W. H. Davies

Plaque commemorating Davies' supposed place of birth, at "The Church House Inn", in Pillgwenlly, Newport, Wales.

The son of an iron moulder, Davies was born at 6, Portland Street in the Pillgwenlly district of Newport, Monmouthshire, a busy port. He had an older brother, Francis Gomer Boase (who was considered "slow") and in 1874 his younger sister Matilda was born.

In November 1874, when William was aged three, his father died. The following year his mother Mary Anne Davies remarried and became Mrs Joseph Hill. She agreed that care of the three children should pass to their paternal grandparents, Francis and Lydia Davies, who ran the nearby Church House Inn at 14, Portland Street. His grandfather Francis Boase Davies, originally from Cornwall, had been a sea captain. Davies was related to the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving (referred to as cousin Brodribb by the family); he later recalled that his grandmother referred to Irving as " the cousin who brought disgrace on us". Davies' grandmother was described, by a neighbour who remembered her, as wearing ".. pretty little caps, with bebe ribbon, tiny roses and puce trimmings".[4] Writing in his Introduction to the 1943 Collected Poems of W. H. Davies, Osbert Sitwell recalled Davies telling him that, in addition to his grandparents and himself, his home consisted of "an imbecile brother, a sister;... a maidservant, a dog, a cat, a parrot, a dove and a canary bird." Sitwell also recounts that Davies' grandmother, a Baptist by denomination, was "of a more austere and religious turn of mind than her husband."[5]

In 1879 the family moved to Raglan Street, then to Upper Lewis Street, from where William attended Temple School. In 1883 he moved to Alexandra Road School and the following year was arrested, as one of a gang of five schoolmates, and charged with stealing handbags. He was given twelve strokes of the birch. In 1885 Davies wrote his first poem entitled "Death".

In his Poet's Pilgrimage (1918) Davies recounts the time when, at the age of 14, he was left with orders to sit with his dying grandfather. He missed the final moments of his grandfather's death as he was too engrossed in reading "a very interesting book of wild adventure".[6]

After school, he worked as an ironmonger. In November 1886, his grandmother signed the papers for Davies to begin a five-year apprenticeship to a local picture-frame maker. Davies never enjoyed the craft. He left Newport, took casual work, and began his travels. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, published in 1908, covers his life in the United States between 1893 and 1899, including many adventures and characters from his travels as a drifter. During this period, he crossed the Atlantic at least seven times on cattle ships. He travelled through many of the states doing seasonal work.

He took advantage of the corrupt system of "boodle", to pass the winter in Michigan, by agreeing to be locked in a series of jails. Here, with his fellow tramps, Davies enjoyed the relative comfort of "card-playing, singing, smoking, reading, relating experiences, and occasionally taking exercise or going out for a walk."[7] At one point on his way to Memphis, Tennessee, he lay alone in a swamp for three days and nights suffering from malaria.[3]

The turning point in Davies' life came after a week of rambling in London. He spotted a newspaper story about the riches to be made in the Klondike, and immediately set off to make his fortune in Canada. Attempting to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario, on 20 March 1899, with fellow tramp Three-fingered Jack, he lost his footing and his right foot was crushed under the wheels of the train. The leg was amputated below the knee, and he wore a peg-leg thereafter. Davies' biographers agreed the impact of the accident was crucial, although Davies played down the story. Moult begins his biography with the incident,[8] and Stonesifer suggested that this event, more than any other, led Davies to become a professional poet.[9] Davies writes of the accident: "I bore this accident with an outward fortitude that was far from the true state of my feelings. Thinking of my present helplessness caused me many a bitter moment, but I managed to impress all comers with a false indifference.... I was soon home again, away less than four months; but all the wildness was taken out of me, and my adventures after this were not of my seeking, but the result of circumstances." [10] Davies's view of his disability was ambivalent. In his poem "The Fog", published in the 1913 Foliage,[11] a blind man leads the poet through the fog, showing the reader one who is handicapped in one domain may well have a considerable advantage in another.

He returned to Britain, living a rough life, particularly in London shelters and doss-houses, including the Salvation Army hostel in Southwark known as "The Ark"[12] which he grew to despise. Fearing the contempt of his fellow tramps, he often feigned slumber in the corner of his doss-house, mentally composing his poems, then later committing them to paper in private. At one point, he borrowed money to print his poems he sold door-to-door through the streets of residential London. After this enterprise failed, he returned to his lodgings, and burned all of the printed sheets.[9]

Davies self-published his first book of poetry, The Soul's Destroyer, in 1905, again by means of his savings. It proved to be the beginning of success and a growing reputation. To publish the slim volume, Davies forwent his allowance to live as a tramp for six months (with the first draft of the book hidden in his pocket), just to secure a loan of funds from his inheritance. After it was published, the volume was ignored. He resorted to posting individual copies by hand to prospective wealthy customers chosen from the pages of Who's Who, asking them to send the price of the book, a half crown, in return. He sold 60 of the 200 copies printed.[3] One of the copies was sent to Arthur Adcock, then a journalist with the Daily Mail. On reading the book, as he later wrote in his essay "Gods of Modern Grub Street", Adcock said he "recognised there were crudities and doggerel in it, there was also in it some of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found in modern books."[9] He sent the price of the book, then asked Davies to meet him. Adcock is regarded as "the man who discovered Davies."[9] The first trade edition of The Soul's Destroyer was published by Alston Rivers in 1907. A second edition followed in 1908 and a third in 1910. A 1906 edition, by Fifield, was advertised but has not been verified.[13]

On 12 October 1905 Davies met Edward Thomas, then literary critic for the Daily Chronicle in London, who was to do more to help him than anyone else.[9] Thomas rented for Davies the tiny two-roomed "Stidulph's Cottage", in Egg Pie Lane, not far from his own home at Elses Farm near Sevenoaks in Kent. Davies moved to the cottage from 6 Llanwern Street, Newport, via London, in the second week of February 1907. The cottage was "only two meadows off" from Thomas's own house.[14] Thomas adopted the role of protective guardian for Davies, on one occasion even arranging for the manufacture, by a local wheelwright, of a makeshift replacement wooden leg, which was invoiced to Davies as "a novelty cricket bat".

In 1907, the manuscript of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp drew the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who agreed to write a preface (largely through the efforts of his wife Charlotte). It was only because of Shaw that Davies' contract with the publishers was rewritten to allow the author to retain the serial rights, all rights after three years, royalties of 15 per cent of selling price, and a non-returnable advance of £25. Davies was also to be given a say on the style of all illustrations, advertisement layouts and cover designs. The original publisher, Duckworth and Sons, rejected these terms, and so the book was placed instead with the London publisher Fifield.[9]

A number of anecdotes of Davies's time with the Thomas family in Kent are recounted in the brief account later published by Thomas's widow Helen.[15] In 1911, Davies was awarded a Civil List Pension of £50,[16] later increased to £100 and then again to £150.

Davies started to spend more time in London and made many literary friends and acquaintances. Though averse to giving autographs himself, Davies began to make a collection of his own and was particularly keen to obtain that of D. H. Lawrence.

Georgian poetry publisher Edward Marsh was able to secure an autograph and also invited Lawrence and wife-to-be Frieda to meet Davies on 28 July 1913. Lawrence was immediately captivated by Davies and later invited him to join them in Germany. Despite his early enthusiasm for Davies' work, however, Lawrence's opinion changed after reading Foliage and he commented after reading Nature Poems in Italy that the verses seemed "so thin, one can hardly feel them."[9]

By this time Davies had a library of about fifty books in his cottage, most of them 16th and 17th-century poets, and including Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake and Herrick. In December 1908 his essay "How It Feels To Be Out of Work", described by Stonesifer as "a rather pedestrian performance", appeared in the pages of The English Review. He continued to send other periodical articles out to editors, but without success.[9]

After lodging at a number of temporary addresses in Sevenoaks, Davies moved back to London early in 1914, settling eventually at 14 Great Russell Street in the Bloomsbury district, previously the residence of Charles Dickens. Here in a tiny two-room apartment, initially infested with mice and rats, and next door to rooms occupied by a noisy Belgian prostitute, he lived from early 1916 until 1921. It was during this time in London that Davies embarked on a series of public readings of his work, alongside such others as Hilaire Belloc and W. B. Yeats, impressing fellow poet Ezra Pound. He soon found that he was able to socialise with leading society figures of the day, including Arthur Balfour and Lady Randolph Churchill. While in London Davies also became friendly with a number of artists, including Jacob Epstein, Harold and Laura Knight, Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Harold Gilman, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Sir William Nicholson and Osbert and Edith Sitwell. He enjoyed the society of literary men and their conversation, particularly in the rarefied downstairs at the Café Royal. He would also meet regularly with W. H. Hudson, Edward Garrett and others at The Mont Blanc in Soho.[17]

For his poetry Davies drew extensively on his experiences with the seamier side of life, but also on his love of nature. By the time of his prominent place in the Edward Marsh Georgian Poetry series, he was an established figure. He is generally best known for the opening two lines of the poem "Leisure", first published in Songs of Joy and Others in 1911: "What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare...."

In October 1917 his work was included in the anthology Welsh Poets: A Representative English selection from Contemporary Writers collated by A. G. Prys-Jones and published by Erskine Macdonald of London.

In the last months of 1921, Davies moved to more comfortable quarters at 13 Avery Row, Brook Street, where he rented rooms from the Quaker poet Olaf Baker. He began to find prolonged work difficult, however, suffering from increased bouts of rheumatism and other ailments. Harlow (1993) lists a total of 14 BBC broadcasts of Davies reading his own work made between 1924 and 1940 (now held in the BBC broadcast archive)[18] although none included his most famous work, "Leisure". Later Days, the 1925 sequel to The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, describes the beginnings of Davies's career as a writer and his acquaintance with Belloc, Shaw, de la Mare and many others.

He became "the most painted literary man of his day", thanks to Augustus John, Sir William Nicholson, Dame Laura Knight and Sir William Rothenstein. His head in bronze was the most successful of Epstein's smaller works.[17]

Davies' last home "Glendower", Watledge Road, Nailsworth, Gloucestershire

On 5 February 1923, Davies married 23-year-old Helen Matilda Payne, at the Registry Office in East Grinstead, Sussex, and the couple set up home in the town at "Tor Leven", Cantelupe Road. According to one of the witnesses, Conrad Aiken, the ceremony proceeded with Davies "in a near panic".[9][19] His book Young Emma was a frank and often disturbing account of his life before and after picking Helen up at a bus-stop in the Edgware Road near Marble Arch. He had caught sight of her just getting off the bus and describes her wearing a "saucy-looking little velvet cap with tassels".[20] Still unmarried, Helen was pregnant at the time.[21] While living with Davies in London, before the couple were married, Helen suffered a dramatic and almost fatal miscarriage.

Although Davies eagerly sent the manuscript for Young Emma to Jonathan Cape in August 1924, he later changed his mind and asked for the manuscript to be returned and the copies destroyed. Only Davies' lack of direct instruction prompted Cape to secretly keep the copies in a locked safe. Later, after Davies' death, when asked by Cape for his advice, George Bernard Shaw advised against publication, and the book was eventually published only after Helen's death in 1979.[22]

The couple lived quietly and happily, moving from East Grinstead, first to Sevenoaks, then to "Malpas House", Oxted in Surrey and finally to a series of five different residences at Nailsworth in Gloucestershire. The first of these was the comfortable detached 19th-century stone-built house "Axpills" (later known as "Shenstone"), with a garden of some character. In the last seven years of his life he lived in four different houses, all within a mile and the first three all within 300 yards (270 m) of one another.[17] His last home was the small roadside cottage "Glendower" in the hamlet of Watledge. The couple had no children.

In 1930 Davies edited the poetry anthology Jewels of Song for Cape, choosing works by more than 120 different poets, and including William Blake, Thomas Campion, William Shakespeare, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and W. B. Yeats. Of his own poems he selected only "The Kingfisher" and "Leisure". The collection was re-published as An Anthology of Short Poems in 1938.

Davies returned to Newport, in September 1938, for the unveiling of a plaque in his honour at the Church House Inn, and with an address given by the Poet Laureate John Masefield. He was still unwell, however, and this proved to be his last public appearance.[3]

Before his marriage to Helen, Davies would regularly visit London and stay with Osbert Sitwell and his brother Sacheverell. He particularly enjoyed walking with them along the river from the Houses of Parliament to the Physic Garden, near to their house, in Chelsea. During his visits Davies would often call, on a Sunday afternoon, to hear recitals on the harpsichord and clavichord given by Violet Gordon Woodhouse. Having moved to Watledge the Davieses continued to visit Gordon Woodhouse, at her house in Nether Lypiatt, near Stroud, to dine with the Sitwells.

About three months before he died, Davies was visited at Glendower by Gordon Woodhouse and the Sitwells, Davies being too ill to travel to dinner at Nether Lypiatt. Osbert Sitwell noted that Davies looked "very ill" but that "his head, so typical of him in its rustic and nautical boldness, with the black hair now greying a little, but as stiff as ever, surrounding his high bony forehead, seemed to have acquired an even more sculptural quality." Helen privately explained to Sitwell that Davies' heart showed "alarming symptoms of weakness" caused, according to his doctors, by the continuous dragging weight of his wooden leg. Helen had been careful to keep the true extent of the medical diagnosis from her husband.

Davies himself confided in Sitwell:

I've never been ill before, really, except when I had that accident and lost my leg.... And, d'you know, I grow so irritable when I've got that pain, I can't bear the sound of people's voices.... Sometimes I feel I should like to turn over on my side and die.[5]

Davies' health continued to deteriorate and he died, in September 1940, at the age of 69. Never a church-goer in his adult life, Davies was cremated at Cheltenham and his remains interred there.

From 1949, "Glendower" was the home of the poet's great nephew Norman Phillips. In 2003, Phillips suffered a heart attack and was forced to move into council accommodation. He subsequently spent £34,000 on the house, hoping to move back, but faced a further five figure sum for essential maintenance. Local residents, including Anthony Burton and biographer Barbara Hooper, formed "The Friends of Glendower" to help save the property and promote the poet's work. Stroud District Council, however, had already voted to embark on the process of obtaining a Compulsory Purchase Order. In 2010, "The Friends of Glendower" arranged a series of lectures, exhibitions, walks and other events, in Nailsworth and Stroud, between 13 and 26 September to mark the 70th anniversary of the poet's death.[23][24]

In December 2012 a number of Davies' books, signed by the author, were found during restoration of the cottage which had been instigated by the Friends of Glendower. The first phase of restoration was due to be completed in 2013, making part of the house habitable once more. Five signed books were found, in a wardrobe in one of the bedrooms, together with letters from Davies to family members. The Friends hoped that the books would remain in Nailsworth and that the cottage might become a Davies study-centre, using the collection of books, manuscripts and belongings that had remained in the family. The plans would include use of the cottage as a home by Phillips, who was one of the last remaining direct descendants of the Davies family.[25]