'Finding Mr Yeats'
I’m in the middle of research for the Hartfield Community Play. For many, Hartfield is synonymous with A.A. Milne and Winnie the Pooh, a fact that is a bit of an irritant with some villagers. I must tread carefully, because, and it’s true, Hartfield (and Milne for that matter) is much more than the world of Pooh. The play will need to embrace that fact. The village is in the heart of the Ashdown Forest and its true story is inexorably linked to the history of Agricultural England, from early feudalism through the battles of commoners rights to the Forest, to the influx of townies into the countryside. These are themes I explored in the Withyham and Groombridge Play Something in Common so I need to either find a different slant to those themes, or find something new and unique to Hartfield. In searching for fresh stories, I discovered that the poets William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound rented a cottage in Coleman’s Hatch for three consecutive winters between 1913 and 1917.
Over a collective period of twelve months or so , W.B. Yeats and Pound walked through the Forest, talking and developing ideas and a language which was to influence world literature and give rise to Anglo American literary modernism.
That’s pretty heavy but it was also a deeply personal time; they both met their future wives whilst at Stone Cottage and honeymooned there. Ezra Pound married Dorothy Shakespeare in 1914; and Yeats and Georgina Hyde Lees in 1917. During their first visit, 1913, Yeats is helping Lady Gregory’ with her book Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. He was a man who believed in fairies, and had over the years gathered and published first hand accounts of people who had encountered them. Staying in the Ashdown Forest could only have reinforced his belief in the supernatural.
W.B. Yeats on the one hand is too good to ignore, but I can’t write a community play for Hartfield solely about a visiting Irish poet. So I’ve been setting out on different paths, but each one seems to lead me back to where I started. I can’t get away from Mr Yeats
I started seeking out the local events and residents of Hartfield and Coleman’s Hatch in search of characters to mould a play around. John Mc Andrews seemed a likely candidate. He was a generous local benefactor of everything charitable, and a church warden at St Mary’s Church in Hartfield for over twenty years. Then around 1912 things went wrong; the Vicar died and he was replaced by an Anglo Catholic. John didn’t approve so he simply built a new church in Coleman’s Hatch, negotiated with the Bishop to make a new parish and changed his place of worship. The church, The Holy Trinity, was consecrated on November 15th, 1913. It turns out the second week of November was the very week W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound came to stay in the village for the first time. I don’t know if they attended but I do know they walked to the Hatch Inn nightly and must been aware of such a big event and the Anglo Catholic, protestant schism.
Putting Yeats aside I start looking further into events around the building of Holy Trinity and find that in 1938 the then vicar, wanting to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the church, approached a writer who was living in the village at the time. The young playwright had taken a job as director of the Tunbridge Repertory Players and recently married. His name was Christopher Fry and he was later to become a national playwright who along with T.S. Eliot developed a modern form of verse play. The play he wrote for Coleman’s Hatch was called The Boy with the Cart and was about St. Cuthman who built a church at Steyning in West Sussex. The whole community come together to perform the play, I imagine directed by Christopher Fry. It was to all intents and purposes a community play.
I made a brief Google search on Steyning and quickly found the original story of St Cuthman, but low and behold I find Steyning residents Edith and Nora Shackleton Heald. Edith was a journalist and theatre critic and, it’s alleged, one time lover of W.B. Yeats. They maintained a life-long friendship and he visited them often, including two or three times in the summer of 1938. Is it likely they would have seen The Boy with the Cart? A play with a Steyning connection would have attracted the attention of the Shackleton Heald sister and Yeats because of his connection to Coleman’s Hatch where he had retreated and honeymooned. Maybe it’s too fanciful.
But who might go to the play?
I was aware from researching the Withyham and Groombridge play that the Duchess of Wellington lived at Penn in the Rocks. She would have been invited as a local celebrity. She is and was possibly better known as Dorothy Wellesley, author of more than ten books of poetry and highly respected, and especially, I now discover by none other than Yeats.
Yeats regarded Dorothy Wellesley as ‘one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century’. There’s rumour they had an affair but the widowed Dorothy was very much in love with Vita Sackville West. She did, however become Yeats’ closest friend during the last four years of his life. They corresponded furiously and after his death their letters were transposed into a book Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. Dorothy took a villa close to Yeats and his wife when he took his final European holiday and was at his bedside when he died. He had made frequent visits to Penn Rock in the mid to late 30’s and remarkably was staying there during the time the residents of Coleman’s Hatch performed The Boy with the Cart.
I determinedly moved the research on and away from Holy Trinity Church and Yeats.
A letter that had been sent to Mike Parcell caught my attention. Mike is a local researcher and a mine of information. He’s a leading member of the Hartfield History Society: his house and his head is a library. He has given me swathes of material among them his research on the Brackenhill Open Air Home School and a letter from an organisation called For Deaf Education in the Third World. The letter asks Mike for information about Brackenhill’s founding head ‘Mrs Kate Harvey’. Miss Harvey, it turns out, was not your typical conservative, rural schoolmistress. She’s a lesbian and radical suffragette who in 1913 is in prison for refusing to pay the newly introduced National Insurance tax on servant’s wages. She’s a physiotherapist – a professional woman in a man’s world. She is all the more remarkable by the fact she does all this and she’s totally deaf. During her Suffragette campaigning she met, fell in love and moved in with Charlotte Despard who is in the top ranks of Suffrage movement alongside the Pankhursts. Charlotte donated Brackenhill House in Hartfield to Kate so she could run her open air home school for poor and sick children. They lived there together for a little while until Charlotte felt the pull of Ireland and went there to support the cause of the Sinn Fein and give aid to political prisoners.
And here we have another connection to Yeats.
Charlotte worked alongside Maude Gonne, the unrequited love of his life. Charlotte and Maude were eventually to fall in love and live together, thus Kate Harvey and W.B. Yeats were left disappointed in love.
The research journey continues.
There are of course stories emerging that are not about Yeats but I was fascinated by the coincidences and connections. The research is narrowing down now to three specific years 1913, 1938 and 1987 the year of the storm.
If you would like to join us we meet at 7.30pm every second Tuesday of the month in the back room of the Anchor in Hartfield. Hopefully see you there.
If you have memories of Hartfield during 1930’s or the great storm of 1987 and can’t make the meetings, e-mail me at jon@claquetheatre.com
Jon Oram
For more information visit http://www.claquetheatre.com/2011/10/14/finding-mr-yeats/