of an Iron Works. At least two of his son would follow him in his profession.

Eleanora was educated at the City of Cardiff High School for Girls, and she apparently attended Cambridge University in 1914-15, before she registered as a Home Student at Oxford for the Hilary Term 1917. She kept terms at Oxford for three years, concluding with the Michaelmas Term 1919.  Her tutors included Miss C.A.E. Moberly (one of the two pseudonymous authors of the famous slim 1911 book An Adventure, recounting their apparently ghostly encounter during a summer 1901 visit at the Petit Trianon in Versailles) and Miss Dorothy Sayers. 

In between her time at Cambridge and Oxford, she married George Hender Geach (1884-1941), who (though he was born and died in Cardiff) worked in the Indian Education Service as a professor of philosophy at Lahore (later, he was principal of a teacher’s training college in Peshwar). After a short period of time in India, Eleanora returned to England for the birth of their one child, Peter (born in Lower Chelsea in London in March 1916), who became a distinguished philosopher. The marriage was unhappy and was quickly broken up. Up until around the age of eight, Peter lived with his maternal grandparents in Cardiff, after which time he was sent off to school by his father and raised by a guardian. Peter Geach never saw his mother again after childhood.

As E.F.A. Geach, Eleonora began publishing poetry while at Oxford. She collaborated on a small book of poems with a fellow student, D.E.A Wallace, better known as Doreen Wallace (1897-1989), who became a prolific novelist in the 1930s.  The book was entitled –Esques, and was published by B. H. Blackwell in May 1918.  It includes eight poems by Geach, nine by Wallace, and one collaboration. The poems are divided into six sections headed Arabesques, Burlesques, Fresques, Grotesques, Humoresques, and A Picturesque, thus explaining the book’s odd title.  One poem, “Episode”, in the Humoresques section seems to refer to Geach’s marriage:  “I loved you for a year, / perhaps a little more . . ./ And now it’s all over / And I feel as though I had never known you – / I feel no gaps, no longing. / Your passage through my life / was like the flight of a bird through the sky.”  T.S. Eliot reviewed –Esques (very briefly) in The Egoist, noting wryly:

“The authors of –Esques trickle down a fine broad page in a pantoum, a roundel, a villanelle, occasionally pagan, mode of thirty years ago:

Why then, O foolish Christ

Didst thou keep tryst

With maudlin harlots wan

With glad things gone?

 To which the obvious answer is. Why did you?  Young poets ought to be made to be cheaply printed; such sumptuous pages deceive many innocent critics.”  (August 1918,  p. 99)

from Fifty New Poems for Children (1922)

Geach, along with Dorothy Sayers and T.W. Earp edited Oxford Poetry 1918, also published by Blackwell. Earp co-edited the annual volume for the years 1915 through 1919; Sayers joined him for three years, 1917-1919. Geach was involved only for the one year. In the 1918 volume there are two poems by Geach and a third in collaboration with D.E.A. Wallace.  One of these poems, consisting of eight lines and titled “Romance”, seems to have been an inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s poem “The Road Goes Ever On”, the first expression of which appears in the final chapter of The Hobbit, though its better-known versions appear in The Lord of the Rings.  That Tolkien would have known the poem comes from the fact (first noticed, I believe, by John D. Rateliff) that it was reprinted immediately after Tolkien’s own poem “Goblin Feet” in Fifty New Poems for Children, a slim volume published by Blackwell in 1922 (p. 28). The poem reads:

                        Romance

Round the next corner and in the next street

Adventure lies in wait for  you.

Oh, who can tell what you may meet

Round the next corner and in the next street!

Could life be anything but sweet

When all is hazardous and new

Round the next corner and in the next street?

Adventure lies in wait for you.

Geach published one further booklet, Twenty Poems, which Blackwell released in March 1931. The poems were all new to the booklet save for one, which was reprinted from The Poetry Review.  These small volumes contain all of Geach’s known writings.  After her time in Oxford, she returned to her family in Cardiff, where she died in 1951. 

Laverne Gay

Laverne Gay (b. Lodi, California, 1 December 1914; d. Sacramento, California, 5 August 1997)

In an online essay on the updating of the entry for the word ruel-bone in the Oxford English Dictionary, the lexicographers (and Tolkien scholars) Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, have noted that, besides Tolkien, there is another modern writer who re-used the obsolete Middle English word ruel-bone in the twentieth century.  The word appears in a line from Chaucer’s “Sir Thopas”: his sadel was of rewel-boon (2068). The word is related to Old French rohal (or rochal) which meant “walrus-ivory”.  Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner wrote:

Intriguingly, during the OED revision process evidence came to light of another modern writer using ruel-bone in a text which was published significantly before any of Tolkien’s uses could have come to public attention. The entry now includes a quotation from the historical novel Wine of Satan (1949)—subtitled “A Tale of Bohemond Prince of Antioch”—by the little-known Californian writer Laverne Gay. Her research in medieval sources was evidently sufficient to equip her with a fine array of unusual vocabulary with which to enrich her rather highly-coloured narrative: other examples from Wine of Satan include baselard, a kind of dagger, and nasal used as a noun to mean the nosepiece of a helmet. In the quoted passage, the crusading Robert of Normandy is described as sitting ‘erect in his rewel-bone saddle’. The author could have acquired rewel-bone (her chosen spelling) from various sources—perhaps Chaucer, or even the original OED entry—but her use of the word evidently did not catch on.

This was enough to make me want to find out more of the little-known Californian writer. She was born Mary Laverne Kels, the daughter of Alexander Andrew Kels (1884-1924) and Anna Theresa Handlin (1886-1977). Andrew Kels was a butcher, an immigrant from Germany, and his wife was of Irish descent.  Besides their daughter, called by her second name Laverne, they also had one son, John Michael Kels (1923-1958). Andrew Kels had been previously married, and had a son from his first marriage. He was hanged for murder on 4 January 1924. 

Laverne was educated by the Domincan Sisters, first at Lodi (St. Anne’s) and later at Stockton (St. Mary’s). Her interest in poetry and journalism was encouraged, and in 1932, her final year, she edited the convent newspaper and yearbook.  At the University of California, she majored in Latin and history, and was junior editor of the Daily Californian. Her interest in medieval history was awakened by attending the lectures of Professor James Westfall Thompson (1869-1941).  She once reminisced that “it was during his new graduate lectures on ‘The Irish Element in Medieval Culture’ that I came upon St. Columban’s royal friend Theudelinda of the Lombards, whom he later characterized to me as neglected by history and a ‘natural’ for me to do. So she became the subject, first of the original research and later of a first novel.”  Laverne Kels graduated from the University of California in 1936, and after taking a teacher’s degree she taught high school for two years in the Oakland School System. 

 

On 28 January 1939, she married Arthur Joseph Gay (1913-1986), an optometrist.  After the outbreak of World War II, her husband’s work with the Navy sent the couple to Texas and then to Idaho, before they returned to California. They had two children, Stephen (b. 1942) and Janis (b. 1947).

Gay’s first novel, The Unspeakables: A Tale of Lombardy (New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945) was set in the sixth century. It centers on Theudelinda, princess of Bavaria, who marries the Lombard king Authari, and after his death, marries the Duke of Turin who is later crowned the king of all Italy.  Reviews were mixed.  Kirkus called it “good history—good biography—good reading, though slow-moving in spots” (1 September 1945), while the New Yorker noted that “the tale would have been better in a style less pretentious than Mrs. Gay’s determinedly literary one.  Brocade is all right to a point, but four hundred pages of ‘Her light laughter broke on the morning air like shards of finest porphyry’ . . . gets to be rather wearing” (13 October 1945).  The Weekly Review added: “there are so many characters in the book, so many battles and so much description of feasting and pageantry and kissing that you may be confused. The opulence of the style will not diminish your mental fog” (21 October 1945). 

Her second and only other published novel was Wine of Satan: A Tale of Bohemond, Prince of Antioch (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948). The author noted:  “Wine of Satan was on Bohemond, leader of the First Crusade, with a more serious attempt at original creation, especially in character, with the same intention of soundness in historical content and interpretation.” Again Kirkus wrote well of Gay’s work:  “Up to par as an historical novel, for which there is always an audience” (1 November 1948).  But The Catholic World criticized it for just the quality that has attracted the attention of  Oxford lexicographers: “her devotion to archaic words develops into a mannerism” (February 1949). The New York Times gave it more praise, stating that “Wine of Satan is colorful and learned but it is considerably more than a tour de force of archaic spectacle. Miss Gay understands people, and she has contrived, amid all the cluttered wealth of her period detail and the great events of the time, to tell a love story whose characters emerge as human beings” (16 January 1949).

Of the obscure words in the novel noted by Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner, nasal appears only once, in the prologue: 

But now his face was a strange and savage-looking mask, with the dank red, ear-length hair dishevelled over it, the ragged beard upon it, and the white streak left on his nose and forehead by the nasal upon the helm. (p. 4)

Rewel-bone also occurs only once:

Godfrey, his noble face alight, his great brown charger restivem stomping for the fray; Robert of Normandy, his high stirrups making his mount grotesquely tall, looking almost child-like at this distance, erect in his rewel-bone saddle. (p. 231)

Baselard occurs at least six times by my count, but I will quote only the first appearance:

As he dismounted, she leaped from her horse, and was backed against a tree, her riding whip in one and a sharp-pointed deadly-looking baselard in the other. (p. 12)

One can see from these short extracts that Gay’s prose has a descriptive vividness to it. Wine of Satan was selected as a Book Club title, and was considerably more successful than Gay’s first novel.

In the early 1950s, Gay worked on a contemporary novel, but it was never published.  She did occasionally review books for the magazine Books on Trial, but mostly she seems to have ceased publishing.  From 1951 through 1964 she worked on the board of the Mercy Children’s Hospital Guild.  Laverne Gay died in Sacramento at the age of eighty-two.

NB: Some details in the above sketch, including Laverne Gay’s reminiscences, are taken from an entry in Catholic Authors (1952).

S. Matthewman

S. Matthewman (b. Leeds, 18 January 1902; d. reg. Surrey, July-Sep. 1970)

**updated 7 January 2016**

Sydney Matthewman*

Sydney Matthewman was the only child  (per the 1911 UK Census) of John Matthewman (1879-1946), a printer, and Matilda Wardman (1878-1965), who were married in Leeds in the spring of 1901.  He was educated at the Leeds Modern School, and the University of Leeds.  Throughout the 1920s Matthewman was especially associated with the poetry scene in Leeds, as well as in London.  He was the founder and editor of Yorkshire Poetry from 1922-24, while also the associate editor of Poetry Review (1921-23) and assistant editor of The Decachord from 1923-29.

In 1921 Matthewman began to produce booklets of poetry out of his father’s printing business in Swan Street, calling his imprint The Swan Press. His first book was a small pamphlet of his own poems, together with a verse dialogue, entitled The Gardens of Meditation (1921). Within a few years he proceeded on to more substantial works by friends and others with whom he had come into contact at Leeds University.  Besides publishing his own writings (all as “S. Matthewman”), the Swan Press also published collections by Catholic poet and Leeds professor Wilfred Rowland Childe (1890-1952), and anthologies like A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association (1923) and Leeds University Verse: 1914-1924 (1924), which include poems by J.R.R. Tolkien, then also on the faculty at Leeds. Many of the Swan Press books were published in small editions. The first printing of A Northern Venture, published in June 1923, was a mere 170 copies, and the reprint in July was of another 200 copies. This title was an exception, for most of the Swan Press booklets were not reprinted at all. 

Decoration by Albert Wainwright,
for The Crystal Casket

Most of Matthewman’s own small books were published between 1921 and 1930.  These include poetry, The Lute of Darkness (1922), Two Poems of the Road (1924), Six Epigrams (1924), The Harlequin (1925), Poems 1927 (1927), Orchard Idyll (1927), Strange Garden (1928), Epithalamion: An Ode (1929); a small essay collection, Sketches in Sunshine (1926); and a few prose fantasies, The Crystal Casket (1924), and The Vision of Richard concerning the Chapel of the Sword and the Rose (1926). The Crystal Casket is a short original fairy tale of merit. A third prose fantasy is How Brother Theodosius Beheld a Vision: A Little Tale of the Springtime (1928), printed privately in an edition of fifty-seven copies. In an entry for a writer’s directory, Matthewman listed a few further titles that cannot presently be verified, including Interlude (1929), as well as some planned translations: Plum Blossom and Nightingale from the Japanese, The Rubai yat of Sarmad (with B. Ahmed Kashmi), and The Complete Poems of Meleager. None of these seem to have been been published.  For High House Press in Shaftesbury, Matthewman translated Hylas: The XIIIth Idyll of Theokritos (1929), and wrote The High House Press: A Short History and an Appreciation (1930). Four Country Poems (1932) came out from Red Lion Press in an edition of fifty copies. Many of Matthewman’s books have decorations by Albert Wainwright (1898-1943).

Matthewman served as secretary to various scientific societies, and joined the Leeds Civic Playhouse in 1927.  He played the part of Hannan in the first British production of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1863-1920). Matthewman married Phyllis Barton (1896-1979) on 22 February 1930.  They had no children and moved around frequently, and sometime in the 1930s Sydney had some sort of breakdown.  Phyllis Matthewman took up writing with Chloe Takes Control (1940), published by the Girls Own Paper Office in London.  Over the next three decades, she would publish over seventy books, most of them novels, many of them published by Mills & Boon. In the mid-1940s she published two novels under the pseudonym Kathryn Surrey. Her final books appeared in 1974.

In 1944, Sydney and Phyllis took temporary refuge from the bombings around their home in Surrey by removing to Hereford, where they became close friends of the writer Elinor Brent-Dyer (1894-1969), author of the popular “Chalet School” series for girls.  Phyllis and Brent-Dyer had known each other as children, but hadn’t been especially close. 

In 1946, after a long hiatus, Sydney published two small books of poetry, Gabriel’s Hounds, a tale in verse, and Christmas Poems. He also served as editor for The Bookmart in 1946-47. 

In 1949, when Sydney set up a literary agency, Elinor Brent-Dyer became one of his first clients.  In 1964, the Matthewmans and Brent-Dyer purchased a house in Redhill, Surrey, where the Matthewmans lived on the ground floor and Brent-Dyer occupied the upstairs flat.  Local residents in Redhill recall Sydney Matthewman as a tall man, around six foot three or four inches tall, who wore a monocle. Brent-Dyer died suddenly in 1969. Sydney Matthewman died the following year.  Phyllis Matthewman lived on until 1979, passing at the age of 83.

*Thanks to Michael Green for the scan of the photograph of Matthewman, the frontispiece to Poems (19 27) 

Dora Owen

Dora Owen (b.  Anwick, Lincolnshire, Dec. 1865; d. Wakefield, 19 July 1938)

Rose Dora Ashington was the youngest child of the Reverend Henry Ashington (1803-1875) and Frances Denton Ashington, née Osborne (1826-1915).  She had five older sisters and three older brothers. Her father was an alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A. Classical Tripos, 1826; M.A. 1829), and was ordained a deacon in London in 1831. He became a priest the following year, and served at various places in Lincolnshire, including as rector of Quarrington (1844), rector of Kirby-le-Thorp with Asgarsby (1845-1854), and rector of Brauncewell and vicar of Anwick (1854-1874). Henry Ashington published a few small books, including The English Clergyman: His Commission, Conduct, and Doctrine (1846), and Two Sermons (1848), with one sermon by Ashington and the other by C.E. Kennaway.

Little is known of Dora’s upbringing and education. In 1881 she was living with her widowed mother, and several unmarried siblings, in Ecclesall Bierlow, Yorkshire.  In the summer of 1887, in Ormskirk, Lancashire, she married Edward Charles Everard Owen (1860-1949), a Balliol College, Oxford, graduate (B.A. Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores, 1883; M.A. 1886). He had been elected to a Fellowship at New College, Oxford, in 1884, and was a lecturer in classics for two years before being appointed to the teaching staff at Harrow, where he would remain for twenty-four years.  He was also ordained in 1884, and when he gave up teaching, he served as rector at Bucknell for two years, and subsequently at other places.  As “E.C.E. Owen” or “E.C. Everard Owen”, he published several books, including Latin Syntax for the Use of Upper Forms (1888), A Synopsis of the Chief Events of Ancient History (1898), and A Brief History of Greece and Rome (1913). He also translated Some Authentic Acts of the Early Martyrs (1927), and edited some volumes of poetry, including Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1897) by Lord Byron, Selections from the Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1899), The Odyssey of Homer (1901), and Selections from the Poems of H. W. Longfellow (1911).  Finally, he published one slim booklet of his own poetry, Three Hills and Other Poems (1916). He and Dora Owen had six sons and two daughters.  These Owens were apparently unrelated to the poet Wilfred Owen, as has sometimes mistakenly been reported.  

Dora Owen shared with her husband a great interest in poetry, and her only book was an anthology, The Book of Fairy Poetry (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1920), to which she contributed one poem (it begins:  “Children, children, don’t forget / There are elves and fairies yet.”). It is a lavish volume (priced at 21 shillings on publication in October 1920), with sixteen colored plates by British artist Warwick Goble (1862-1943), pasted onto inserted heavy pasteboard pages, as well as fifteen further black-and-white drawings. Goble’s works are well-collected today, and he is perhaps best remembered for watercolor illustrations to gift books, particularly to Green Willow and Other Japanese Fairy Tales (1910). 

The Book of Fairy Poetry is divided into three main sections: Fairy Stories; Fairy Songs, Dances and Talk; and Fairyland and Fairy Lore; with the poems in each section presented in chronological order.  In addition to traditional ballads and stories in verse, there are selections from many classic authors of fairy literature, including Michael Drayton, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Sir Walter Scott, and John Keats, as well as work by more recent poets such as Christina Rossetti, Andrew Lang, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fiona Macleod, Walter de la Mare, William Butler Yeats, and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Tolkien’s poem “Goblin Feet”, the third poem from the end, earned a colored illustration by Warwick Goble, representing the line from Tolkien’s poem: “And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming!” 

Dora Owen compiled the book over several years.  It was in January 1916, just one month after the first publication of “Goblin Feet” in Oxford  Poetry 1915,  that she wrote to ask for Tolkien’s permission to include it in her book.  Tolkien responded by offering her some additional poems, which she declined to use.  “Goblin Feet” was Tolkien’s first significant publication, and the reprint in The Book of Fairy Poetry one of his most lavish.  In later years Tolkien came to feel that “Goblin Feet” represented much of what he had come to dislike about modern conceptions of fairies, and complained that the poem was given an illustration “as bad as it deserved”.  Certainly one cannot fault Goble too much for the illustration, which is of a type consistent with the rest in the volume, and which includes specific details (with some absurdities added, particularly in the facial expressions of the gnomes) from Tolkien’s poem.